Quotes About Loss

And now he couldn't cloak it any longer, the leaking sense of loss, more fucking loss, soaking through into the same old general, swirling sense of betrayal, years upon pissed-away years of it, made bitter and particular on his tongue now, as if Grace-of-Heaven had come wormwood into his mouth in those final clenched, pulsing seconds.

The process of identifying a self inevitably involves loss as well as gain. We discover our boundaries, and those boundaries by definition separate us from our fellows. As we clarify our perceptions, we lose our misconceptions. As we eliminate ambiguity, we lose illusion as well. We arrive at clarity, and clarity creates change.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size. MARK TWAIN

Unfold your days with me and lose your sense of panic and loss. This earth is abundant. It holds joy for you, and contentment. Bring me your restless heart. Allow me to gentle your soul.

A drought is a tearless time of grief.

Every love story is a potential grief story.

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

This is what those who haven't crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.

He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes for both.

The, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

You're still in it. You'll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it's gone that deep. You'll always be walking wounded. That's the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don't you agree?

Things, once gone, can't be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can't be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can't be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn't forget, because we have been changed forever.

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

I swiftly realised how grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail. Old friendships may deepen through shared sorrow; or suddenly appear lightweight.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both. So why do we constantly aspire to love? because love is the meeting point of truth and magic.

Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera).

At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.