Best 4819 quotes in «loss quotes» category

So much ice. She thumbed a drying tear away. How much water can the weight of ice carry?

Isobel had entrusted the note to Gwen just before Baltimore. And the small scrap of paper still remained her only tangible evidence that Varen had loved her. Expect...he didn't anymore.

Isn’t it complicated to be human, though?” she said. “Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally…And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn’t make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance…” “The one thing,” Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, “the thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won’t ever see her grow up. She’ll have to do it without whatever I could have given her.” “Time, too, time and everything that one could do in it, and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It’s so important to us because we see it so close. We’re individuals, we’re full of ourselves, and so we’re bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of sudden there’s so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we’d always been and always intended to be…do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there’s so much to feel and I’m greedy?

I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.

I steer clear of telling. I can't come out with it. The outlandish truth of me. How can I reveal this to someone innocent and unsuspecting? With those who know my story I talk freely about us.... But with others I keep it hidden, the truth. I keep it under wraps because I don't want to shock or make anyone distressed. But it's not like me to be cagey in my interactions.... But now I try to keep a distance from those who are innocent of my reality. At best I am vague. I feel deceitful at times. But I can't just drop it on someone, I feel--it's too horrifying, too huge. It's not that I should be honest with everyone, the white lies I tell strangers I don't mind. But there are those I see time and again, have drinks with, share jokes, and even they don't know. They see my cheery side. And I kick myself for being a fraud.... I can see, though, that my secrecy does me no favors. It probably makes worse my sense of being outlandish. It confirms to me that it might be abhorrent, my story, or that few can relate to it.

Is the air okay?" I texted. "It hurts a little to breathe," my sister texted back. "But we're okay." Jesus, I thought, is there a better and more succinct definition of grief than It hurts a little to breathe, but we're okay?

Is there anything so empty as something that's once been full?

I stood staring to heaven and nothing came from there, no mercy or redemption. Whatever had come had come already and it was not sent by God. I stood, arms outstretched and empty, like a man praying but I was not praying, I was crying, because it had come to this and I had come to this place, and they were not with me... they were gone for ever.

I still want to feel you against me.” Her gaze dropped to his hands. “I want you to stay with me. Hold me. Just tonight. If I lose you again tomorrow then it will still be worth it. I will lose you a hundred times, if you would but hold me in your arms each time before my loss.” She saw his eyes water, but no tears emerged...

I stopped in St. Bernadette's Cemetery one of my favorite places... The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns. In the quiet space below, is laid out an aisle similar to those in any library. The gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those whose names have been blotted from the pages of life; who have been forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here.

I still have my dad's phone. I keep it and a charging cord hidden in Harold's trunk next to the spare tire. A ton of pictures on his phone were of leafless branches dividing up the sky, like the view I had as we floated under that sycamore tree. I always wondered what he saw in that, in the split-apart sky.

I stood in your doorway this morning dreaming you’d turn around you’d tilt your head you’d softly whisper ”stay” or that you’d grab my arms to shake me while asking what the hell are we doing we love each other and this is not right so we will make this work now stay! You poured your coffee. Stirred the spoon like a crystal man with your back to me and not a sound. the fridge humming elegies while the clock ticked on and the streets are so clean here people rushing to work and maybe I should be too by now at this age this stage this town. I will stand in that doorway dreaming for many nights to come.

I still wonder what made him leave. Were they my demons or his own?

I still think of you every day. But I’m trying not to let it hurt me with the same intensity that it used to.

Is worth for a man to lose his soul, and gain worldly wealth?

I take it as a compliment when somebody calls me crazy. I would be offended if I was one of the sheeple, one of the sleepwalkers in the matrix or part of the collective hallucination we call 'normal

It began with the Christmas tree lights. They were candy-bright, mouth-size. She wanted to feel the lightness of them on her tongue, the spark on her tastebuds. Without him life was so dark, and all the holiday debris only made it worse. She promised herself she wouldn't bite down.

It could be kindness. Faith felt hollow at the thought. She had needed kindness before, and has received none. Now it was too late, and she did not know what to do with it.

It didn’t hurt me. Not “hurt”. Hurt is a four letter word. It’s short, almost cute sounding. Aawwww, did that hurt? No. It didn’t hurt. Destroyed, Obliterated, Desecrated, Annihilated, Demolished, Shattered, or Demoralised maybe… But no. It didn’t hurt me. It didn’t “hurt” me at all.

It could have been avoided. This couch misery spiral, this … loss … I could’ve avoided the bulk of it simply by doing more. I could’ve given a shit...

It doesn't matter if you never see someone again, I told myself. There are millions of people in the world, and most of them never see each other in the first place. You hoped to know Ellington Feint forever, but there's no such thing as forever, really. Everything is much shorter than that.

I tell you of loss, my child, so you will listen, slowly, and know that in life every emotion is fated to rear itself within your being. Don't judge it proper or ugly. It's simply there and yours. When you should happen to cry, then cry, knowing that just as easily you will laugh again and cry again. Your feelings will enter the currents of your core and there they shall remain

It feels like I’m stuck in one spot. It’s been this way for a long time. I know you understand, but now you’re moving on without me. And I—I’m not ready to be alone.

It feels weird, being out in the real world again. Around people just living their lives like normal. Their presence is oppressive. The very fact that the world is going on as usual, like nothing ever happened, makes me want to scream. I know it's irrational to expect everything to grind to a halt because of June, but still. A wave of anxiety builds in my chest, my head pounding so loud it drowns out the noise of people talking and tapping away on their laptops.

It had been a long fifteen years. So much had changed in both their lives. Both hearts somehow sadly hardened. “Let us just make it through,” Claire whispered her desperate plea. It was her only prayer, one she said over and over again. An almost cynical laugh erupted out of her as she turned one last time to say goodbye to her father’s tombstone. That was her prayer? That was all she could come up with to say to God? Then so be it.

It had been so silent in the wake of that commotion, a kind of potent silence that seemed to contain everything. The songs of the birds and the creak of the trees. The dying snow and the unseen gurgling water. The glimmering sun. The certain sky. The gun that didn't have a bullet in its chamber. And the mother. Always the mother. The one who would never come to me.

It had been so long since she had felt anything.

It has been clear to him for a long time now that it is possible to love somebody and at the same time know that if this person just, say, evaporated one day, just disappeared into thin air, your life would be thousands of time better.

It has been said that bereavement is a state of loss and grief is a response to loss. To grieve is a natural and healthy response to our losses. It is nature’s way of letting us heal and open ourselves up to a new chapter in our lives.

It has just been discovered that women carry fetal cells from all the babies they have carried. Crossing the defensive boundaries of our immune system and mixing with our own cells, the fetal cells circulate in the mother’s bloodstream for decades after each birth. The body does not tolerate foreign cells, which trigger illness and rejection. But a mother’s body incorporates into her own the cells of her children as if they recognize each other, belong to each other. This fantastic melding of two selves, mother and child, is called human microchimerism. My three children are carried in my bloodstream still…. How did we not know this? How can this be a surprise?

It had just been a friendship, normal as anything. But then his mum's "little talk" had happened, and what came next was simple, really, and sudden. No one knew. Then Lily's mum knew, of course. Then Lily knew. And then everyone knew. Everyone. Which changed the whole world in a single day. And he was never going to forgive her for that.

It has been utterly exhausting to love you.

[I]t has struck me that along with all other losses, I might lose friendship, too. I am not equal anymore to the people that I know, and what is friendship but a celebration of equality? 82

I think about the people I know with the absolutely largest hearts, people with a stunning capacity for endurance and grace and kindness against the most screaming terrors and pains. My Mom and Dad, for example, enduring the death of their first child at six months old, the boy the brother I never met, dying quietly in his stroller on the porch in the moment that my mother stepped back inside to get a pair of gloves because the crisp brilliant April wind was filled with a whistling cutting wind.... Fifty years later after five more children and two miscarriages she is standing in the kitchen with her usual eternal endless cup of tea and I ask her: How do you get over the death of your child? And she says, in her blunt honest direct terse kind way, You don't. Her face harrowed like a hawk for a moment in the swirling steam of the tea. p112-13

I think of drug dealers like I think of my father— never really there when you want them to be.

I think it was C.S. Lewis that asked, 'Do not most people simply drift away?'. I've always been a reader and for the longest time that stuck with me because I was at war with it. How can people 'simply' drift away?

I think it will be better if we can live our life as if Christ is going to return today and plan our live as if it is hundred years off. Keep living, serving and most of all be prepared.

I think it is in grief that we need some reminder of our humanity--and sometimes, someone to say it for us. Poetry steps in at those moments when ordinary words fail: poetry as ceremony, as closure to what cannot be closed.

I think that we’ve just lost it and it doesn’t feel like home anymore…

I think part of your attraction to him is the draw of the unknown, of being different, even special. He is so out of the ordinary that you feel pulled to that because you yourself are not so ordinary. You're alone. And sometimes the pain of so much loss is written across your face. You wear it like an adornment and that causes other people to wonder about you; they can't relate to you and what you've been through, but you can relate to him in his dark state.

I think that everything that happens to you stays in you, even if it stays in a part of your mind where you can't find it. That's why you should never try to forget when people urge you to.

I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss?--

I think the purest of souls, those with the most fragile of hearts, must be meant for a short life. They can't be tethered or held in your palm. Just like a sparrow, they light on your porch. Their song might be brief, but how greedy would we be to ask for more? No, you cannot keep a sparrow. You can only hope that as they fly away, they take a little bit of you with them.

I think there were times when I was so afraid of losing you that I forgot I even had you at all.

I thought maybe we mourned not only for the dead but also for the living. We felt their absence before we knew for sure they were gone.

I thought about the dog and was suddenly very sad; sad about her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss.

I thought of all the hardships and people that I had lost in the past few days alone, but, most of all, I thought of how I didn't regret any of it.

It hurts that I was just one page in the book of your life… But what hurts more is knowing you’ll revise that chapter someday…. ….. and you’ll erase me completely.

It is as difficult for most poor people to truly believe that they could someday escape poverty as it is for most wealthy people to truly believe that their wealth could someday escape them.

It is an unwritten rule of life that when you are in acute pain and have no one to console you, someone, from somewhere, will emerge in your life to offer you comfort. However, ‘that’ someone will vanish from the scene once you begin to regain grip on your life, leaving you with another sense of loss to nurse.