Quotes About Loss

My very best friend died in a car accident when I was 16 years old. That was the hardest blow emotionally that I have ever had to endure. Suddenly, you realize tomorrow might not come. Now I live by the motto, 'Today is what I have.'

I lost contact with my father for many years because of apartheid. For, like, six years, I didn't see my dad. And, now, this was the six years of being a teenager.

My dad's cooking was magic in the kitchen. But eventually over the years, his personality changed and his ability to remember recipes failed. He became paranoid and thought people were stealing from him, when often he was just misplacing things.

I was raised an orphan... My mother died when I was 2 years old.

My mother's belief in spiritual healers grew stronger after our family went through a rough patch following my father's death. Sufi saint Karimullah Shah Kadri changed our lives, and all of us converted to Sufism. But it wasn't an instantaneous decision - it took us 10 years to convert. The change in religion was like washing away the past.

Seven years after my mother's passing, I still reach for the phone for a split second to call her. We spoke every day.

Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was, you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose, which he put on her bedside table. That's how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning, there was no rose.

Ten years ago, I still feared loss enough to abandon myself in order to keep things stable. I'd smile when I was sad, pretend to like people who appalled me. What I now know is that losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.

Michael died five years ago this January, and the first thing that really struck me about the script was the part about her peeling off from the funeral and just getting into a rowboat and having a real kind of cry where nobody was.

I lost my dad two years ago to cancer, and before he died, I asked him to write 'Daddy's Little Girl' on a piece of paper for me. I told him it was for an album. He practiced and practiced and then sent it to me, and I had it tattooed onto my wrist and surprised him with it. He cried when he saw it, happy tears. This way I always carry him with me.

I got a poster from Columbia Records, and there's Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ellington, Count Basie - everybody in that poster has died, I'm the only one left. And great players like Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, it's hard to believe they're gone because we were all so close. But I believe in the future and the tradition will go on.

A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.

With The Key, it was, I had gone through a divorce and losing my father, and just kinda really reminiscing about how much I loved the traditional side of country music, so I made a record that was really traditional from start to finish.

There's some things I can't write about, just terrible personal tragedies.

Disney features, especially the early ones, were horror movies with cute critters: Greek tragedies with a hummable chorus. Forcing children to confront the loss of home, parent, friends and fondest pets, these films imposed shock therapy on four-year-olds.

I haven't had too many tragedies in my family where there has been a loss or even an accident. I've been lucky in that sense.

You know, most of my friends are either dead or in jail. There were a lot of tragedies.

I've had a lot of big impacts before the music as far as deaths and tragedies and experiences in my life.

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

The biggest tragedy I had was the loss of my daughter from neuromuscular disease in 2000, at age 46.

At the root of everything I write is tragedy.

There's sadness to anyone that dies before their time, and specifically ones that seem to affect people in a positive way. It doesn't matter if it's Whitney Houston or a nameless, faceless person on the street. That's just as big of a tragedy for me.

In the midst of the sense of tragedy or loss, sometimes laughter is not only healing, it's a way of experiencing the person that you've lost again.

One death is a tragedy, and a million deaths are a statistic.