100 Quotes About Loss

You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?. Jeanette Winterson

It’s the same with people who say, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying. Rob Sheffield

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life. Unknown

That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I’d lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that --I didn't let it-- and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn't sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be. . Kazuo Ishiguro

When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn't return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequieted love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels.. Rosamund Lupton

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

You see how I try To reach with words What matters most And how I fail. Unknown

Why love what you will lose? There is nothing else to love. Unknown

I held a jewel in my fingers And went to sleep. The day was warm, and winds were prosy; I said: "'T will keep." I woke and chid my honest fingers, – The gem was gone; And now an amethyst remembrance Is all I own. Emily Dickinson

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. . George Santayana

The inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him, and until I wake I believe I will die of grief, for I knowthat this boy grew into a manwho was a faithful friendwho died. Wendell Berry

I never used to realize it, I guess. I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble at all if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it. Ernest Hemingway

I want to wake Chrissie and tell her this as if it's a warning: Don't push too hard; your last chance to see a person the way you wanted them to be may come at any moment. One minute you have a parent, or a friend, or a lover, something solid, and physics tells you their resistance will always be there to meet you as you press yourself into relief against them. Then all of a sudden your mother is a fading outline in a thunderstorm, wet and weak and so far out of reach; or your lover who may also be your best and only friend is pulled so quickly into someone else's life that you don't even realize he's left yours until you're getting a save-the-date card; or your father is somewhere at the end of the world and even if you had a number for him, you'd feel wrong calling to tell him to quit collecting stuff when it's painfully clear you have nothing to offer to replace it. But I don't wake Chrissie because she's sleeping like a baby, and anyway, she isn't a baby and she doesn't need me to tell her what it is to watch somebody let you down by being human in the saddest and neediest ways, what it is to push at something that has long since given way. . Danielle Evans

The worst pain ... isn't the pain you feel at the time, it's the pain you feel later on when there's nothing you can do about it, They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory ... Unknown

Yes, he would look for her, whether to delight in the joys of spring together or to plunge into the abyss. He would look for her because he loved her. And somehow this would lessen the lie Claire was living. For, in the end, the girl's love was reciprocated, and Tom's love, like Shackleton's, was also unattainable, lost in the ether, unable to its way to her. Unknown

The city gate opened when she and Harper reached the causeway. Her mind barely registered the new walls and the number of soldiers lining the ramparts who were cheering them. Oh, don’t, she wanted to tell them. We have lost so much. Carla Kelly

Even if one incurs a loss, he should expose this fact to the other person. This way the intent the other person does, will dispel the [negative] atoms and one will, become lighter himself. Otherwise suffering alone increases the mental burden. Dada Bhagwan

What is it like to be a Spokane Indian without wild salmon? It is like being a Christian if Jesus had never rolled back the stone and risen from his tomb. Sherman Alexie

There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

It isn’t easy when life tears away the one person in a million you thought you could always trust. Unknown

...I Know it hurts. But sometimes it's the greatest things in our lives that cause us the most pain. That's why it hurts so much, because they're so important. C.J. Bishop

There are times when one cannot accept facts for fear of shattering one's being. As I listened to Ian's news, all of Digit's life, since my first meeting with him as a playful little ball of black fluff ten years earlier, passed through my mind. From that moment on, I came to live within an insulated part of myself. Dian Fossey

If you lose someone, you feel a loss, then after a while you fill in the hole in your life and the loss gradually gets smaller and smaller and eventually goes away. There's a point to the pain. There's a reason and a direction. Marian Keyes

I am like some wounded animal in a darkened lair, nursing the thorn in my paw, unable to find anyone to take it out. Kristin Hannah

There is no pain in losing what you never had. Dauglas Dauglas

Only Certain offered no enticements, for she knew nothing could ease the pain. Not books or photography or food. Not even love. Billie Letts

War takes many things from people, but unfortunately, pain is not one of them. Laura Thalassa

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. Leigh Allison Wilson

I don't understand how the pain of losing him can be a pale shadow in comparison to the pain of finding him again. Amy Engel

... some wounds refuse the remedy of time. Robert McCammon

Recognize those times when it's best to do nothing. The weeks and months following a significant loss, including death, divorce, or the incapacitation of a loved one, are fraught with emotions. We typically do not make our best decisions under circumstances such as these. **Avoid the inclination to immediately put your house on the market** cash in all your savings, and move to the south of France, or trust the first person who comes along who says he or she can give you all the help you need. . Lois P. Frankel

You chose love and you lost. Timothy Joshua

Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I've lived my life again just telling it to you. Arthur Golden

What you love, you must love all the harder because someday it will be gone. Stephen King

My love for you is a prayer, she thought. Love is the only prayer I know. Marion Zimmer Bradley

Loving someone is weakness. as well as strength for self. which one you want to use ? Litymunshi

I am still trying and trying to exorcise youbut you cling to me like mud or bloodstains, like a battlefield fought in my imaginationevery day that I raise my pen against the swordyou used to slice my heart into small, bitter pieces. Miriam Joy

Why must man not marry?" "He cannot marry. He cannot marry, " he said angrily. "If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he cannot lose. Ernest Hemingway

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. Chuck Palahniuk

Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back. Mitch Albom

Losing me will hurt; it will be the kind of pain that won't feel real at first, and when it does, it will take her breath away. Gayle Forman

So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness. Haruki Murakami

I cannot conceive of a greater loss than the loss of one's self-respect. Mahatma Gandhi

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. Gail Caldwell

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

With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion--like the phantom pain of an amputee. Khaled Hosseini

To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost. Unknown

It's hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It's hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you've had him for long enough. Joe Abercrombie

I am now convinced that I have never been much in love; for had I really experienced that pure and elevating passion, I should at present detest his very name, and wish him all manner of evil. But my feelings are not only cordial towards him; they are even impartial towards her. I cannot find out that I hate her at all, or that I am in the least unwilling to think her a very good sort of girl. There can be no love in all this. . Jane Austen

When you go, if you go, And I should want to die, there's nothing I'd be saved bymore than the timeyou fell asleep in my armsin a trust so gentle I let the darkening roomdrink up the evening, tillrest, or the new rainlightly roused you awake. I asked if you heard the rain in your dreamand half dreaming still you only said, I love you. Edwin Morgan

Later, when his father left him, the boy cried over his pet, until eventually his father sent a servant to take the body of the bird away and bury it. The boy never cried again, and he never forgot what he'd learned: that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed. Cassandra Clare

I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants of shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet and walk. Katja Millay

He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall. Michael Ondaatje

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect? Jodi Picoult

Well, if you live long enough, you lose a lot. Just as long as you don't throw them away. Whatever you loose, you'll find again, but what you throw away you never get back.- Oibore (Enishi's dad) to Yahiko and Misao Nobuhiro Watsuki

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering. Roland Barthes

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them. Barbara Kingsolver

For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the word 'never'. And it's really awful. You say the word a hundred times a day but you don't really know what you're saying until you're faced with a real 'never again'. Muriel Barbery

How is it possible that a boyfriend ceases to exist from one day to another? Gayle Forman

The reverse side of love is unbearable loss. Susan Abulhawa

You can’t replace people you love with other people… But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love. Barbara Kingsolver

Sweet for a little even to fear, and sweet, O love, to lay down fear at love’s fair feet; Shall not some fiery memory of his breath Lie sweet on lips that touch the lips of death? Yet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free; Love me no more, but love my love of thee. Love where thou wilt, and live thy life; and I, One thing I can, and one love cannot–die. Pass from me; yet thine arms, thine eyes, thine hair, Feed my desire and deaden my despair. Yet once more ere time change us, ere my cheek Whiten, ere hope be dumb or sorrow speak, Yet once more ere thou hate me, one full kiss; Keep other hours for others, save me this. Yea, and I will not (if it please thee) weep, Lest thou be sad; I will but sigh, and sleep. Sweet, does death hurt? thou canst not do me wrong: I shall not lack thee, as I loved thee, long. Hast thou not given me above all that live Joy, and a little sorrow shalt not give? What even though fairer fingers of strange girls Pass nestling through thy beautiful boy’s curls As mine did, or those curled lithe lips of thine Meet theirs as these, all theirs come after mine; And though I were not, though I be not, best, I have loved and love thee more than all the rest. O love, O lover, loose or hold me fast, I had thee first, whoever have thee last; Fairer or not, what need I know, what care? To thy fair bud my blossom once seemed fair. Why am I fair at all before thee, why At all desired? seeing thou art fair, not I. I shall be glad of thee, O fairest head, Alive, alone, without thee, with thee, dead; I shall remember while the light lives yet, And in the night-time I shall not forget. Though (as thou wilt) thou leave me ere life leave, I will not, for thy love I will not, grieve; Not as they use who love not more than I, Who love not as I love thee though I die; And though thy lips, once mine, be oftener prest To many another brow and balmier breast, And sweeter arms, or sweeter to thy mind, Lull thee or lure, more fond thou wilt not find. Algernon Charles Swinburne

He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle. Hermann Hesse

All of us lost something. Some of us lost everything. Cassandra Clare

If you love someone, they leave you. But if you don't love someone, they leave you, too. So your choice isn't between loving and losing but only between loving and not loving. Steve Rasnic Tem

When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He DID things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on. . Ray Bradbury

Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually wracked with pain. Philip Pullman

How easy it was to lose everything you had always thought you'd have forever. Cassandra Clare

In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. Richard Flanagan

Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in. Bonsai trees twist in miniature. I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them. Jodi Picoult

I don't think it is as much a human foible as it is a human curse that we cannot understand the beauty of a thing until it is gone. Richard Paul Evans

What is first seen as a loss is now seen as a gain. For he finds solitude, not in far off, quite places; he creates it out of himself, spreads it around him, wherever he may be, because he loves it and slowly he ripens in this tranquility. For the inner process is beginning to unfold, stillness is extraordinarily important. Unknown

The persons on whom I have bestowed my dearest love lie deep in their graves; but, although the happiness and delight of my life lie buried there too, I have not made a coffin of my heart, and sealed it up for ever on my best affections. Deep affliction has only made them stronger; it ought, I think, for it should refine our nature. Charles Dickens

I thought maybe we mourned not only for the dead but also for the living. We felt their absence before we knew for sure they were gone. Vaddey Ratner

I lost someone very close to me and afterward I believed I could have saved him had I been a better friend to him. But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them. Dave Eggers

Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night. Michael Ondaatje

We can only lose what we have first claimed. Richard Paul Evans

You can't lose someone who was never there in the first place. Non Pratt

Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die. M. John Harrison

Loss leaves us empty- but learn not to close your heart and mind to grief. Allow life to replinish you. When sorrow comes it seems impossible- but new Pam Brown

Don't love anything that can be taken away. Ron Rash

That's what it's all about—knowing what you have to lose, but risking the loss anyway. Julie Reece Deaver

I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for. Louise Erdrich

If he closed his eyes he could dwell in the circuit of air that had once held her, he could hold his breath and be inside her again, within the close and burning borders of her- she stood here, washed her hair in this sink, wrote upon this wall, ate roasted chicken at this table. There was no place he could enter where she had not also been, her echoes hanging in the air like pages hung to dry. No place that did not suppurate in her absence, which was not ringed with the light of her old selves, like film burned with a cigarette. Catherynne M. Valente

So lately, been wondering Who will be there to take my place When I'm gone, you'll need love To light the shadows on your face. The Calling

I think a person permeates a spot, and a lost presence makes the environment timeless to me, keeps an area alive. It pulsates because of that. Andrew Wyeth

Watching them, Harmony felt too shaken to take a step. Eddie and Sheba were young; but she herself had become old. Even if she wasn’t particularly old if you just counted years, the fact was years were no way to count. Happenings were the way to count, the big happening that separated her from youth or even middle age was the death of her daughter, Pepper. That death made her realize that life, once you got around to producing children, was no longer about being pretty or having boyfriends or making money — it was about protecting children; getting them raised to the point where they could try life as adults. It didn’t have to be just children that come out of your body, either. It could be anyone young who needed something you had to give. Some grown men were children; some grown women, too. Harmony knew that she had spent a good part of her life, taking care of just such men. But now that she felt old she didn’t think she wanted to spend much more of her energy protecting men who had had a good chance to grow up, but had blown it. If she never had another boyfriend — something she had been worrying about, on the plane — it might be a little dull in some areas, like sexual areas, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. What would be the end of the world would be to let some little girl like Sheba get in the car with a bad man who would make a U-turn across the street and kill her right there in front of the pay phones, where pimps and crack dealers were making their calls. Larry McMurtry

I am afraid of losing what I have already valued. Rosie Thomas

There are times when our victories have a cost that we did not foresee, when winning brings us loss. Susanna Kearsley