Quotes About Loss

To the woman in the restaurant today, the doll in her arms was the real child who still lived in her memories.

I mention her name and the old pain returns. Forget her, you say? How can you forget a living human being?

I sat on the verandah steps and wept for the loss of my home, for everything that I held to be precious. I tried to muffle the sound of my weeping, but my voice cried out loudly as if it were the only weapon I had against those who had destroyed my life.

I did not know it at the time, but we would never see Jegan again.

It's the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.

At the end, we receive ashes. They are not condensations of being but a reminder that even fire cannot destroy what has been loved. ––

Grief is not a record of what has been lost but of who has been loved. In the end, we weep not only for the death of someone but for the startling question that faces us: what shall we do with the love we have for the deceased? Where will we put it?

A tiny bit of myself is lost when my friends are gone. A tiny bit of myself was lost when my brothers, all but one, passed away.

It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.

Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land.

And when the war is done and youth stone deadI'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

Suicide in the trenches: I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy, Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark. In winter trenches, cowed and glum With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again. * * * * * You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go." "The War Poems

The dead...are more real than the living because they are complete.

They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky

I died in hell. They called it Passchendaele.

When Dick was killed last week he looked like that, Flapping along the fire-step like a fish, After the blazing crump had knocked him flat…. "How many dead? As many as ever you wish. Don't count 'em; they're too many. Who'll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny?

We were carrying something in our heads which belonged to us alone, and to those we had left behind us in the battle.

Burning my dreams away beside the fire: For death has made me wise and bitter and strong; And I am rich in all that I have lost.

We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.

What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.

You can't hurry love, as the song goes. You can't hurry grief either.

The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you've loved grow old.