Quotes About Loss

My father hates organized religion, probably because he hates the God who killed his little girl back in 1968. I find religions variously bemusing.

In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.

They say the only thing that your parents don't teach you is how to live without them, but my grandma's religious beliefs allowed me to accept death even though it was so hard to live without her.

Sometimes when you lose your mobile phone, even though it's frustrating, it's sort of rewarding in many ways because, though we do rely on them a lot, we are not reliant on them. The world continues without.

The Columbia is lost, but the dreams that inspired its crew remain with us.

There is no way you're going to have an event like 9/11 and expect things to remain the same. They killed 3,000 people in New York on that day, and if they could have they would've killed 300,000.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

In life, loss is inevitable. Everyone knows this, yet in the core of most people it remains deeply denied - 'This should not happen to me.' It is for this reason that loss is the most difficult challenge one has to face as a human being.

I was in New York City on 9/11. Grief remains from that awful day, but not only grief. There is fear, too, a fear informed by the knowledge that whatever my worst nightmare is, there is someone out there embittered enough to carry it out.

As someone who has lived the nightmare of losing a child, I know that the enormous hole left behind remains forever.

I've met so many remarkable people so far, coming up through stand-up all these years, who just aren't alive anymore. Because they are dead. Some really great people who helped change my life and career, people like Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Rodney Dangerfield, Johnny Carson.

I have lost someone I loved as a brother, as a closest friend, and a remarkable human being. We have also lost one of the best damn actors we'll ever see.

Chris was a friend of mine, I loved him. I didn't see him for 18 months before he died, but I'd met him several times after the accident. What was remarkable was his personal growth in his interior life.

By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been.

Carrie Fisher was the most remarkable person I've ever known. I made my first three albums in her house. 'Goodbye My Lover' was recorded in her bathroom. My life will not be nearly as much fun now she's gone.

I remember I was changing to one phone from another and going through my old contact details, and so I was having to delete duplicate numbers to make room, and up came the name of someone who died, and... it felt hard to delete the name.

I remember when I first started in the business, I lost a lot of friends. Some were jealous, some were annoyed at the fact that I was an actress.

I remember when my father passed away, we drove the funeral procession past the bank so he could say one last goodbye. That's how much the bank meant to my father.

But more importantly, I think he remembered how very close I was with my own dad, who had died in 1997.

For millions, Roger Ebert will be remembered as a writer and television personality who brought a sense of passion and excellence to his craft. For me, he is a man who fused joy and courage as few others ever have. My life was enriched by having such a friend; it is poorer for losing such a friend.

When Dad died in 1998, it really hit my confidence - he'd helped me write and he thought I was really funny, but since he'd died I didn't feel right. And it felt like no one but me even remembered him.

Perhaps it's more merciful to forget the dead instead of remembering them.

Remembering people is the most fundamental gesture of love and respect. For me, there are people in my life who are no longer with me, who have died, who are with me as much as any living person because I remember everything about them. My great-uncle, who I got a lot of guidance in life from, meant so much to me.

I envy my Jewish friends the ritual of saying kaddish - a ritual that seems perfectly conceived, with its built-in support group and its ceremonious designation of time each day devoted to remembering the lost person.