Quotes About Loss

even grief had its limits

I'd been ready to go down to the graduation hall and fight for my life; I'd been ready to fight for the lives of everyone I knew, for the chance of a future. I didn't need this much more to lose.

Maybe when your mother died young, you became instantly old.

Apparently people commonly died when their loved ones were out of the room. Bathroom break. Quick trip down to the cafeteria for a grilled cheese. It was easier to die if you didn't have family members to worry about at that exact moment. Easier for the one who was dying, maybe.

the long sorrow of the color red.

what twists or rage greater than we could ever guess had savaged skylines, thousands of lives?

He's mourning his son, number 3000 American dead in Iraq, but as far as he can feel, the worst one.

People do not die./ They die/ And then they stay.

as a boy stands back from his earlier self mocking it and the light of fireflies blinking against an old fence has become as sad as it is lovely because so many hands are gone by now it is not that we wanted the light to be caught      but reached for that was it

Grief is an ambush. You're walking along feeling fine, look down, see a leaf, and begin to weep. —Jack

By January 2021, in the Hudson Valley, there was no Jewish or Episcopal or Catholic community anymore. There was no home. Whoever had hated our belief, and the strength it gave us — whoever had wanted our faith communities to die out — had won.

One who has loved truly, can never lose entirely. Love is whimsical and temperamental. Its nature is ephemeral, and transitory. It comes when it pleases,and goes away without warning. Accept and enjoy it while it remains, but spend no time worrying about its departure. Worry will never bring it back.

If you believe yourself unfortunate because you have loved and lost, perish the thought. One who has loved truly, can never lose entirely.

THE FEAR OF LOSS OF LOVE

The fear of POVERTY The fear of CRITICISM The fear of ILL HEALTH at the bottom of most of one's worries The fear of LOSS OF LOVE OF SOMEONE The fear of OLD AGE The fear of DEATH

When the rose's flash to the sunset Reels to the wrack and the twist, And the rose is a red bygone, When the face I love is going And the gate to the end shall clang, And it's no use to beckon or say, "So long"— Maybe I'll tell you then— some other time.

The keepers of wisdom testify a heap of ashes means whatever was there went out burning.

In 2011, a seventeen-year-old Israeli girl named Chen Aida Ayash was killed in a car accident. After her death, her parents asked for doctors to collect some eggs from her cadaver. They had to go to court to get permission, explaining to a judge that they wanted to fertilize Chen's eggs, after which Chen's aunt would bear them to term. After her own death, Chen would give her parents grandchildren.

until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

I turned you into a stranger in order to forget you and now I'm the stranger.

Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.

Sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.

Youth is like a fickle girlfriend. We can't understand or value her until she goes off with someone else, never to return.

I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my ..reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and second hand dreams