Quotes About Loss

The risk people tend to fear most is not financial loss or wasted time. Rather, it is the risk to their pride, status, and prestige, to what their peers will think of them if they fail.2 In other words, the risk of failure can weigh more heavily than what is at risk.

Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the white peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.

An income tax form is like a laundry list -- either way you lose your shirt.

When she died, she went on teaching me—about loss and grief… and about the renewal of hope and joy.

There are certain things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin either by words or pictures. Nor can any description that I might offer here even approximate what it feels like to lose a real chunk of money that you used to own.

The indignation school of writers never tires of pointing out the millions that are stolen in the Street. But while the millions are being stolen, the billions are being lost. Nothing crooked—just bad luck and bad brains met together in an effort to do something that couldn't be done in the first place.

He came into my life in February 1932 and never left it again. More than a quarter of a century has passed since then, more than nine thousand days, desultory and tedious, hollow with the sense of effort or work without hope- days and years, many of them as dead as dry leaves on a dead tree. I can remember the day and the hour when I first set eyes on this boy who was to be the source of my greatest happiness and of my greatest despair.

So I went through the whole list except the names beginning with H, and when I had finished I found that twenty-six boys out of the forty-six in my class had died for das 1000-jährige Reich.

Did I really want or need to know? What difference would it make if he were dead or alive, since dead or alive I should never see him again? But could I be certain? Was it completely and utterly out of the question for the door to open and for him to walk in? And wasn't I even now listening for his footstep?

They play with unflinching seriousness, as if life depended upon the flick of a piece or the snap of a clock - and it does. Some of these men have lost jobs and wives playing night after night, usually against the same opponent. . . . Night after night, the same men sit across from one another in the same chairs. They seem to have no sense of the passing of time.

It's like we're born with a memory of something we've never seen. We yearn to return to a place we've never been. We mourn that loss and seek it every day, no matter what our religion, or none.

Living on through loss seems by contrast as bad or worse; it means experiencing environmental deterioration, steady decline in human well-being, and increasing constraint on future human action consciously and slowly while realizing that they are likely to continue for generations after one is gone.

What to know about pain is how little we deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose.

I certainly didn't want to fight with him. I did, however, want to shout, "Listen, you son of a bitch, life isn't all a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl! Life is rejection and pain and loss" -- all those things I so cherishly cuddled in my slef-pitying bosom. I didn't, of course, say any such thing

We know the worth of a thing when we have lost it.

how can he love me then not? He went,he ran. And I cannot bring him back. Yet I left the door metaphorically wide open, hoping he'd come back and bang on it proclaiming, "I want to be here with you. Always." Soon I'm going to have to shutit. For my safety and my sanity. Let go. I don't want to. Won't letting go be just that - letting go? Giving up? Admitting failure? Admitting that it is really, truly over?

It's just the world seems a very spacious place without him.

My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently. My painting contains in it the message of pain. I think that at least a few people are interested in it. It's not revolutionary. Why keep wishing for it to be belligerent? I can't. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this. I think work is the best.

My paintings are well-painted, not nimbly but patiently. My painting contains in it the message of pain. I think that at least a few people are interested in it. It's not revolutionary. Why keep wishing for it to be belligerent? I can't. Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best.

World history is tragic.

No greater grief than to remember days of gladness when sorrow is at hand

being a survivor meant that you lived to some degree in a chronic state of mourning, like a low-level fever that waxes and wanes but is never truly eliminated.

There is no sorrow like the memory of love and the knowledge that it is gone forever.

Tammy's fallen tomahawk.