Quotes About Loss

Was it hard to watch people go? No. Breathing afterward, every day, was harder.

Grief wasn't a feeling. It was a thing that visited. It was a weight, a lead wall, and it pressed on her lungs and settled a shadow across her mind, until the only way she could inhale was through a gasp of anger.

If you haven't been in a war and are wondering how long it takes to get used to losing everything you think you need or love, I can tell you the answer is no time at all.

Would you have your hand back, Eugenides? And lose Attolia? And see Attolia lost to the Mede?' Eugenides's eyes were open. In front of his face the floor was littered with tiny bits of glass that glittered in the candlelight. 'You have your answer, Little Thief.

But if I hadn't lost the hand, I'd be another person entirely by now. Wishing for the hand back would be like wishing the man I already am, to be replaced by some stranger. It would be wishing my own self out of existence.

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

Sometimes you don't even know what you want until you find out you can't have it.

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you most.

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

What had happened still seemed implausible. A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief.

If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.

In the months that followed my mother's death, I managed to look like a normal person. I walked the street; I answered my phone; I brushed my teeth; most of the time. But I was not OK. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. Dishes piled in the sink, knives crusted with strawberry jam. At one point I did not wash my hair for ten days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of everyday.

There is a razor-thin line between trying to find something usefully redemptive in illness and lying to ourselves about the nature of suffering. Until we mourn what is lost in illness—and until we have a medical community that takes seriously the suffering of patients—we should not celebrate what is gained in it.

Suddenly it was fall, the season of death, the anniversary of things-going-to-hell.

the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools...It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

When we are learning the world, we know things we cannot say how we know. When we are relearning the world in the aftermath of a loss, we feel things we had almost forgotten, old things, beneath the seat of reason.

She said that her father's death had been the hardest thing in her life. We are all children until our fathers die.

Even a perfect understanding of failed love is the booby prize.

I never expected anyone in my family to change, and especially not my father, who changed first and most profoundly: He died.

You're going to lose him, Jane, Faith said. I won't. Yes, Faith said. You will. Okay, but I'll lose him my way, I say.

Once when I visited her, she scuffed around the house in pink pile-lined slippers you'd wear only while waiting for the police to discover you many days dead.

I was so afraid. I was afraid of losing you. Never, my love. We will always be together.

She still loved him, she would always love him, but it was the kind of love that was muted, safely seen through the rear-view window, like a place you used to call home but no longer visited. There would always be a wound there, but the healing had begun.

He squeezed her hand one last time. Then Jack was gone and she was alone.