Quotes About Loss

The sweetness of love is short-lived, but the pain endures.

Then he looked by him, and was ware of a damsel that came riding as fast as her horse might gallop upon a fair palfrey. And when she espied that Sir Lanceor was slain, then she made sorrow out of measure, and said, O Balin ! two bodies hast thou slain and one heart, and two hearts in one body, and two souls thou hast lost.

Only death dignifies our sufferings in the eyes of others.

ce que nous appelons la douleur n'est peut-être pas tant le regret que nous éprouvons de cette impossibilité de voir les morts revenir à la vie que notre impuissance à le souhaiter.

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.

Death alone can make others respect our sufferings; and through death the most pitiable sufferings acquire dignity.

Demek ki insanlar?n bizim ac?m?za sayg? duymas?n? ölüm saÄŸl?yor, en hazin ac?lar bile ölümle sayg?nl?k kazan?yordu.

We cannot possess things–we die and they are lost, or they are stolen, or they perish. But more than that, we ourselves cannot even enjoy the things themselves. To think we can is idolatry.

My mother was informing me, by mail, that she was about to die, and would never see me again.

I feel like one Who treads alone Some banquet-hall deserted, Whose lights are fled, Whose garland's dead, And all but he departed!

Oh, ever thus, from childhood's hour, I 've seen my fondest hopes decay; I never loved a tree or flower But 't was the first to fade away. I never nurs'd a dear gazelle, To glad me with its soft black eye, But when it came to know me well And love me, it was sure to die.

Her grief is still too young to behave itself, so she never lets it out.

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.

Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

Time travel, as it turns out, is not for civilian tourists, you don't just climb into a machine, you have to do it from the inside out, with your mind and body, and navigating Time is an unforgiving discipline. It requires years of pain, hard labor, and loss, and there is no redemption--of, or from, anything.

No, thought Oedipa, sad. As if their home cemetery in some way still did exist, in a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the East San Narciso Freeway, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

Yet is Dixon certain, as certain as the lightness he feels now, lightness premonitory of Flying, that far worse happen'd here, to these poor People, as the blood flew and the Children cried, - that at the end no one understood what they said as they died.

Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool's attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living... and with each one, he thinks he feels patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts of whoever he's been losing all definition, reverting to dumb chemistry...

The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not.

How much money would I have to take from you so I don't lose your respect?" Crocker Fenway chuckled without mirth. "A bit late for that, Mr. Sportello. People like you lose all claim to respect the first time they pay anybody rent." "And when the first landlord decided to stiff the first renter for his security deposit, your whole fucking class lost everybody's respect.

It was the end of something—if not his innocence, at least of his faith that things would always happen gradually enough to afford time to do something about it in.

Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool's attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not.

So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence – not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be – its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator. - Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)