Loss Quotes

“How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?”
― Jodi Picoult, Mercy

“I think perhaps I will always hold a candle for you – even until it burns my hand.
And when the light has long since gone …. I will be there in the darkness holding what remains, quite simply because I cannot let go.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Losing people you love affects you. It is buried inside of you and becomes this big, deep hole of ache. It doesn't magically go away, even when you stop officially mourning.”
― Carrie Jones, Captivate

“One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.”
― K.L. Toth

“Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse.”
― Kelley Armstrong, The Calling

“The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.”
― Kristina McMorris, Bridge of Scarlet Leaves

“I had someone once who made every day mean something.
And now…. I am lost….
And nothing means anything anymore.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.”
― Mark Slouka, God's Fool

“Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.”
― Orson Scott Card, Shadow of the Giant

“We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

“I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Verse XXVII”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam

“There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...]”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”
― Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship

“I miss that feeling of connection.
Knowing he was out there somewhere thinking about me at the same time I was thinking about him.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We're not words, Henry, we're people.
Words are how others define us, but we can define ourselves any way we choose.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Musgrave Ritual - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?”
― Jodi Picoult, Plain Truth

“He was both everything I could ever want…
And nothing I could ever have…”
― Ranata Suzuki

“What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Less is less. Heartbreak is heartbreak. You think I'm sitting here gloating. Telling myself that my suffering beats yours? Hurt is hurt. You don't measure these things.”
― Stephanie Kallos, Broken for You

“It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!”
― Roman Payne, Hope and Despair

“It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere

“I knew that somewhere God was laughing. He had taken the other half of my heart, the one person who knew me better than I knew myself, and He had done what nothing else could do. By bringing us together, He had set into motion the one thing that could tear us apart.”
― Jodi Picoult, Harvesting the Heart

“It’s difficult for me to imagine the rest of my life without you. But I suppose I don’t have to imagine it... I just have to live it”
― Ranata Suzuki

“The last time I felt alive – I was looking into your eyes.
Breathing your air…. touching your skin…
… Saying goodbye….
The last time I felt alive…. I was dying.”
― Ranata Suzuki