Quotes About Loss

He died on his return to New York. He died on the gangplank, just a few feet away from America. He didn't quite make it. His hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gang-plank and landed, plop, on America. Poor devil. I heard it was his heart, but the way the Chinese dentist described the business, it could have been his teeth.

I'm falling for you, but I can't do this if your still hung up on a dead guy...you can still love him and love me, but you won't let yourself, Becca.

Don't let anyone make you feel guilty because you are still grieving. Grief is a slow process and often takes as long as two years to complete its healing work. That doesn't mean that you will always hurt this badly, but it does mean that you should give yourself permission to take as much time as you need to work through your loss.

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H. I've plenty of what are called "resources." People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly.… Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this "commonsense" vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

she, armed with both & abandoning the joys of reason that had meant so much to her as well as me, made a suitably advantageous marriage with an ironmonger with a face like an anvil & a soul like a slag, & so I never saw her freckles fade, her auburn hair dull, never had to watch our love turn to that non-colour, white.

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his figures back into dust.

A coat hanger of a body trying to remember the coat that years before had fallen off

As a meteorite strike long ago explains the large lake now, so Amy's absence shaped everything, even when—and sometimes most particularly when—he wasn't thinking of her.

Nineveh, Tyre, a God-forsaken railway in Siam, Dorrigo Evans said, flame

I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species and phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish

Every death of those you love is the death also of so many shared memories and understanding, of a now irretrievable part of your own life.

Thus attired in the night of their grief, they prepared to depart into a morning she seemed determined not to relinquish.

Richard Flanagan

we wish we had never known.

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction.

How amazingly far normalcy extends; how you can keep it in sight as if you were on a raft sliding out to sea, the stitch of land growing smaller and smaller. Or in a balloon swept up on a column of prairie air, the ground widening and flattening, growing less and less distinct below you. You notice it, or you don't notice it. But you're already too far away and all is lost.

And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could've been. It can be corrupting. I

For the two of us, ours was just a version of life briefly perfected (though in a way that showed me something) and that ended.

Sometimes we do not really become adults until after we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes

Though when I turn to regard life -- my own or others'-- I now never fail to be struck, amid the onslaught of all that's happened and still is happening, by how much that's gone from me. Absences seem to surround and intrude upon everything. Though in acknowledging this, I cannot let it be a loss or even be a fact I regret, since that is merely how life is--another enduring truth we must notice.

a considerable portion of the appalling loss of British life was due to the destruction of the old armoured cruisers which had no business at Jutland

as the money and shipbuilding facilities were limited in Britain as well as in Germany, each battle cruiser represented the loss of a battleship. Indeed, they were soon costing more and absorbing more labour and materials than their contemporary Dreadnoughts.

The only problem they had ... was in drawing the fine differences between war-mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own; justifiable loss-mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains; and criminal negligence-mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit.