Loss Quotes

“...you can lose more than you thought possible and still grow back, stronger than anyone imagined.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, "the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter." We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, "what was once man's confident expectations for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, 'I am all right,' there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“I loved it and then I lost it.
This has not motivated me.
Loss isn't motivating.
It's debilitating.”
― Adrienne Kisner, Dear Rachel Maddow

“My return was sweet, my home refound, but my thoughts were filled only with grief at having lost her, and my eyes gazed at the Moon, for ever beyond my reach, as I sought her. And I saw her. She was there where I had left her, lying on a beach directly over our heads, and she said nothing. She was the colour of the Moon; she held the harp at her side and moved one hand now and then in slow arpeggios. I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first silver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.”
― Italo Calvino, The Distance of the Moon

“He grasped for hope in Emerson's vision of natural polarities, in which all things are balanced by their opposites—darkness by light, cold by heat, loss by gain.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend

“The heart is as transparent as the depths of the ocean.”
― Meredith T. Taylor

“So might it be that whatever I’ve lost in my life is what creates the space for whatever I’ve yet to gain in my life. Therefore, without loss I am without gain.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The heart is as transparent as the depths of the ocean; One can only see until the light is gone.”
― Meredith T. Taylor, Clashing Waters: The Obyascon Prince

“Simply said, ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation. Ritual is the pitch through which the personal and collective voices of our longing and creativity are extended to the unseen dimensions of life, beyond our conscious minds and into the realms of nature and spirit.
Ritual is a form of direct knowing, something indigenous to the psyche. It has evolved with us, taking knowing into the bone, into our very marrow. I call ritual an embodied process.”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“When someone dies, you have to get used to talking to someone else about the things you would have normally talked to that person about - have those conversations with someone else, ask those questions to someone else. [...] Who do you talk to when the only person who would have understood is gone?”
― Heloise Clough, The Art of Being a Little Bit Crazy

“They were already out of her lands, and in another day Yorkshire would be behind them altogether. By the end of the week she'd be in London, resuming her life as if this trip had never happened. Three or four months from now, Harry, acting as her land steward, might write to ask if she wanted him to present his report on her lands in person. And she, having just returned from another soiree, might turn the letter over in her hand and muse, Harry Pye. Why, I once lay in his arms. I looked up into his illuminated face as he joined his flesh with mine, and I was alive. She might toss the letter on her desk and think, But that was so long ago now and in a different place. Perhaps it was only a dream.
She might think that.
George closed her eyes. Somehow she knew that there would never come a day when Harry Pye was not her first memory when she woke and her last thought as she drifted into sleep. She would remember him all the days of her life.
Remember and regret.”
― Elizabeth Hoyt, The Leopard Prince

“Because of Jesus, we can walk the path of loss knowing He is always in front, lighting the way.”
― Lisa Kibler, Heart Renovation: A Construction Guide to Godly Character

“One day I watched a man sweep all the yellow leaves off the street in front of his house, and then he proceeded to do the same thing in front of his neighbor's houses on both sides. If I was the neighbor I'd be mad. Leave my leaves alone, I'd think. As soon as the man went back in there was a gust of wind and a couple leaves trickled into his clear pristine black tar, and I laughed out loud, as if I'm not always trying to stave off death and the death of my loved ones.”
― Shilo Niziolek, SLAB

“When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking
a way in, will masquerade
as the wind, its voice made audible
by the tongues of leaves, greedily
lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue
is a turning and returning, the dead
will not then nor ever again
desert you, their unrest
will be the coat cloaking you,
the farther you journey
from them the more
that distance will maw in you,
time and place gulching
when the dead return to demand
accounting, wanting
and wanting and wanting
everything you have to give and nothing
will quench or unhunger them
as they take all you make as offering.
Then tell you to begin again.”
― Shara McCallum

“Things happened so casually. There was no added friction to the running of time, no solemnity…. Life kept going as it always did…as if what had happened was nothing at all. But it wasn’t to me. Suddenly, I was not at home in any place anymore. They all became strangers—faceless, emotionless people I could not understand or relate to. And I slowly distanced myself from their world…and, since then, I haven’t really been there for most of it…. When they lowered their coffins into the ground, I found myself in a horror movie with no one to save me. I understood that I would not see them again. But oddly, they appear in my mind all the time. I see their smile; I can hear their laughter. It makes me smile back…I forget they are gone…and my step quickens to take me home to them. For a few seconds, I believe they are waiting for me as if no time has passed at all….”
― Sheila Matharu, Darkness

“He doesn't visit me in dreams, but the smell of garlic on my fingers reminds me of him and, by extension, he loss of him. Sulfurous, maybe a little shameful, the smell reminds me of love.”
― Abe Opincar, Fried Butter: A Food Memoir

“A hard red knot glues itself to my ribs like indigestion, the tangled-up knot of all the things I've loved that will be buried one day, all the things I know I am bound to forget.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“As her photo burned, I thought: even oblivion is a kindness.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree

“Ritual is able to hold the long-discarded shards of our stories and make them whole again. It has the strength and elasticity to contain what we cannot contain on our own, what we cannot face in solitude.”
― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

“Who knows what somber ancestor had passed on to me this talent, this precocious ear for loss? For a while, because of it, I misheard almost everything.”
― Mark Slouka, All That Is Left Is All That Matters: Stories

“I’m sure it wasn’t easy being in your big sister’s shadow for 104 years. You complained about it a lot but I know you’d have been miserable without me.
Well, I’m glad things have worked out the way they have, because you never had to be alone, Bessie
Funny thing is, though, by leaving me here by myself, you're letting me get the last word. Ooooooh, I'm not sure you would have liked that!

- Sarah L. Delany”
― Sarah L. Delany, On My Own at 107: Reflections on Life Without Bessie

“Their desperation must have been great, indeed. Desperation or greed. Is there a difference? Some days, I cannot tell.”
― Katie Cross, Chronicles of the Dragonmasters

“They were already out of her lands, and in another day Yorkshire would be behind them altogether. By the end of the week she'd be in London, resuming her life as if this trip had never happened. Three or four months from now, Harry, acting as her land steward, might write to ask if she wanted him to present his report on her lands in person. And she, having just returned from another soiree, might turn the letter over in her hand and muse, Harry Pye. Why, I once lay in his arms. I looked up into his illuminated face as he joined his flesh with mine, and I was alive. She might toss the letter on her desk and think, But that was so long ago now and in a different place. Perhaps it was only a dream.

She might think that.

George closed her eyes. Somehow she knew that there would never come a day when Harry Pye was not her first memory when she woke and her last thought as she drifted into sleep. She would remember him all the days of her life.

Remember and regret.”
― Elizabeth Hoyt, The Leopard Prince

“And the sound of her laughter made him feel somehow better, as if this ridiculous escapade had helped to jar loose the memories of the last few days. Tragedy was overcome by living life. Best way to deal with loss was to gain as much as possible every place else.”
― R.J. Ellory, Bad Signs

“Our baby was laid on the cool metal, on his side, six inches long, eyes closed, mouth open slightly, thin arms and legs, little red fingers and toes. You looked without blinking. I wanted to put my hands over your eyes, to block what you were seeing, to stop the gasps that you expelled.”
― Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

“There is no panacea for this kind of loss. Just know that every day it gets the tiniest bit better-- suddenly one day you can put it in a different perspective.”
― David Niven

“Not really, No. I don’t think of the poem as being negative. To me, it evokes a feeling that can never truly be expressed in words, the feeling of losing someone…. Aside from whether we think of death as a passage to something else or as the end of everything, aside from whether the thought of it fills us with fear and anguish or leaves us indifferent, there is an unfillable longing, a desperate ache for the person who was loved and is lost.”
― Sheila Matharu

“Although they remain silent companions throughout my life, I feel their absence the most when I’m happiest. I know it seems strange, even counterintuitive. It’s hard to explain…. I guess that I wish they could be part of those moments—or perhaps the happy moments, instances of life going on without them, come with the fear of losing their constant presence in my thoughts and the knowledge that, in a way, they are being left behind…. In a way, grief reassures me that I still love them as much as when they were here, and that through me some part of them still exists in this world….”
― Sheila Matharu

“One can only see until the light is gone.”
― Meredith T. Taylor, Clashing Waters: The Obyascon Prince

“I didn't want to picture what I suspected was not possible. Better to imagine the worst. At least then you could be prepared. The phone rang and rang and the four aloe leaves twirled. Time was, I agreed, a space full of agreeable and disagreeable spaces.”
― Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree