Best 4819 quotes in «loss quotes» category

The sorrow we feel when we lose a loved one is the price we pay to have had them in our lives.

The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams.

The strong floral fragrance was sickening, suffocating, and threatened to snuff out any lingering remainder of fragile lilac—of the mother she’d loved so, so much.

The sudden loss of her father was like living with a wound that would never heal, yet her memories of him were fading more and more every day.

The supple water is forever changing. It's almost like it never happened, which gives me hope that one day it will be like it never happened.

...the sweetness of grace and freedom comes hand in hand with the uncomfortable, bitter-rawness of honest emotions and grief.

The tallest slugger touched my forehead, and I ignited like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. Shards of dazzling light rippled under my skin. I was the constellation Grus. The Trifid Nebula. I was the Big Bang, expanding endlessly through time and space forever. "I thought I was dying. That I was going to expire on a cold slab, trapped inside an UFO, my body filled with every light that had ever existed. I couldn't imagine a better way to die.

The tension between not being let in and not being let go fixes us. Especially when it's the not-being-let-in that won't let you go. You're held at the threshold. You're turned away, but you can't turn away.

The thing about old friends is not that they love you, but that they know you. They remember that disastrous New Year's Eve when you mixed White Russians and champagne, and how you wore that red maternity dress until everyone was sick of seeing the blaze of it in the office, and the uncomfortable couch in your first apartment and the smoky stove in your beach rental. They look at you and don't really think you look older because they've grown old along with you, and, like the faded paint in a beloved room, they're used to the look. And then one of them is gone, and you've lost a chunk of yourself. The stories of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the tsunami, the Japanese earthquake always used numbers, the deaths of thousands a measure of how great the disaster. Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.

The things that truly define me can’t be lost.

...the things we don't have are sadder than the things we have. Because the things we don't have exist in our imaginations, where they are perfect.

The things you let go will someday teach you how to fly.

The things left unsaid to people we care about, and the void those unspoken words leave, often have more impact than what is said.

The thing that's hard about it—the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance—is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now—the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong.

The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled.

The tragedy of life, Mitchell, happens because you can never have everything and because you will even lose the graces you have once possessed.

The trivial will be the evidence they provide to prove they are still right here.

The train blows through town delivering reality, slapping my face and screaming, “You are alone” Rose colored memories drown, taking their last breath.

The trivial will be the evidence they provide to prove to you they are still right here.

The truth is that any figure of Africans imported into the Americas which is narrowly based on the surviving records is bound to be low, because there were so many people at the time who had a vested interest in smuggling slaves (and withholding data. Nevertheless, if the low figure of ten million was accepted as basis for evaluating the impact of slaving on Africa as a whole, the conclusions that could legitimately be drawn would confound those who attempt to make light of the experience of the rape of Africans from 1445 to 1870. Pg. 96

The truth is, we never know what life will bring us and we don't have as much control as we might think we have. But we CAN choose how we walk through life and how we spend our time.

The truth is that she was a cruel kind of beautiful. Someone you might remember on your deathbed, wondering where your courage had been on the day you met, wondering why your courage only ever surfaced at the wrong time and for people who weren’t worth it.

The value you get does not depend on what you have, but how much of it you bring to the market place. You don’t get paid when you keep your gifts at home and go to the market empty handed!

The vivid memory of the woods had blossomed into a visceral longing for the Ridge, so immediate that I felt the ghost of my vanished house rise around me, a cold mountain wind thrumming past its walls, and thought that, if I reached down, I could feel Adso's soft gray fur under my fingers. I swallowed, hard.

...the way we ended things was not uncommon for kids like us. She said we'd lost enough in our short lives to want to cauterize our wounds before they happened. We burned our connection closed before we felt the holes.

The way he said it spoke of an ache I recognized. I knew that no matter how similar they were, no two losses were the same, but despite his loss being from a different circumstance, I felt his sadness as my own. We sat there in silence with my hand resting in his. My bandage told its own stories while we remembered the girl who taught Randolf such a valuable lesson about the small turning into the large.

The whole encounter was surreal. No one had mentioned cancer. I hadn’t requested special treatment for Jacob. Yet he’d just nabbed a private meeting with an actor from his favorite movie. I would later ask Mike, the comic book store owner, what had prompted him to invite Jacob to the supper and a private meeting with Mr. Bulloch. “It was Jeremy at the door. He recognized something in Jacob. Jeremy is a cancer survivor.

The winners of life's game always set and have goals in focus that they score to fulfill their purposes of existence and making the planet earth to celebrate joy; the losers make life bitter for others by tormenting their senses of joy and peace!

The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse "los," meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.

The world is made of more than particles. It's made of things you can't hold in your hand, like fear, love, loss, hope, truth.

The world is full of holes and uneven seams, wrinkled places that you can’t make smooth, no matter how hard you try.

The world was not to be trusted. Loved persons were always stolen. Dreams always squashed. That was life as she understood it.

The wounds from that time have already become scabs.

The wounds will take decades to heal, centuries to overcome the trauma.

They don't want to see me lose my home. They want me to come to my senses before it's too late. I need a better way to cope with my feelings of loss and guilt. I need bereavement therapy. Here are some names. I should think about medication. Here's what worked for them. There are books. There are websites. There are support groups. Healing won't come from withdrawing into a fantasy world, isolating myself, spending all my time with a dog. There is such a thing as pathological grief. There is the magical thinking of pathological grief, which is a kind of dementia. Which in their collective opinion is what I have.

They possessed a peaceful relic to set their child free, and the simulacrum they had fed would fade away.

The world is full of problems and I bet you the problems will continue to exist but what will make you relevant to the world is when you have answers to the questions the world asks. You can only be useful when you have the answers to the questions of the world. The best way you provide solutions and answers to those challenges is through wisdom.

The world is full of widows--several among my closer friends. We have each known that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged but found a way of living after and beyond. It is an entirely changed life, for anyone who has been in a long marriage--forty-one years, for me: alone in bed, alone most of the time, without that presence towards which you turned for advice, reassurance, with whom you shared the good news and the bad. Every decision now taken alone; no one to defuse anxieties. And a thoroughly commonplace experience--everywhere, always--so get on with it and don't behave as though you are uniquely afflicted. I didn't tell myself that at the time, and I doubt if it would have helped if I had, but it is what I have come--not so much to feel as to understand.

The world went on. People left and people died and people went to memorial services and put orange blocks of cheese into their purses. People confessed to you that they were hungry all the time. And then you got up in the morning and pretended that none of it had happened.

The worst lie is to say good-bye. Where are you going that I won't follow?

They are dead. We are dead. It is over.

They may be complete strangers, with different lives and different problems, but there in that examination room they are measuring sadness the same way. They are measuring it in loss.

They say “Follow your heart”…. …. But I can’t follow you where you’re going…

They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

they say we’re losing centimetres every year; as if we were a beach that’s losing ground with every salt advance the night is overcast but why not try, at least, to touch the things our orbits cannot hold, while there’s time while we can.

They throw rice at a new marriage, then give him beans in a divorcement.

They would chase the image rising from death, expect it, but then enter an empty room with a shrine of deadened memorabilia that made them lose their minds.

They will try to ascribe a purpose to my death, as though it were a punishment, but don’t you do so, in order that I continue to live in all the shadows of your longing. I will always be in your sleep and your wakefulness. I will be with you praying, propitiating and yearning for you, in sadness, in sorrow, in dismay and in the most profound happiness.

Think about your story in a new way,' the wise person says. 'You've been thinking of it as a loss. Now think of it as a liberation. What happened to you--it actually freed you up. And it didn't just free you up any old way. It freed you from some dead weight of the past so you could find a new home that would bring life to some part of you, maybe the best part of you.

Things like "Everything happens for a reason" and "You'll become a stronger/kinder/more compassionate person because of this" brings out rage in grieving people. Nothing makes a person angrier than when they know they're being insulted but can't figure out how. It's not just erasing your current pain that makes words of comfort land so badly. There's a hidden subtext in those statements about becoming a better, kinder, and more compassionate because of your loss, that often-used phrase about knowing what's "truly important in life" now that you've learned how quickly life can change. The unspoken second half of the sentence in this case says you needed this somehow. It says that you weren't aware of what was important in life before this happened. It says that you weren't kind, compassionate, or aware enough in your life before this happened. That you needed this experience in order to develop or grow, that you needed this lesson in order to step into your "true path" in life. As though loss and hardship were the only ways to grow as a human being. As though pain were the only doorway to a better, deeper life, the only way to be truly compassionate and kind.