Quotes About Loss

The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person's reckless mistake. Only after it's a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something.

I had a list going in my head that fall, of what all I would tell my little brother one day. But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it's going to fucking leave you and not come back.

I wasn't keeping to any road, I was running, forgetting what lay behind and always looking ahead for the perfect home, where trains never wrecked and hearts never broke, where no one you loved ever died.

Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.

When a house no longer provided shelter, it turned out to be worth exactly the sum of its parts.

if she really wanted to read an article about sailboat building she'd written twenty years ago, which she definitely did not. But giving up the physical record of all that work felt like a kind of death. Online wasn't enough. She wanted it to weigh something.

I suppose it is in our nature," she said finally. "When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order." "If that is our nature, then nature is madness.

Oh, it's a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it's easy to cast curses like stones on our ancestors. But that's nothing more than cursing ourselves and all that made us. Had I not married a preacher named Nathan Price, my particular children would never have seen the light of this world. I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose

When someone mattered like that, you didn't lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

my wallet at the mall. I was sure I would never ever see it again," he said. I bobbed my head up and down. "I know it. That's because of Finders keepers, losers weepers," I said. "Finders keepers, losers weepers is the rule. Right, Grampa?

It's right funny, when yer think about it. First Polly died, then me mam, and now Mrs Fairley. All in just a few months of each other.' Cook returned Emma's concentrated stare. 'It's said, in these parts, that everything goes in threes.

tries, and tries very hard, but she doesn't know what it's like to be the sole survivor, the only one left of one's contemporaries. They've all gone now. They're all dead and buried. My dearest friends, my loved ones. Even my enemies are no longer around to get my goat and spark the will in me to fight.

Killed so tragically in a plane crash, in a plane he was flying himself; David Amory, her grandfather, who was aboard that plane

She was sitting at a table in a cafe and he had just left. What she has understood, with absolute certainty, was that to live without him would be, forever, her fundamental occupation and that from that moment on things would always have a shadow for her, an extra shadow, even in the dark, and maybe especially in the dark. She wondered if that might work as an explanation of what it means to be mad about someone.

Had I not known that I was dead already I would have mourned my loss of life. —last words of Ota Dokan, scholar of military arts and poet, 1486

Asian face and local language skills to handle the cash. I had just returned to the States from Vietnam, having left the military under a cloud, the origins of which I was able to understand only years later. My mother, the American half of the marriage, had just died; I had no brothers or sisters;

The owner of a coffee shop sat diminished in the back of his deserted establishment, waiting for patronage that had long since vanished.

I looked over the despondency of the home crowd. Fools! Fools! I thought. Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it. Nobody was killed. We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful.

If the real human environment in developed countries today is third-growth monocultured "forests," tar-sand petroleum, cow-burnt grasslands, and smog-like clouds of microplastics floating in oceans where fish once thrived, then human cultures need to distinguish between sentimentality about loss and the imperative to survive. They need to establish a more relevant politics than the competitive politics of nation-states. And to found economies built not on profit but on conservation.

Some studies have estimated that losses have more than twice the psychological impact as equivalent gains. The fact is, we all hate to lose, which Kahneman and Tversky refer to as loss aversion.

Afterward I remembered these things very clearly, with that longing we feel sometimes to recover a state of life that we have lost for ever, though it is perhaps that we have lost it is all its value.

every triumph is also a defeat, and the ecstasies of those who prevail are matched by the agonies of those who lose.

When his body was cremated