Quotes About Loss

Nothing was a pleasure to her now; how could anything be a pleasure to a woman who knew that she had thrown away her life? There was an everlasting weight on her heart — there was a livid light on everything.

But even while they pretend to be lost in their fairy-tale they're steeped in their vision of the dead restored to them.

I'm a survivor—a survivor of a general wreck . . . everyone else has gone . . . I'm all that's left.

Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in especial, might survive, in memory, of the friends little children had lost.

We've played our dreadful game, and we've lost. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our feeling for ourselves and for each other, not to wait another day.

But the sense that it was his last chance, that he loved her and had lost her, that she would think him a fool whatever he should say, suddenly gave him a lash and added a deep vibration to his low voice.

The broken charm of the world about was broken into smaller pieces.

People are proud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.

You've not only dried up my tears; you've dried up my soul.

some degree to her loss.  There was an odd pang for me in seeing her move about alone; I felt somehow responsible for it and asked myself why I couldn't have kept my hands off.  I had seen Jasper in the smoking-room more

The mere sense of his grasp in her own covered the ground of loss just as much as the ground of gain. His presence was like an object brought so close to her face that she couldn't see round its edges

Julia would have got over the other woman, but she would never get over his becoming a nobody

It was the end for me. And yet not an end. In all the years which have since elapsed she remains the woman I loved and lost, the unattainable one [...] I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous man, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the man in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable. —Henry Miller, Stand Still like the Hummingbird (1962)

I was alive. But I was alive without a memory, without a name; I was cut off from hope as well as from remorse or regret. I had no past and would probably have no future; I was buried alive in a void which was the wound that had been dealt me. I was like the wound itself.

I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me hack again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.

Visata susitrauk?, liko tik miesto kvartalo dydžio, joje neb?ra žvaigždži?, neb?ra medži?, neb?ra upi?. Žmon?s, kurie ?ia gyvena, yra mir?. Jie dirba k?des, ant kuri? kiti žmon?s s?di sapnuose.

He's like a hero come back from the war, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams. Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door he enters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves a bad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; the elements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality. Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up, his body was stolen.

When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.

We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I couldn't recognize the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over and I had been picked clean.

Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her - and the me which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an end is intolerable to me.

I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life… instead I lost hold of life completely, I reached out for something to attach myself to—and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for—myself.

Everything American will disappear one day. More completely than that which was Greek, or Roman, or Egyptian. This is one of the ideas which pushed me outside the warm, comfortable bloodstream, where buffalos all, we once grazed in peace. An idea which has caused me infinite sorrow. For not to belong to something enduring is the last agony.

In the course of disintegration, a process which may go on for centuries, life loses all significance.

Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves.