quotations about loss
The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.
JAMES PATTERSON
Angel
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
That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.
ALFRED TENNYSON
"In Memoriam A.H.H."
Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Kafka on the Shore
Think not that I have come in quest of common flowers; but rather to bemoan the loss of one whose scent has vanished from the air.
MURASAKI SHIKIBU
The Tale of Genji
A wise man loses nothing, if he but save himself.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Essays
Even loss can be a profit.
PERSIAN PROVERB
In loss itself
I find assuagement:
having lost the treasure,
I've nothing to fear.
JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ
"Disillusionment", A Sor Juana Anthology
Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life.
CAITLIN KITTREDGE
Bone Gods
We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.
CASSANDRA CLARE
City of Heavenly Fire
We gain and lose by the same means.
ROMAN PROVERB
Regret is ... an unavoidable result of any loss, for in loss we lose the tomorrow that we needed to make right our yesterday or today.
GERALD LAWSON SITTSER
A Grace Disguised
It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Fight Club
What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.
SUZANNE COLLINS
Mockingjay
Oh, everything is gorgeous once it's gone.
GREGORY MAGUIRE
Wicked
Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.
MARK SLOUKA
God's Fool
One man's loss is another man's gain.
ENGLISH PROVERB
Only loss teaches us about the value of things.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit
I guess by now I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone -- you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence.
ALYSON NOEL
Evermore
Eventually, everything goes away.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Eat, Pray, Love