Quotes About Loss

YESTERDAY I FOUND a note I had written to myself, in the piles of outlines and narrative maps that are a writer's building blocks. "Let Her Die," I had written at the top of a legal pad, a shorthand reminder to get to that part of the story. Then I saw it the next day and half gasped; for a moment it was as though someone else had given me this instruction. Let her die: a three-word definition of the arc of grief if ever I heard one, and it takes a long time.

IT'S AN OLD, OLD STORY: I HAD A FRIEND AND WE shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.

In the dream I knew she was dead, and I reached out for her and said, "But you're coming back, right?" She smiled but shook her head; her face was a well of sadness.

I missed Caroline in dozens of ways, but through them all was the absence of the ongoing dialogue, real or imagined.

Break up? We didn't break up. He gave me away.

A thief, stealing his friendship.

After all the human noise and conflicts have stopped, the absent person has more room in your heart to spread out and be herself. My mother's been gone ten years and I know her much better now than when we saw each other every day.

No one likes to lose. It is how you handle the loss that reveals your character.

If loss makes you doubt your belief in justice, then you never truly believed in justice at all.

Grief was an opponent he would never be able to defeat.

Please, Matsu-san,' I told him, not long after the house was completed. 'I don't wish to have any flowers.' "Never once did he question me. I needed my life to be simple without any beauty to remind me of all I had lost. And though I had not told him that, Matsu must have seen it in my eyes. 'Don't worry, Sachi,' he said, 'there will be no flowers.

Haru looked at the devastation around her. I see a world covered in grey ash. I see a world covered in grey ash with flecks of white bone. I see a world covered in grey ash with flecks of white bone of all those who will never rise again.

I knew the sense of integrity I had long admired in him had died, and that I was already grieving for its loss.

What wars really destroyed were families.

He has joined the great majority.

Mourn, ye Graces and Loves, and all you whom the Graces love. My lady's sparrow is dead, the sparrow, my lady's pet.

And let her not look to find my love, as before; my love, which by her fault has dropped like a flower on the meadow's edge, when it has been touched by the plow passing by.

En qué clase de mundo vivimos, que te deja amar tanto a alguien y luego te lo arrebata para siempre? Entonces comprendí que el cielo no existe en otra parte, y tampoco el infierno. Están en la tierra. Los tenemos aquí mismo, en nuestra vida común. Solo que a veces tenemos que atravesar un infierno para llegar al cielo.

Do you think there really is a Heaven?" Jamie asked, his small voice floating up into the darkness. I lay still, afraid to answer, because I wasn't sure. "Yes, Jamie," Mary said. "And tomorrow we'll see Mum and Dad." "And Bella," I added. "She'll bark the second she sees you." Jamie giggled. To laugh at our own death seemed strange, but it was all we could do.

was Lilah, well, that was almost too

The wages of dying are love.

the wages of dying is love.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, rather than risk having to face dire consequences for his accumulated writings, he burned several kilos of manuscripts (ten plays, and many short stories, poems, and essays). For him it was an ordeal to part with what he had written. Moreover, it took a long time to burn so much paper without creating smoke and arousing suspicions.

still I think about him more than I don't. I'm I'm careful, I think about him all the time. What would it take to return to the ease of feeling safe and appreciated? The way I did with him. It would take, I decide, being 20. Better to think about my dead sister than a man whose kiss I will remember forever. Even if he vanishes as completely as Rebecca has.