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Quotes About Loss

Kuru Qan once told me that grieving had nothing to do with the ones gone, and everything to do with the ones left behind. We feel the absences in our life like open wounds, and they never really close, no matter how many years pass.
~ Steven Erikson
If not for a dumb beast's incomprehension at its own destruction beneath the loving hands of two heartbroken children.
~ Steven Erikson
Burdens were born from the loss of innocence. Naïveté. While the innocent yearned to lose their innocence, those who had already done so in turn envied the innocent, and knew grief in what they had lost. Between the two, no exchange of truths was possible.
~ Steven Erikson
I think I am dead. Am I? Am I dead?" "I don't know. But... I think so." "The dead, it is said, do not sleep." Coll knew the saying, and knew that it had originally come from Hood's own temple. He knew, as well, the wry observation that closed the quote. "'While the living do not live'. Not that that makes much sense." "It does to me. For I now know that I have lost what I did not know I once possessed.
~ Steven Erikson
For himself, Rallick, such gifts had long since been lost, and he was not the kind of man to stir the ashes. No embers survived, no flame could be born anew. Life belonged to other people, and his only claim to it was his power to take it from them. Nor would he recognise hope if it came to him. Too much a stranger, too long a ghost.
~ Steven Erikson
The proudest candle vanishes unseen into a raging house-fire, with none to recount the beauty of its delicate glow, or the dignity of its desire.
~ Steven Erikson
Where are the days we once held So loose in our sure hands? When did these racing streams Carve depthless caves beneath our feet? And how did this scene stagger And shift to make fraught our deft lies In the places where youth will meet, In the lands of our proud dreams? Where, among all you before me, Are the faces I once knew?
~ Steven Erikson
Andiamo a prendere parte alla morte. Ed è in questi momenti, prima che le spade vengano sguainate, prima che il sangue bagni il terreno e le grida riempiano l'aria, che il senso di futilità scende su di noi. Senza le nostre armature, piangeremmo tutti quanti. In che altro modo potremmo reagire all'imminente promessa di incalcolabili perdite?
~ Steven Erikson
There were clouds closed fast round the moon. And one by one, gardens died.
~ Steven Erikson
There is nothing just in death. When the moment arrives, it is always too soon. The curse of incompletion, the loss that can never be filled. Before too long, rising like jagged rocks from the flood, there was anger.
~ Steven Erikson
Honourable Murillo is dead
~ Steven Erikson
There was a smudge of motion in the grasses, about twenty paces distant. "That dog. Hood knows what it's up to." [...] 'Your beast is wandering out there'. 'I know. Every night. As if looking for something. I think it might be ... Coltaine. Looking for Coltaine. And it breaks my heart, sir.
~ Steven Erikson
The dead speak in silences and so never leave us in peace.
~ Steven Erikson
The dead were gone through Hood's Gate. The living were left with the pain of their passage.
~ Steven Erikson
Hear them rattle These chains of living Bound to every moment passed Until the wreckage clamours In deafening wake And each stride trails A dirge of the lost. - House of Chains
~ Steven Erikson
his life had been rather headlong. He felt as if he was plunging down a steep hill, for ever but one step from bone-snapping, blood-spraying disaster. Used to be he thrived on such feelings. Proof that he was alive. Yet…too many friends had fallen to the wayside on the journey. Far too many, and he was reluctant to let others take their places
~ Steven Erikson
Midnight comes often in the dusk of my life, when I look back upon all that I have survived. The deaths of so many for whom I cared and loved in my heart, have expunged all sense of glory from my thoughts. To have escaped those random fates has lost all triumph. I know you have seen me, friend, my lined face and silent regard, the cold calcretions that slow my embittered pace, as I walk down the last years, clothed in darkness as are all old men, haunted by memories …
~ Steven Erikson
Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold?
~ Steven Erikson
Mistress to these footprints Lover to the wake of where He has just passed, for the path he wanders is between us all. The sweet taste of loss feeds every mountain stream, Failing ice down to seas warm as blood threading thin our dreams. For where he leads her has lost its bones, And the trail he walks is flesh without life and the sea remembers nothing.
~ Steven Erikson
everything – now sank beneath a familiar cloud, settling grey and thick, where every shape was but hinted at, where he was lost. As lost as he had been, as lost as any and every mortal soul, no matter how blustery its claims to certainty, to faith. And yet…and yet it was a warm cloud, shot through with precious things: his love for his wife, his children; his wonder at their lives, the changes that came to them day by day. He found he was weeping, even as he climbed to his feet.
~ Steven Erikson
Man and woman both, there was an age that, when reached, made the world beyond seem to fall away, drained of colour, devoid of significance. To live as a thing no longer desired but tolerated, at best humoured. To reach that age was to know the light in the eyes dimming – the first spark to wink out, and from that moment on, the shadows just crept ever closer.
~ Steven Erikson
Death is not an unkind fate,' Darist said above him. 'If she was a friend, you will miss her company, and that is the true source of your grief—your sorrow is for yourself. My words may displease you, but I speak from experience. I have felt the deaths of many of my kin, and I mourn the spaces in my life where they once stood. But such losses serve only to ease my own impending demise.
~ Steven Erikson
Names are no comfort, they're a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him? Why do the survivors remain anonymous—as if cursed—while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold? Name none of the fallen, for they stood in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown.
~ Steven Erikson
To live is to lose the faith you were born with to a thousand cuts, each year bleeding into the next. The eyes of the innocent see a world very differently from what you and I see. To know this is to revisit one's own loss, eye to eye with sad reflection, and to feel once more that dreadful ache in your chest.
~ Steven Erikson