Quotes About Loss

I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.

I used to pray to recover you. --from Daddy, written 12 October 1962

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one's ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know.

For I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.

Doreen is dissolving, Lenny Shepherd is dissolving, Frankie is dissolving, New York is dissolving, they are all dissolving away and none of them matter anymore.I don't know them. I have never known them and I am very pure.

I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her, and she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me

When you give someone your whole heart and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back. It's gone forever.

But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.

daddy daddy you bastard, i'm through

It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain Ã¢â'¬Â¦ remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I've taken for granted. When you feel that this may be the good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.

White Godiva, I unpeel -- Dead hands, dead stringencies.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like a tombstone.

I had hoped to make her strong and healthy, and now she may be too weak herself after this slow death, like my father's slow long death, to come to me. and I am here, futile, cut off from the ritual of family love and neighborhood and from giving strength and love to my dear brave grandmother's dying whom I loved above thought. and my mother will go, and there is the terror of having no parents, no older seasoned beings, to advise and love me in this world.

Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld, A world we lose by merely waking up.

I borrow the stilts of an old tragedy.

I simply don't know what to do. All joy and hope is gone.

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

I'll call you. Take care. And he was gone. So the rain comes down hard outside my room, and like Eddie Cohen, I say, ... fifteen thousand years - - - of what? We're still nothing but animals.

And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.

from the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked… but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as i sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers.