Quotes About Loss

After Father died, she told me that it felt strange to have hands anymore, what with no one to hold them.

The bitch is dead now.

Before he slept he reflected, as he had often reflected in other moments of triumph at the card table, that the gain to the winner is, in some odd way, always less than the loss to the loser.

Mister. Nothing is forever. Only death is permanent. Nothing is forever except what you did to me.

She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime.

On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice, would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back.

How quickly the dead faded into each other

A blend of desolation and outrage. Or longing and fury. She wanted him back, she never wanted to see him again.

When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past.

This sense of absence had been growing since Molly's funeral. It was wearing into him. Last night he had woken beside his sleeping wife and had to touch his own face to be assured he remained a physical entity.

She turned her face into the pillow and let her tears drain into it, and felt that yet more was lost, when there was no witness to her sorrow.

His right hemisphere had died. He knew so many people who had died that in his present state of dissociation he could begin to contemplate his own end as a commonplace – a flurry of burying or cremating, a welt of grief raised, then subsiding as life swept on. Perhaps he had already died.

Voleva fuggire, buttarsi da sola sul letto a faccia in giù e assaporare il dolore cocente di quel momento, e poi seguire con il pensiero il diramarsi di ogni possibile conseguenza fino al punto esatto che precedeva la devastazione. Aveva bisogno di contemplare a occhi chiusi la ricchezza di quello che aveva perso, di quello che aveva ceduto, e di prefigurarsi il nuovo stato delle cose.

Old Europa tosses in her dreams. She wants to help but she doesn't want to share or lose what she has.

She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby's half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living.

He leaves behind in the library a field of resonating sadness, an imagined shape, a disappointed hologram still in possession of his chair.

He was a lovely boy who was a long way from his family and he was about to die.

But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past—how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory. Paradise or

The years slid over old deaths like a heavy lid. Nearly everything that happens to you in life you forget. Should have kept a journal.

But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past—how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory.

And so the dead might cease to grieve And we might make amends And there might be a pact between Dead friends and living friends.

She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked.

others, the story losing

If you're afraid of losing her, remember that no one can lose something that didn't belong to him to begin with. If anyone thinks otherwise, he'll end up tormenting himself twice: first, on account of his ignorance, and second, on account of losing something that wasn't his.