Loss Quotes - Page 13

Instead of asking why they left,now I ask,what beauty will I createin the space the no longeroccupy?

The way you argued with me, you would have thought that we were debating the existence of God or whether or not we should move in together. These kinds of fights can never be won – even if you’re the victor, you’ve hurt the other person, and there has to be some loss associated with that.

Ownership breeds slavery: with every single thing that you acquire, comes a new worry of not losing that thing.

I said out loud, "Damn you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing but to love you and hate you, and that's gonna kill me, and you know it is."Then I turned round, went back to the cellar room, and picked up the sewing.Don't think she wasn't in every stitch I worked. She was in the wind and the rain and the creaking from the rocker. She sat on the wall with the birds and stared at me. When darkness fell, she fell with it.

You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you’re the house where people come and go as they please, because you’re simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn’t let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You’re still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn’t have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert.

the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools...It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

I believe that is what happened during this time in my life. God had other things for me, and he knew me so much better than I knew myself, so he moved me along to a new place. It certainly didn't lessen the pain at the time, but if I've learned anything along the way, it's that sometimes the best lessons are the ones that hurt the most.

It’s always hard to lose somebody. It leaves a hole in you heart that never grows back.

It was a lesson she was still learning. When she had first started nursing, she had taken every death personally, like she was losing her father all over again. Every patient lost under her care was a little piece of death she would carry around with her until the end of her own life. But the alternative seemed so unfeeling. Tina and the other nurses could crack jokes and banter back and forth about contestants on American Idol before the body of a deceased patient was even cold. It was a coping mechanism, she knew, but not necessarily one she thought she would ever adopt. There had to be something in between. Olive had been called a bleeding heart before, but her heart no longer had the same plasticity and tenderness—it was scarred and worn beyond repair

He let himself into the house and sat down with his back against the door, where the tiles were cool on his legs and he tried to hear, as he had earlier imagined, every single thing that his wife was not doing in their home on this Sunday night. He could hardly keep track of it all, she was so busy being absent. She was not pouring water into a glass or a pitcher. She was not kicking his shoes out of the hall. She was not switching the laundry into the dryer. She was not opening the screen door and going outside barefoot and calling for him to come look at the sunset. She was not putting lotion on her elbows or flattening the newspaper or picking up the ringing telephone, which would go on calling out the absence of Petra in nine-ring sequences dozens of times every day.

The less I have, the less I can lose.

Every story is true and a lie. The true part of this one is: Love and the memory of love can't be drowned. The lie part is that this is a good thing.

We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believed Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.

My mom was there to answer the unanswerable, to make sense of the fault in our life - and we got through that somehow; we came out on the other side. Now I'm 0 for 2 and I don't get any more pitches to swing at.

I don’t think you ever really understood….…. All the love I had in the world went to you.

I hope that I get to see you love what you are. To know yourself as gift and worth and truth. That you see what a huge thing it is to have the courage to break your own heart. That you have chosen wholeness — even when it has shattered you. And that you will one day see that you can be whole and broken in the exact same spaces, that they nestle side by side — and that this is the way of things. Not your punishment for wrongdoing, or for not trying hard enough — but just the way of things. That you can stand and look at yourself in a mirror and see your goodness right there, see the worth of what you bring on the surface of your skin, just like I do. That you trust there is brilliance to come. That you own what is yours to own, both the bad and the good. That you do not insist on owning it all. It was never all yours to hold

If I could sleep with my arms around you, the ink could stay in the bottle.

Since I’ve been home I’ve been trying hard to mend my relationship with my mother. Asking her to do things for me instead of brushing aside any offer of help, as I did for years out of anger. Letting her handle all the money I won. Returning her hugs instead of tolerating them. My time in the arena made me realize how I needed to stop punishing her for something she couldn’t help, specifically the crushing depression she fell into after my father’s death. Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.

I'm so in love with you I can't stand up.

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

A hole is a space where everything has been moved out so that opportunity has space to move in.

Though his death would not fill me with any sense of sadness, I would probably feel the loss. Even enemies are part of one.

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as one fixed thing, a plaster death mask, which as soon as it was touched crumbled in his figures back into dust.

I work so hard for profits because my dreams are expensive.

Everyone else’s Minute of remembering is over, but ours stretches on and on. It doesn’tend.

The only place I ever felt at home was with you. There isn’t a place for me anywhere anymore… I’ve been evicted.

Unfortunately, there is no expiration date on grief

Loss taught me. Loss taught me that death comes to both the old and the young.

I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her—to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her—but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too—drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep—I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn’t actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness.

Yes, it's worth it. The pain of sorrow is terrible and hard to bear, but the joy of love makes it worthwhile. p123

But oh my dear, I am tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is. Only I do get tired.

Being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in. It’s not so much, what’s the point? It’s more like, what’s the difference?

When all you have is the memory of a thing, all you can think about is how the thing is gone.

I saw her disappear from my life like a star that fades into obscurity behind a veil of clouds.

Heartbreak , death and loss were shared between us, but renewal, commitment and strength as well.

The aching in my chest isn't because I miss you,it's realizing that you have become someone I no longer know,your fears, your 4 am thoughts, your achievements,are things I no longer have an equivalent to.Who we were and who we are are four different people, and the me from now doesn't relate to the me from then, let alone to the you from now.-Tanzy Sayadi and Jarod Kintz

When someone you love dies, part of you dies with them. It's why your never the same after losing someone.

Eli was right. The measure of success isn't what you gain. It's what you pay to get it.

If love was a lucky penny, shiny and unspoiled, secreted in a most unlikely place, then it's tarnished flipside was loss.

Loss taught me the priceless value of friends. I would have lost it but for my friends.

Chuang-tzu once told a story about two persons who both lost a sheep. One person got very depressed and lost himself in drinking, sex, and gambling to try to forget this misfortune. The other person decided that this would be an excellent chance for him to study the classics and quietly observe the subtleties of nature. Both men experience the same misfortune, but one man lost himself because he was too attached to the experience of loss, while the other found himself because he was able to let go of gain and loss.

There were many tears, many unsure times, many troubled moments. The fun memories were only a few, but even so, those memories will shine bright like stardust, and continue to shine on in my heart.

Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone. Or set me on an airplane traveling west, crossing the date line again and again, losing this day, then that, until the day of loss still lies ahead, and you are here instead of sorrow.

Death is fugitive; even when you're watching for it, the actual instant somehow slips between your fingers. You don't get that sudden drop of the head you see in movies. Instead you simply sit there, waiting for something to happen, and all at once you realize you've missed it.

What I understand now about survival is that something in you dies. You don't become a survivor intact. Survival's cost is always loss.

It's one thing to love someone so completely that their loss causes you unfathomable grief, agony that rips at your very being. It's another thing to love someone so completely that you can no longer go on with your own life.

Sleep comes, no matter how deep the sadness cuts. It’s like a gift from the universe.

That loss is common would not makeMy own less bitter, rather more:Too common! Never morning woreTo evening, but some heart did break.

It made him sad, realising that their smell was going to be gone for good one day. Even if they kept all their clothes, the scent would vanish eventually and become only a memory, just like everything else about them. Sometimes he thought he couldn’t even remember their voices anymore. There were photos of course, but it wasn’t the same. Although he had not hugged either of his parents in years, the thought of not being able to do so was too painful to bear, especially when he felt like he needed it. Eventually he would forget what it had felt like to be near his mum or what kind of a presence his father had. They were just going to be names, mere mentions in conversation that were glazed over and didn’t mean much to anybody.

This is probably going to be one wound that can never be healed.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

Keeping busy is the hardest part. When I find myself still, clear of thoughts, I can still feel you holding me.

Everything we come across becomes a part of us. It doesn't matter how small or insignificant it is…or how devastating. One story here, one story there, that’s what I see when I look back at my life. An accumulation of everything I went through.

Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but loose you.

I believe that our world was created with a sense of order. For every loss, there's a gain. Sometimes we're so blinded by the loss that we don't see the gain, don't recognize the gift.

You have no idea how well you are doing,” John complimented mejust a few minutes after he mentioned the Christmas card. What did that mean: That I was doing well? That I’d come to a family gathering? That I’d remembered to bring food? That I was dressed, and my hair combed? That I was wearing shoes? I wasn’t sure, but maybe just making an appearance at a family event meant I was handling things well.

I fear I have praised you too much too soon. Will I lose you in your shame of believing that you can never be what I think you are?

We weren’t that different after all, our souls laden with the same ache of loss, our hearts bursting with the same longing to save what remained of all we loved.

Her question was clear-“Father, where does the Loss reside?”In the sighs?Cheeks with tears wiped?A lost appetite?Owning a room confined?Or in the smiles all falsified?Thus, the Father decide,It is no matter to hide, he replied-“I think its deep inside,Probably,In the layers of your soul,Where the body provides it,Ample food to be-Magnified, multiplied, intensified.But once you clarify,That its not to be occupied inside,It starves of supplies,And dies.So child, when there is loss,Make sure you refuse to invite it inward, And absolutely never make it your lifelong parasite.