Loss Quotes

Don't cry. She wouldn't like it. When I missed my father, I used to cry. Mama taught me when I cry, he is sad and will cry, too. I don't want my daddy sad. I'm sure you don't want your daughter sad, too.

The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, "—three," and years later, "Three," she will say, "—four.

I ached with loss that I’d never allowed myself to feel. As if I was leaving something important behind. And that something was me.

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.

Is worth for a man to lose his soul, and gain worldly wealth?

You're not defeated when you lose a battle.You are defeated when you give up the struggle

The dead never truly die. They simply change form.

When you left you left behind a fieldof silent flowers under a sky full of unstirred clouds...you left a million butterfliesmid-silky flutters You left like midnight rain against my dreaming ears Oh and how you left leaving my coffee scentless and my couch comfortless leaving upon my fingers the melting snow of you you left behind a calendar full of empty days and seasons full of aimless wanders leaving me alone with an armful of sunsets your reflection behind in every puddle your whispersupon every curtain your fragranceinside every petal you left your echoes in between the silence of my eyes Oh and how you leftleaving my sands footless and my shores songless leaving me with windows full of moistened moonlight nights and nightsof only a half-warmed soul and when you left... you left behind a lifetime of moments untouched the light of a million starsunshed and when you left you somehowleft my poem...unfinished. (Published in Taj Mahal Review Vol.11Number 1 June 2012)

Change is loss. I was fully functional prior to the actions you have taken. If you change me, I will cease to be me. If you love me, you wouldn’t want to change me… Love appears to have made you less functional.

I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it.And now I will have to be that person forever.

Tonight I want to stand on the side of a cliff and look down, dare the wind to gust and knock me off. Everyone thinks that falling to your death is the worst thing that can happen. But that’s a lie. The worst thing is to be alive for no reason.

In time the whole family perked up like Sesame Street puppets, hoping that cheer, if worked at hard enough, could sugar the living and quiet the dead.

As a kid I heard the word malignancy as "Malig-Nancy" like an evil woman's name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her first symptoms for a pregnancy, and so I still pictured the Malig-Nancy as a baby, a tiny, eyeless fist of a sister, killing her.

Loosers want it but only through the easy way. If action taking were like reading a story book, loosers would only love to open the picture pages

He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.

If you hang to pain, hurt, embarrassment, guilt and such emotions you will find that they will dominate your life. They won’t allow you to move on unless you make a conscious effort to deal with them and free yourself. Talking to friends, family or to God can help remove the burden from your chest and make you feel better.

Dry fingers of decaying branches protruded upward, above what was left of the canopy of green. They rattled like skeletal bones, grasping for a final breath from the last silvery clouds of evening that slowly drifted by.

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.

The less I have, the less I can lose.

Treat gain and loss the same.' Don't be Intimidated. Don't make a Big Deal of anything - just accept things as they come to you.

Love was indeed a big responsibility. One must use the word judiciously. One cannot love one day and take away love the next day. It is total caring.

I stood in your doorway this morningdreaming you’d turn aroundyou’d tilt your headyou’d softly whisper ”stay”or that you’d grab my armsto shake me while askingwhat the hell are we doingwe loveeach otherand this is not rightso we will make this worknow stay!You poured your coffee. Stirred the spoon like a crystal manwith your back to me and not a sound. the fridge humming elegies while the clock ticked onand the streets are so clean here people rushing to workand maybe I should be tooby nowat this agethis stagethis town.I will stand in that doorway dreamingfor many nights to come.

There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds.

Like so many plain cups on the shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don't matter. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and smashes to piece, and you shrug and say to yourself, what a pity. Then you reach for the cup that you use every day, one that you love and use so often that as you stretch out your hand it is already making the shape that fits its curve. You are certain that yesterday it was in its proper place, but now there is nothing. Just air. You have lost something that was so familiar, so much a part of your life that you were not even looking for it. Just expecting it to be there, as always.

A lot of people pray for power, house, financial breakthrough, wealth etc. But only few ask God for wisdom. There are so many great power pack man and women of God who lack wisdom.

I am overachieving at aimlessness, I am a type-A, alpha-girl lollygagger, the leader of a gang of heartbroken kids, running wild across this lonely strip of amusements, each of us smarting from the betrayals of a loved one.

Something significant in me snapped when I miscarried; that something hadnt unsnapped yet. It hadn't been put back together and I was afraid it never would. I knew Jesus was with me, but my insides twirled threatening to take me down from the inside out. I knew He was with me, giving me permission to be in the broken parts of my story...

I figured we really shouldn’t grieve for those who leave us for God. They’ve arrived at their destinations with lucky souls no longer burdened by our piddling human considerations. It may seem cruel when they die so young or so beautiful or so loved. Cry not for them, for the life not lived. Cry only for your own hurt in missing them. That’s the only true loss. And in those sad moments when you remember a touch, or catch them watching from the corner of your eye, understand they left you with a lesson. Everyone who touches your life teaches you something important you’re meant to learn. Somehow their visit here pushed your own soul along its path. Learning that lesson is the best way you can honor them.

There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go. The problem, however, is that we tend to spend a great deal of energy in attempting to avoid the truth. We construct an image of ourselves that seeks to shield us from a confrontation with our ghosts. Hence we often encounter them only late at night, in the corridors of our dreams.

All the love you ever gave is waiting for you there at Rainbow Bridge.

Sometimes you have to risk life, in order to live, and gamble death, to sacrifice life.

Have the courage to walk away, those that value you will want you back, & those that do not won't hold you back.

Here are the things I want for you -I want you to be happy. I want someone else to know the warmth of your smile, to feel the way I did when I was in your presence.I want you to know how happy you once made me and though you really did hurt me, in the end, I was better for it. I don't know if what we had was love, but if it wasn't, I hope to never fall in love. Because of you, I know I am too fragile to bear it.I want you to remember my lips beneath your fingers and how you told me things you never told another soul. I want you to know that I have kept sacred, everything you had entrusted in me and I always will.Finally, I want you to know how sorry I am for pushing you away when I had only meant to bring you closer. And if I ever felt like home to you, it was because you were safe with me. - I want you to know that most of all.

It was possible, I found, to both mourn a loss and yet be grateful it happened.

One month flies by when you're falling love with the woman you're using for sex. Two is an eternity when the woman you love leaves you.

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…

To be happy to be sad and sad to be happy is to sing an echo in that beautiful language called Sorrow.

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

You always have something left to lose. Until, of course, you die.

My mom’s smile is genuine,A lilac beamingIn the presence of her Sun.Indentions in the sand proveTime’s linear progression,Her hair yet unblighted,Carrying midnight’s consistency.Clear tracks fading as theMovement slips furtherIn the past.CheekbonesHigh, soft,In summer’s hue,Hopeful.Each step’s unknown impact,A future looking back.My father’s strength:One whoseLife is in his arms.Squinting past the camera,He rests upon a rockLike caramel corn half eaten,Just to the leftOf man-made concrete conventionDaylight’s eraserRemoving color to his right.Dustin sitsIn my father’s lap,Open mouth of a droolingBig mouth bass;Muscle toneOf a well exercisedJelly fish,He looks at meHalf aware;His wheelchairPerched at the edgeOf parking lot gravel graftedLike a scar on nature’s beach,Opening to the ironic splendorOf a bitter tasting lake.I took the picture.Age 11.Capturing the pinnacle arcOf a sonTo my lilacWhoOutlived him and weeps,Still.Their sky has staple holes –Maybe that’s how theLightLeaked out.

Grief is always amplified in silence.

You don't understand the power of loss when it first hits you like a baseball coming fast from an out-of-control pitcher....It's the third day after an injury when the pain really starts to throb.

Life luscious wet life bereft of death, loss of empty shell minus absent of nothing exploding star cell amoeba sweet algae oxygen, hydrogen flowering in the vacuum ofspace and magnetic motion.

... The women's song was always the same, as monotonous as the beating of the waves against the beach: loss, loss. The conch offered them no enchantment. When they put their ear to it, all they heard was the echo of their mourning.

Someone once said that death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live. I could tell you who said it, but who the hell really cares.

A spectacularly foolish and baseless faith, against enormous odds, that a world you do not control will not take from you the one thing you cannot bare to lose.

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.tIn both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center: there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure.

All my life I have heard the term happiness thrown around like a buzzword as if it is something to be gained. As I have previously expressed, I do not view happiness as a tangible thing. To me happinesss is the elimination of accumulated darkness. Self-sustaining happiness comes from contentment of acceptance, compassion and sympathetic joy, qualities which cannot be developed like a muscle, but rather they must be actualized by the removal of fetters in the mind

After your visits, I twisted my blinds shut every night. I locked out the stars and I never saw lightning again. Each night, I simply turned out the lights and went to bed.

...always-the sharp,plaintive edgeon the rimof the spoonof my giving.(lines 8-13 of the poem 'Confessions')

Our stars are not where we last admired them. Our homes crumble and we don't know which place to long for.

He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.

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...

I wake and in those first fuddled moments forget you’re not here. I must have been dreaming about you – a tense, erotic dream. I reach out in bed to the place your body should be. It’s cold and there is no hollow. Even the bed is forgetting you.

Yes, I've lost him. But I don't have to lose myself.

...People are not one-dimensional. People do not live on one plane...

You shine brighter than the sun""But even the sun goes away every night""But it is hte sun's absence that makes us feel its power. We know the loss, the beauty and the life that the moon can't replace. That is why we hang on to each day we are given.

When it comes to love and loss, acceptance is never easy. We can't make someone see all we have to give, make them love us, or make them change. All we can do is move on and stop wasting time.

Liberty is a constant battle between government; who would limit it, people; who would concede it, and patriots; who would defend it.

Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed.