Quotes About Loss

I think she's running from a broken heart. She left it behind her somewhere, but she can still hear it cracking.

The real me died years ago. I died and I went to hell. This is hell.

The dead don't come back. Not to this world. This world is too cruel for anyone to want to come back.

I thought about my family. It was small by any standard, shrunken to a handful by Hitler, Stalin, and divorce.

The love I have given and received has been pure. Driven by loss, I have both used the gift of intellect I possessed and lived my life fully.

I didn't know, even vaguely, the difference between physical deprivation and the emotional loss of one's child, even when you know that child is healthy and well.

Much as I hate to say it, the Second World War did end the Great Depression. I think we solve our problems by killing our boys and others.

Who knows Bob's name in this outfit—let alone his lame child's? ("The last place I worked for, I was let go," recalls the bank teller. "One of my friends stopped by and asked where I was at. They said, 'She's no longer with us.' That's all. I vanished.") It's nothing personal, really. Dickens's people have been replaced by Beckett's.

The war was fun for America. I'm not talking about the poor souls who lost sons and daughters. But for the rest of us, the war was a hell of a good time. Farmers in South Dakota that I administered relief to and gave 'em bully beef and four dollars a week to feed their families, when I came home were worth a quarter-million dollars, right? It's forgotten now.

I presumably lost $150,000 in the depression of 1937—on my one stock investment—because I did everything Lehman Brothers told me. I said, well, this is a fool's procedure . . . buying stock in other people's businesses.

The stark truth is, of course, that grief never dies. The American counsellor Lois Tonkin reminds us that loss isn't something we 'get over', and it doesn't necessarily lessen, either. It remains at the core of us and we just expand our lives around it, burying it deeper from the surface. So with time it may become more distant, more compartmentalised and therefore easier to manage, but it does not go away.

The American counsellor Lois Tonkin reminds us that loss isn't something we 'get over', and it doesn't necessarily lessen, either. It remains at the core of us and we just expand our lives around it, burying it deeper from the surface. So with time it may become more distant, more compartmentalised and therefore easier to manage, but it does not go away.

It's disconcerting to realize how little you have to say to someone who once occupied such a prominent place in your bed.

Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure.

This is how it happens," he said again, quietly and near tears. "They go, one by one, and before you know it, the room is empty.

But pain may be a gift to us. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift.

Loss brings pain. Yes. But pain triggers memory. And memory is a kind of new birth, within each of us. And it is that new birth after long pain, that resurrection - in memory - that, to our surprise, perhaps, comforts us.

My sister and I were the ones in the family who had seen this as necessary; neither of my brothers felt there was a problem with Dad. And in general when I'd expressed my concern for him, she was the one of my siblings who responded. She and I had also been the ones who sorted through and distributed mother's possessions after she had died.

But then he returned and our life went on. Three days gone. A week. I measured the time in the faint waning of my consciousness of my misery, and wondered if this would one day be enough: simply not to be consciously miserable anymore.

There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you've hung it so careful.

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.

Things had changed in a way that no one could have ever expected - and I ached with regret.

i cried when i saw those buildings collapse on themselves like a broken heart.

How quickly we became prisoners, how quickly we gave up our freedom, how quickly we tolerated the loss of that freedom, like a child being abused, in silence.