Quotes About Loss

People lament that if their loved ones had been born fifty years later, they might have survived what killed them. But perhaps what killed them is what led someone to find a cure.

But life is not a board game, and losing a loved one is never really "starting over." More like "continuing without.

A freed soldier is often furious. The days and nights he lost, the torture and humiliation he suffered-it all demands a fierce revenge

His mind had forgotten the pathway to his voice.

When someone passes, Benjamin, people always ask, 'Why did God take them?' A better question would be 'Why did God give them to us?' What did we do to deserve their love, their joy, the sweet memories we shared?

She says everyone you lose here, you find again there. Our family is all together. Her. My parents.

and that's the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going into every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone

Four years? She'd been gone from this world as long as she'd been in it.

I collected the papers, wrapped them back in the rubber band, and felt a small grief, like a person who discovers, upon returning from a trip, that something has been left behind and there is no way now to retrieve it.

When someone passes, Benjamin, people always ask, 'Why did God take them?' A better question would be 'Why did God give them to us?' What did we do to deserve their love, their joy, the sweet moments we shared?

Something has gone amiss with the world, he found himself thinking. Something has changed in the marrow, and I'm at a loss to make sense of it.

brother had done. He pushes the boots to one side and

but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.

the end of a couple is like a death, and the notion of death, of temporariness, can remind us of the value of things

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

Saeed wanted to feel for Nadia what he had always felt for Nadia, and the potential loss of this feeling left him unmoored, adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing.

Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

a beautiful memory one knows has already commenced to fade. •

if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.

We are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another.

Saeed prayed a great deal, and so did his father, and so did their guests, and some of them wept, but Saeed had wept only once, when he first saw his mother's corpse and screamed, and Saeed's father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend.

for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.

Saeed's father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend.