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Link Quote Stars Tags Author
56647e7 He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living. death inspirational loss love Alice Sebold
bc38acf I ultimately decided to hold my tongue and settle instead for the comfort of ignorance. Not knowing the truth, I retained hope, and that hope I held like a smooth warm stone against my heart. grief hope loss Catherine Gilbert Murdock
baa44f7 I was wrong when I said that I did not regret the past. I do regret it; I weep for that past love which can never return. Who is to blame, I do not know. Love remains, but not the old love; its place remains, but it all wasted away and has lost all strength and substance; recollections are still left, and gratitude; but... loss love regret Leo Tolstoy
bd5c73e Suddenly she hated them all because they were different from her, because they carried their losses with an air that she could never attain, would never wish to attain. She hated them, these smiling, light-footed strangers, these proud fools who took pride in something they had lost, seeming to be proud that they had lost it. gone-with-the-wind hardship loss scarlett-o-hara Margaret Mitchell
3353816 It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for. loss love rape relationships survivor trauma Jodi Picoult
ad6ddfa He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips. loss sorrow Jodi Picoult
98c4d11 What his uncle does not understand is that in walking backwards, his back to the world, his back to God, he is not grieving. He is objecting. Because when everything cherished by you in life has been taken away, what else is there to do but object? loss walking Yann Martel
d116095 photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself... canon capture film fujifilm grief joy knowledge kodachrome kodak loss love meaning nikon nostalgia past photo photography romance super-8 Rebecca McNutt
3610317 I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again. careers employment failure getting-fired human-nature job-losses learning-from-mistakes life life-lessons losing-hope losing-self loss mistake mistakes self-worth Gillian Flynn
7ad5cbf He smiled his shy smile at her as he went into the yard. Anne took the memory of it with her when she went to her room that night and sat for a long while at her open window, thinking of the past and dreaming of the future. Outside the Snow Queen was mistily white in the moonshine; the frogs were singing in the marsh beyond Orchard Slope. Anne always remembered the silvery, peaceful beauty and fragrant calm of that night. It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it. dreamy loss memories touching tranquility L.M. Montgomery
de1c914 "You're innocent until proven guilty," Mandy exclaimed, unable to hide her gleeful smile. She missed the way people used to have normal conversations, used to be more caring for each other than themselves, back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, she realized, neighbors kept to themselves, their kids kept to themselves, nobody talked to each other anymore. They went to work, went shopping and shut themselves up at home in front of glowing computer screens and cellphones... but maybe the nostalgic, better times in her life would stay buried, maybe the world would never be what it was. In the 21st century music was bad, movies were bad, society was failing and there were very few intelligent people left who missed the way things used to be... maybe though, Mandy could change things. Thinking back to the old home movies in her basement, she recalled what Alecto had told her. "We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed." The 1960's and 1970's were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad comedy and when people would just walk to a friend's house for the afternoon instead of texting in bed all day. She missed soda fountains and department stores and non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags, she wished cellphones, bad pop music and LED lights didn't exist... she hated how everything had a diagnosis or pill now, how people who didn't fit in with modern, lazy society were just prescribed medications without a second thought... she hated how old, reliable cars were replaced with cheap hybrid vehicles... she hated how everything could be done online, so that people could just ignore each other... the world was becoming much more convenient, but at the same time, less human, and her teenage life was considered nostalgic history now. Hanging her head low, avoiding the slightly confused stare of the cab driver through the rear view mirror, she started crying uncontrollably, her tears soaking the collar of her coat as the sun blared through the windows in a warm light." canada cape-breton cars convenient crazy crying death digital dying earth environment gone grief insane leaving-home lonely loss medications mental-illness misery moving nostalgia nova-scotia old-school reporter retro sad stop stuck taxi trapped Rebecca McNutt
e9006de "Noli me tangere, noli me legere, isolation latin loneliness loss pain self-reliance solitude Mark Z. Danielewski
8cee67d We keep moving. And as we do, the things around us, well, they disappear. flow loss love Haruki Murakami
124b1c3 I'll remember you... I remember everyone I've lost. grief loss love memory noir nostalgia photo-album photograph remember sad think Rebecca McNutt
b8453f8 She wasn't crying at all. This was what scared him the most. Where had she locked up the things he'd seen her feeling that day when she heard? She wasn't that big a girl to hold all of it--to hold her brother's life and his death inside of her. To hold all his long-limbed raging tidal motion and all the loss of that. loss morning mourn withdrawal Francesca Lia Block
19c36ae 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. gift loss Debbie Macomber
4ab75d7 It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It's the mathematical logic of being alive. If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness--cry and then walk--but what really breaks us cleanest are the losses that happen out of order. life logic loss math numbers Aimee Bender
71497f7 There is a widespread sense of loss here, if not always of God, then at least of meaning. loss meaning Charles Taylor
0b40c9f A small profit it better than a big loss choices life loss profit Ron Rash
6f4b514 Que l'on soit absent dans la piece voisine, ou sur l'autre versant de la planete, la difference n'est pas essentielle. La presence de l'ami qui en apparence s'est eloigne, peut se faire plus dense qu'une presence reelle. heart loss Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
c4ceedd I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he'd spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life? delusion delusional delusional-love frustration grief hope hopeless hunger loner loss misery obsession past reality relationship save sickness stalking unreal unrequited-love waste Donna Tartt
f05c12a People talk of sorrow as if it is soft, a thing of water and tears. But true sorrow is not soft. True sorrow is a thing of fire, and rock. It burns your heart, crushes your soul under the weight of mountains. It destroys, and even if you keep breathing, keep going, you die. The person you were moments ago dies... Gone. Everything solid, everything real, is gone. It doesn't come back. The world is forever fractured, so that you walk on the crust of an earth where you can always feel the heat under you, the press of lava, that is so hot it can burn flesh, melt bone, and the very air is poisonous. To survive, you swallow the heat. To keep from falling through and dying for real, you swallow all that hate. You push it down inside you, into that fresh grave that is all that is left of what you thought the world would be. loss truth Laurell K. Hamilton
e65f7ed You have entered an abnormal, lonely, and unwelcome new world where you are nothing but an island of sadness. grief isolation loneliness loss sadness Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
c0d5972 For darkness terrifies. It swallows you, warps you, nullifies you. Who alive can possibly profess confidence in darkness? In the dark, you can't see. change darkness grief loss Haruki Murakami
2ee1f42 The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone. loss lost-loved-one spirit Mitch Albom
04151cb 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. daughter death father loss memories Frank Beddor
2b0998f Friends disappear or they are powerless. This is what misfortune means an acid test of friendship. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. friendship friendship-quotes friendship-true-and-loyal humanity-and-society life loss misfortune trivial Anne Carson
3404e3c "Even as I hold you I think of you as someone gone far, far away. Your eyes the color of pennies in a bowl of dark honey bringing sweet light to someone else your black hair slipping through my fingers is the flash of your head going around a corner your smile, breaking before me, the flippant last turn of a revolving door, emptying you out, changed, away from me. loss love poetry poetry-quotations Alice Walker
062039d I'm still pretty sick about what I've lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I'm not the best sleeper. loss Nick Hornby
d71839f ...this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash. loss Hilary Mantel
4225628 I stare at the pile of discarded remnants and think of my mother. Did she touch that pillar there? Does her scent still linger in a fragment of glass or a splinter of wood? A terrible emptiness settles into my chest. No matter how much I go about living, there are always small reminders that make the loss fresh again. loss Libba Bray
b54f8fd If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard. bad bad-habit befall befell complain depression dragon fear future happen hoard loss mourn much occur occurence past predict sadness sorrow tendency wallow woe woes Robin Hobb
49d73f9 "If she lives, she shall be my wedded wife. If she dies--mother, I can't speak of what I shall feel if she dies." His voice was choked in his throat." jem loss love marriage Elizabeth Gaskell
965974b You must bear losses like a soldier, the voice told me, bravely and without complaint, and just when the day seems lost, grab your shield for another stand, another thrust forward. That is the juncture that separates heroes from the merely strong. inspirational julius-caesar loss resilience war Margaret George
7e07da1 The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks ago. Each day, some further evidence of a task half finished, a scheme incomplete. He found a novel, with her place marked. And this is it. loss Hilary Mantel
abfb3b8 I dont know what happens to country. borders frontier loss Cormac McCarthy
d2dc9a8 Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her. desolation grief loss mourning John Fowles
2dd1419 I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life. hope loss time Edward Gibbon
8fcc33a It's like I'd been walking a tightrope with a big safety net underneath me, but I never really thought about the net until someone took it away. And then every single step scared me to death. concern death emotions family feelings life loss love relationship security separation Margaret Peterson Haddix
3577875 Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever. loss love pain Jack Kerouac
be67ef2 This is my home, Cape Breton is my home, and I don't know if I really want to leave it as much as I might think and I'm sort of scared to leave it all behind, everything I've lived with, I have so many memories of all the things I've done here and I'm afraid if I leave, I might lose all my memories... cape-breton home leaving loss memory moving nostalgia nova-scotia remember scared scary travel Rebecca McNutt
19e2f66 And that's that as you get older, you lose things, things you don't necessarily want to lose. loss meg-cabot princess-diaries Meg Cabot
3baf9b0 Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run? loss love memories nostalgia past trip Jeanette Winterson
d0a3ffe "People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this was the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Marika was beckoning from the other side." loss Heather O'Neill
f0a2cd6 Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way. great honor loss novels Cormac McCarthy
21a2c3e in these shitty plastic days ... a-new-era a-new-world change changes destruction electronic-revolution fake human-nature life-sucks loss new-age plastic stuck-in-a-rut technology the-good-days-are-gone the-past the-world Gillian Flynn
6459073 "A few cold words on yonder stone, A corpse as cold as they can be - Vain words, and mouldering dust, alone - Can this be all that's left of thee? O, no! thy spirit lingers still Where'er thy sunny smile was seen: There's less of darkness, less of chill On earth, than if thou hadst not been. Thou breathest in my bosom yet, And dwellest in my beating heart; loss poetry Anne Brontë
837ba01 His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss. loss love regret Vladimir Nabokov
f54b38a For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. beowulf loss poignant regret sorrow writing J.R.R. Tolkien
3890b81 "Walk openly, Marian used to say. Love even the threat and the pain, feel yourself fully alive, cast a bold shadow, accept, accept. What we call evil is only a groping towards good, part of the trial and error by which we move toward the perfected consciousness... God is kind? Life is good? Nature never did betray the heart that loved her? Why the reward she received for living intensely and generously and trying to die with dignity? Why the horror at the bridge her last clear sight of earth?...I do not accept, I am not reconciled. But one thing she did. She taught me the stupidity of the attempt to withdraw and be free of trouble and harm... She said, "You wondered what was in whale's milk. Now you know. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born, just to be!" I had had no answer for her then. Now I might have one. Yes, think of it, I might say. And think how random and indiscriminate it is, think how helplessly we must submit, think how impossible it is to control or direct it. Think how often beauty and delicacy and grace are choked out by weeds. Think how endless and dubious is the progress from weed to flower. Even alive, she never convinced me with her advocacy of biological perfectionism. She never persuaded me to ignore, or look upon as merely hard pleasures, the evil that I felt in every blight and smut and pest in my garden- that I felt, for that matter, squatting like a toad on my own heart. Think of the force of life, yes, but think of the component of darkness in it. One of the things that's in whale's milk is the promise of pain and death. And so? Admitting what is so obvious, what then? Would I wipe Marion Catlin out of my unperfected consciousness if I could? Would I forgo the pleasure of her company to escape the bleakness of her loss? Would I go back to my own formula, which was twilight sleep, to evade the pain she brought with her? Not for a moment. And so even in the gnashing of my teeth, I acknowledge my conversion. It turns out to be for me as I once told her it would be for her daughter. I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow." loss pain sorrow Wallace Stegner
1c94307 Grief seems to create losses within us that reach beyond our awareness--we feel as if we're missing something that was invisible and unknown to us while we had it, but is now painfully gone...Longing is not conscious wanting; it's an involuntary yearning for wholeness, for understanding, for meaning, for the opportunity to regain or even simply touch what we've lost. loss wholeness yearning Brené Brown
0143fa9 "Eternity is a long time and it doesn't always work out that way," Jareth says, a bit bitterly. "It's worse to love someone and then lose them, then to never love at all." loss love Mari Mancusi
a8224f5 Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank. loss Jodi Picoult
416933f The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that always leans to the left. Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food in the night it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it. grief loss love-hurts Nicole Krauss
b4c0c2b There are all sorts of losses people suffer- from the small to the large. You can lose your car keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion. jodi-picoult loss the-storyteller Jodi Picoult
80e1fdf 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. claire-fraser loss memory nostalgia Diana Gabaldon
7fe02cb These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be frank, the only reason anyone knows anything about him at all. husband loss love wife Nicole Krauss
c545b15 A funeral is no place for secrets. funeral grieving loss secrets Mitch Albom
bb86857 And I wished I could believe him. I wished with all that I had. And when you're eleven, you're on the cusp between still believing wishing worked if you wanted something hard enough and understanding the world is teeth and sharp edges. I wished. I did. I promise you with all that I have that I did. But I knew the teeth. The sharp edges. And they were bigger than wishing. I was only eleven, but I was the product of my upbringing too. Maybe that's why I was able to be the one to leave. Maybe I'd been looking for a reason and latched on to the first one that came, no matter how hard it was. If there's one thing I've learned in my life, it's that it's easier to leave someone before they leave you. Because eventually, everyone leaves. It's inevitable. harsh-life leaving loss pain sad-quote wishing T.J. Klune
4feb2b4 Of course, Mary Magdalene would have very little tolerance for the Christian platitudes and vapid optimism that seem to swirl around these kinds of tragic events. Those platitudes are tempting, but they're nothing but luxuries for people who've never had demons (or at least have never admitted to them). But equally, she would reject nihilism, or the idea that there is no real meaning in life or death - ideas present in so much of postmodernity. Those ideas, too, are luxuries, but they are for those who have never been freed from demons. christianity demons faith grieving jesus loss mary-magdalene platitudes Nadia Bolz-Weber
ba8366b You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall. loss suffering Mary Lawson
2c753fe Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn't held it tighter when you had it every day. loss perspective Betty Smith
a20d496 "How ridiculous that water ran out of your eyes when your heart hurt. Tragic heroines in books tended to be amazingly beautiful. Not a word about swollen eyes or a red nose. "Crying always gives me a red nose," thought Elinor. "I expect that's why I'll never be in any book." greif loss pain sadness Cornelia Funke
f8b8502 You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent. loss memory Harold Pinter
2ddf6e0 "According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it is the ego's survivability that is finally at issue. Why the ego? After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a "you" or a set of "yous" without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the boundaries of who I am. If I have a boundary at all, or if a boundary can be said to belong to me, it is only because I have become separated from others, and it is only on condition of this separation that I can relate to them at all. So the boundary is a function of the relation, a brokering of difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness. If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who "I" am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others. I may lose this "you" and any number of particular others, and I may well survive those losses. But that can happen only if I do not lose the possibility of any "you" at all. If I survive, it is only because my life is nothing without the life that exceeds me, that refers to some indexical you, without whom I cannot be." boundaries butler dissociation grief klein life loss morality otherness self-preservation seperation survival Judith Butler
382a54d I had heard the wind from the mountains calling me last night, telling me it was my time to go, and I woke up, knowing what to do. hearbreak heartache incest loss V.C. Andrews
25de940 I always wondered what it must be like to lose a twin--if somehow Mary felt it like it was happening to her. If she felt physical pain. death-and-dying death-of-a-loved-one empathetic empathy loss pain suffer suffering twin twins Francesca Lia Block
40a6c24 "This cry for mercy is possible only when we are willing to confess that somehow, somewhere, we ourselves have something to do with our losses. Crying for mercy is a recognition that blaming God, the world, or others for our losses does not do full justice to the truth of who we are. At the moment we are willing to take responsibility, even for the pain we didn't cause directly, blaming is connected into an acknowledgement of our own role in human brokenness. The prayer for God's mercy comes from a heart that knows that this human brokenness is not a fatal condition of which we have become the sad victims, but the bitter fruit of the human choice to say "No" to love." loss mercy Henri J.M. Nouwen
930a8af I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear. fear loss Sebastian Faulks
a8a3c7e Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn't remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts. death guilt loss silence Michelle Sagara West
1c9d77f "Why'd you want to kill yourself? Didn't you feel anything, or didn't it hurt you?" Mandy questioned, looking puzzled. "Yes, I suppose it did, ... it was strange, it was sharp, that's all I can think of to describe it... and cold, but not cold like ice, more like... I don't know, like something much worse, something horrible... and it seemed like the ground was falling upwards, becoming the sky... for a moment it made me consider that it was just a dream, that I was on some sort of drug, and then I remember being overjoyed to see the sky was still above me, then just really sad, really tired... and then I don't remember much else about it," Alecto told her, glaring straight ahead at the sky with narrowed eyes. "I don't mind, I'm not supposed to mind, anyway. Mearth already told me that eventually I would want to be dead, that it was inevitable... still, I sometimes wish that I could have done something good for other people in my life, it might have made up for all the bad stuff I've done." canada confusion creepy dark death drugs dying dysfunctional friend friends friendship grief halloween help loss morbid nostalgia sadness self-harm self-mutilation spooky suicide swing-set Rebecca McNutt
bcfce31 "Will you not weep?" "I do not have the time for tears." grief loss mourning sorrow strength tears weep George R.R. Martin
99c5c19 "I've seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly... they can't kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I've seen humans die from smoking them... if I were you I would stop smoking them." "Why should I? You smoke 'em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes," Mandy pointed out. "Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties... for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes... but I'm not a person, I'm Pollution, things like that aren't dangerous to me but they are to you," Alecto told her. "It's not a good idea." attack blast-from-the-past cancer chain-smoke cigar cigarette creepy deadly depress depression disturbing education eerie gray grief haunting health horror knowledge loss no-smoking past pollution retro scary self-help sick smog smoke spooky times tobacco trapped vhs-tape video Rebecca McNutt
a50f21c "Her gaze wavered towards one of the books on the sales counter beside the register, a hardcover copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet with many of the pages dog-eared and stained with coffee and tea. The store owner caught her looking at it and slid it across the counter towards her. "You ever read Hamlet?" he questioned. "I tried to when I was in high school," said Mandy, picking up the book and flipping it over to read the back. "I mean, it's expected that everyone should like Shakespeare's books and plays, but I just...." her words faltered when she noticed him laughing to himself. "What's so funny, Sir?" she added, slightly offended. "...Oh, I'm not laughing at you, just with you," said the store owner. "Most people who say they love Shakespeare only pretend to love his work. You're honest Ma'am, that's all. You see, the reason you and so many others are put-off by reading Shakespeare is because reading his words on paper, and seeing his words in action, in a play as they were meant to be seen, are two separate things... and if you can find a way to relate his plays to yourself, you'll enjoy them so much more because you'll feel connected to them. Take Hamlet for example - Hamlet himself is grieving over a loss in his life, and everyone is telling him to move on but no matter how hard he tries to, in the end all he can do is to get even with the ones who betrayed him." "...Wow, when you put it that way... sure, I think I'll buy a copy just to try reading, why not?" Mandy replied with a smile." bookstore classic coffee diffcult dog-eared geek grief hamlet loss nerd reading revenge shakespeare tea Rebecca McNutt
b31badc Who has believed in the world and died with its name on his lips? hope innocence loss wise Jack Kerouac
91d09bd Those intricate curves and patterns your people create are beyond human eyes and hands to make. Perhaps we wished to avoid a poor imitation that would only have been an ever-present reminder to us of what we had lost. There is a different beauty in simplicity, in a single line placed just so, a single flower among the rocks. The harshness of the stone makes the flower more precious. We try not to dwell too much on what is gone. The strongest heart will break under that strain. loss ogier stone-mason Robert Jordan
d029336 He was out to get back everything he'd lost; there was no end to his loss; this thing would drag on forever. forever life loss Jack Kerouac
8ee4a29 And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before I have a chance to know her better. good-byes loss memory Amy Tan
0f85ff5 She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop. grief hope loss stapler staples Jonathan Safran Foer
168de9f I never advise friends to put money in anything,. said Danny. 'It's a no-win situation - if they make a profit they forget that it was you who recommended it, and if they make a loss they never stop reminding you. My only advise would be not to gamble what you can't afford, and never to risk an amount that might cause you to lose a night's sleep afford friends gamble investment loss money recommend risk sleep win Jeffrey Archer
26c8701 Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss. loss mistakes Rebecca Solnit
8eecc01 Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose loss Chuck Palahniuk
47d227b I turn my back on him as he goes, and settle myself in the parlor, and touch Ma's piano. My fingers leave sighs in the dust. loss music-expression piano Karen Hesse
6ab8ad6 "The sentiment that one "should have done something more" reflects, it seems to me, an underlying wish to control the uncontrollable. After all, if one is guilty about not having done something that one should have done, then it follows that there is something that could have been done - a comforting thought that decoys us from our pathetic helplessness in the face of death." grief loss psychology Irvin D. Yalom
9782f27 Once I was in the cold dim room, without furniture or carpet or rugs, only a dollhouse that wasn't as wonderful as the original, I opened the tall and narrow closet door and began my ascent up the steep and narrow stairs. On my way to the attic. On my way to where I'd find my Christopher, again... heartache heartbreak incest loss V.C. Andrews
d76d8ac How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell. grief loss love sad sadness Jodi Picoult
dd39c15 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. loss memory time Richard Flanagan
49d5f06 Maybe you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value. jodi-picoult loss love value worth Jodi Picoult
c1eb745 There's no choice that doesn't mean a loss. loss Jeanette Winterson
53ec32e The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester's motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue. clown humour life loss John Berger
226d104 You see, there's some blues for folks ain't never had a thing, and that's a sad blues ... but the saddest kind of blues is for them that's had everything they ever wanted and has lost it, and knows it won't come back no more. Ain't no sufferin' in this world worse than that; and that's the blue we call 'I Had It But It's All Gone Now. depths-of-despair despair loss music music-lyrics r-and-b sadness Ken Grimwood
de5625f "Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell puts it, "with one skin-layer missing." grief intensity loss sensitivity sorrow Kay Redfield Jamison
6ad570a I look for my sister but it's hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can't tell the living from the dead. It's all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere. loss sisters Karen Russell
020833f Losing Sarah and my boy was the hardest thing I've ever lived through. But even then, you see, I knew that Eleanor was with me. If not here, then at least in the world, where I could find her. I could think of her living in that old house with her father, I could write to her if I chose. She was the anchor in my world, no matter how far I was from her. But if I lose ... Ian, I lose myself. I can't live. Not without Eleanor. eleanor hart ian loss Jennifer Ashley
28200b6 Better, I thought, not to touch at all than to touch and bring hurt upon myself and others. Better to do nothing than to make a move and have it be the wrong one. But even deciding to not touch or to be nothing is a decision, Vanyel, and by deciding not to touch, so as to avoid hurt, I then hurt those who tried to touch me. loss love Mercedes Lackey
a202347 But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue loss love miscarriage motherhood parenthood Ariel Levy
b8b2676 "Why did you revive me?" Alecto repeated. "Well... uh, well...." Mandy hesitated, her voice full of sudden misery. "They say there are five stages of grief, you know... five stages. denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Not in any particular order. Anyhow, I denied your death, I was angry about it, I bargained with Mearth to try and get her to un-bury your site and I was depressed about the whole ordeal. One thing I just froze up on though was acceptance. I just couldn't accept your death. It was really cruel the way you died, and I missed you so much... Mearth, my parents, the cops, Dr. Pottie, they all thought I was crazy. When people think you're crazy, that label automatically dehumanizes you, because people can use it to discredit everything you say with, "oh, pay no mind to her, she's just this crazy lunatic with a dead imaginary friend." I just wanted to do something, anything to make it all go away, and I decided that I wanted to revive you." anger bargaining crazy death death-of-a-loved-one dehumanization denial depression discredit dying friend friendship grief help imaginary-friend loss lunatic mourning revival sadness Rebecca McNutt
bdbdf53 She had never looked as well. She had entered her room as just an impossibly lovely girl. The woman who emerged was a trifle thinner, a great deal wiser, an ocean sadder. This one understood the nature of pain, and beneath the glory of her features, there was character, and a sure knowledge of suffering. heartbreak loss love melancholy pain sorrow suffering William Goldman
72f0ffc "Mid-Term Break I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying-- He had always taken funerals in his stride-- And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'. Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. grief loss Seamus Heaney
5ac577c "With Pollution, emotion is irrelevant, it is not their nature," Mearth sighed, making a face as if she were talking to an ignorant small child. "I didn't create them, humans created the Pollution. Cheryl Nobel, Alecto Steele, Albert Sanders, Olivia Campbell, all my pretty little Representations, there aren't many of them left these days but they're still very dangerous! They're here to tell society all about its mistakes! You don't understand the world of Representations." canada cape-breton chemicals chernobyl coal death disturbing dying earth entity environment fear green grief hazardous hippie imaginary imagination loss love-canal mother-earth nature nova-scotia pollution recycle representation scared smog steel storm suicide sydney-tar-ponds tar tar-sands toxic-waste Rebecca McNutt
dc27394 And now at the airport, after shaking hands with everybody, waving good-bye, I think about all the different ways we leave people in this world. Cheerily waving good-bye to some at airports, knowing we'll never see each other again. Leaving others on the side of the road, hoping that we will. Finding my mother in my father's story and saying good-bye before before I have a chance to know her better. good-bye loss memory Amy Tan
7103481 "If you were me you'd do the right thing, help your friends, because you're not a coward," Mandy sighed sadly. "I covered up a murder because I was scared to go to jail and I did the wrong thing... well, now's my chance to do the right thing, to save someone's life, because I don't want you to die." "Save someone's life? I'm no one," Alecto laughed morbidly. "A hundred and twelve years is definitely way too long to have survived. You'd be wasting your time and risking your own life...." "This is my life," Mandy declared, smiling sincerely. Alecto just looked concerned and very doubtful as the rain drizzled down the roads and sidewalks, towards the harbour where it fell into the ocean, indistinguishable from all the other water in the world." -- cape-breton coward crime death disturbance dying friend friendship grief help imaginary-friend jail loss misery moral-values morals murder nova-scotia ocean rescue right scary seaside suicide wrong Rebecca McNutt
f46b9a0 "If we aren't willing to do whatever is required," he said finally, "then we risk losing what we have been mandated to protect." loss protection risk tarkin James Luceno
38b3956 Why do we feel guilty, even when we've done nothing to bring on illness or death--even when we've done everything possible to prevent it? Suffering feels like punishment, as cultural anthropologists observe; no doubt that's one reason why people still tell the story of Adam and Eve, which interprets suffering that way. bible death grief guilt illness loss mourning punishment suffering Elaine Pagels
9673a85 Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random.... If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature. death grief guilt loss mourning nature pain suffering Elaine Pagels
37fcf01 What clear is that meaning may not be something we . We found no meaning in our son's death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to meaning. grief loss meaning mourning Elaine Pagels
25c1661 Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him. alcohol darkness death depression heartache lonely loss mourning sad suicidal-ideation Dennis Lehane
d7a05f3 "No longer married, suddenly I was . From Latin, the name means "emptied." Far worse; it felt like being torn in half, ripped apart from the single functioning organism that had been our family, our lives. Shattered, the word kept recurring; the whole pattern shattered, just as the mountain rocks had shattered his body." families grief loss mourning relationships widows Elaine Pagels
abd7cba All loss is one, and one loss becomes all, a single death is the key to the gate that bars memory. loss memory Diana Gabaldon
df9fdae This is the context in which the story must be understood--as one incident in human history, an incident in certain ways and to certain people important, but only one incident. God is the God of human history, and He is at work continuously, mysteriously, accomplishing His eternal purposes in us, through us, for us, and in spite of us. human-history incident loss Elisabeth Elliot
8d58310 Only I had dry eyes, a dry heart. heartache incest loss love V.C. Andrews
d2761a6 "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." loss lost rebecca-solnit Rebecca Solnit
3084e04 He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely. Nevertheless. loss protection Christopher Isherwood
9c38c2c I did not want to die, but desperately wanted to be anywhere but there; the pain was unbearable. Yet in that vision, or whatever it was, I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved, and that nothing else could have kept us in this world. death grief loss mourning religion Elaine Pagels
37e8add We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies and all the sorrows of familial and passional life. literature loss reading relationships words Harold Bloom
712a42c ...love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down grief loss love Jeanette Winterson
080c3c2 "...I love you," he said to her, although at that point he was certain she could no longer comprehend the words. "I'd trade places with you in an instant, Mandy Valems... you never deserved this... why would anyone do something so terrible!?" A cold chill froze his heart when he saw her empty eyes again. The fluorescent lights in the dim room sparked to life all of a sudden, brightness so sharp that it startled him. In a flash, sharp and sudden, quicker than a lightning strike, the bulbs flickered and exploded with a few jingling pops." bulb death depressing dim electricity empty explode eyes fluorescent friendship grief heart hospital i-love-you lobotomy loss love mental-hospital psychosurgery tragic Rebecca McNutt
4299a25 "Why do they lie?" she asked herself aloud. "They say time makes losing someone you loved easier to deal with, but it only makes it worse." ask bereavement deal death-dying death-of-a-friend death-of-a-loved-one easy grief lie loss love mourning saying time worse Rebecca McNutt
cb64080 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. loss love young-love Vladimir Nabokov
480bd1b Saeed prayed a great deal, and so did his father, and so did their guests, and some of them wept, but Saeed had wept only once, when he first saw his mother's corpse and screamed, and Saeed's father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend. grief loss mourning sorrow weeping Mohsin Hamid
fb4879f They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity. loss loss-of-love regret Edith Wharton
282b299 The sun was hot and bright. A day for fishing, for swimming, for playing tennis and having fun, and they put my Christopher in the ground. heartbreak incest loss love V.C. Andrews
3690835 I was the last of the four Dresden dolls. Only me... and I didn't want to be here. heartbreak loss love V.C. Andrews
d988171 The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life. loss Alan Lightman
c749cea Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe anyone loves you for yourself. I never believed that my parents loved me. I tried to love them but it didn't work. It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value. I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea. I thought that love was loss. Why is the measure of love loss? authenticity being-yourself belonging family fulfilment loss love unconditional-love Jeanette Winterson
0aa453f Lost is not an address, it's not permission to fail, it's not an excuse. loss Gregory Maguire
733cf38 "...Look, I'm real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot," Mandy apologized gloomily. "It's wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution." "It's alright, I think she wants to be remediated," Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did. "You don't have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you," Mandy pointed out. "People shouldn't be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don't want to." confusion death depression fear friendship grief grief-stricken help hope lonliness loss love memory pollution remediation removal uncertainty Rebecca McNutt
775cd5a "Melly is the only woman friend I ever had," she thought forlornly, "the only woman except Mother who really loved me. She's like Mother, too. Everyone who knew her has clung to her skirts." grief loss love Margaret Mitchell
0cfee0b She now felt an incessant and universal numbness. darkness existentialism loss love numbness passion Gustave Flaubert
5867f9c Proud houses fall into decline and great cities pass into ruin. The stories of those things are lost to forgotten languages and moth-eaten scrolls. Vine and root grapple with the rune carved in stone, and rust carries away, fleck by fleck, the great gates of iron. loss past time William Timothy Murray
602e1a0 Listen, said Beverly. Let me tell you something. There is no Very Friendly Animal Center. That cat is long gone. loss pets Kate DiCamillo
791c80b , though Peter. 'Eat,' said Leo Matienne again, very gently. Peter looked the truth of what he had lost full in the face. And then he ate. family food grief loss Kate DiCamillo
18f58a0 "On any basic figure of the Africans landed alive in the Americas, one would have to make several extensions- starting with a calculation to cover mortality in transshipment. The Atlantic crossing, or "Middle Passage," as it was called by European slavers, was notorious for the number of deaths incurred, averaging in the vicinity of 15-20 per cent. There were also numerous deaths in Africa between time of capture and time of embarkation, especially in cases where captives had to travel hundreds of miles to the coast. Most important of all (given that warfare was the principal means of obtaining captives) it is necessary to make some estimate of the number of people killed and injured so as to extract the millions who were taken alive and sound. The resultant figure would be many times the millions landed alive outside of Africa, and it is that figure which represents the number of Africans directly removed from the population and labor force of Africa because of the establishment of slave production by Europeans. Pg. 96" development europe history legacy loss slave-trade Walter Rodney
7f5a5ae Home was a curious thing, like happiness. You never knew you had had it until it was gone. home loss Wallace Stegner
70f9aaa "Isn't it complicated to be human, though?" she said. "Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally...And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn't make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance..." "The one thing," Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, "the thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won't ever see her grow up. She'll have to do it without whatever I could have given her." "Time, too, time and everything that one could do in it, and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It's so important to us because we see it so close. We're individuals, we're full of ourselves, and so we're bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of sudden there's so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we'd always been and always intended to be...do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there's so much to feel and I'm greedy?" death grief humanity loss love suffering Wallace Stegner
197ca7d "Like Mom, Zoe thought-like Mom used to. And that's where they differed, for Zoe wrote quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions. It's not even good poetry, she thought. I don't have talent, it's her. I should be the one ill; she has so much to offer, so much life. "You're a dark one," her mother said sometimes with amused wonder. "You're a mystery." cancer dying-mother emotion greif lonliness loss mother pain sadness Annette Curtis Klause
66bc4be Beyond her declaration of love she could not see. But as she rehearsed the intensity of her passion she thought that he , when the time came, . The desire to, at the right time, him became, as the years moved forward toward that time, increasingly painful, like a poisoned wound that must heal itself by breaking open. She thought in anguish of the times, the recent times, when she could have told him, and had been afraid to, and had clumsily withdrawn, when she could have attracted him and drawn his attention to her. When she had watched over him when he was sleeping in the sedan-chair and could have wakened him with a kiss. If only she had , then she could more easily have borne his not preferring her. He was ready to fall in love -- and if he had -- he must have loved her -- if he had known how much she loved him. The pain of this loss burnt her in every waking moment, that awful 'if only'. She had lost him, and lost him through her own fault. There were no more pleasures now in life. if-only iris-murdoch loss missed-chance missed-opportunity suffering the-green-knight unrequited-love unspoken Iris Murdoch
b5c073c ...architecture was what you had instead of landscape, a signal of loss, of imitation. Europe had it in spades... australian-literature cities europe landscape loss Tim Winton
9374184 And in that single crackle of tortured electronics she had lost everything. Her comm, her lights, her limited maneuvering jets, her life support regulator, her emergency beacons. Everything. For a second her thoughts flickered to Skywalker. He'd been lost in deep space, too, awhile back. But she'd had a reason to find him. No one had a similar reason to find her. loss luke-skywalker mara-jade star-wars Timothy Zahn
924beae The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they'll say even before I write them. grief loss omniscience unreality Sigrid Nunez
5e3060f Understand something people, we will be hated by many in the name of Christ, ridiculed, mocked, stoned, slaughtered. We will be fined, jailed and killed for our love for Christ. You are supposed to see better with your eyes today, how close this is happening, just prepare your heart and soul to be braver than Peter and not deny Christ in the moment your life might be in jeopardy for Him and what you believe. Apostle Pauls says to live is Christ to die is gain. depression destiny dream dreams earning endtime family fantasy feminism fiction-food-for-though forgiveness freedom friends friendship future grief heart history humanity-humour imagination inspirational-quotes intelligence-is-attractive joy leadership life-and-living-life-philosophy life-quotes literature living loss love-quotes magic-spirit marriage meditation-men mind money motivation motivational motivational-quotes music nature pain passion-peace patience patience-johnson pentecost people politics positive-thinking power prayer psychology purpose quote quotes reading reality-relationship repentance sadness self-help self-improvement society soul spiritual strength time trust-war wisdom-quotes women words work world Patience Johnson
7b427fe from under the ground, from under the waters, they clutch at us, they clutch at us, we won't let go. dreaming dreams grief grieving loss nightmare nightmares poetic poetry Margaret Atwood
301eb28 There is only one thing worse than losing the one you love, and that is losing them without knowing why. If you are a dog, then your master is like a god to you, and the pain of losing him is greater still. loss love Louis de Bernières
a9f84fe "I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. But until we are old ladies--a cypress age, a Sawtooth age--I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love." loneliness loss love sisters Karen Russell
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