Loss Quotes

"Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you."

John Green

"If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."

Emily Brontë

"Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form."

Rumi

"The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before."

John Green

"Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart."

José N. Harris

"If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?"

Jodi Picoult

"From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone."

Edgar Allan Poe

"I guess by now I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone-you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence."

Alyson Noel

"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell."

Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt."

Haruki Murakami

"Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color."

W.S. Merwin

"We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss."

Cassandra Clare

"You never knew the last time you were seeing someone. You didn't know when the last argument happened, or the last time you had sex, or the last time you looked into their eyes and thanked God they were in your life.After they were gone?That was all you thought about.Day and night."

J.R. Ward

"Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one."

Dean Koontz

"Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things."

Arthur Schopenhauer

"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

"Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears."

Criss Jami

"How could you go about choosing something that would hold the half of your heart you had to bury?"

Jodi Picoult, Mercy

"Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss."

Meghan O'Rourke

"But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone."

Mitch Albom

"Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering."

Roland Barthes

"It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, but it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter,the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands,the scent of rain, the concept of subway trains... if only one could leave this life slowly!"

Roman Payne

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

Kevin Brooks, Lucas

"I just looked at her, feeling utterly empty. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to her. My life is in that bed. Please let me stay."

Maggie Stiefvater

"So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it."

Margaret George

"True regret is knowing you missed your only opportunity to be simply a good friend to someone that was exactly like you."

Shannon L. Alder

"Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse."

Kelley Armstrong

"The harmonica has musical wind, and is the breath of soul. It’s like a sad, lonely I love you lost in the breeze."

Jarod Kintz

"Why is the measure of love loss?"

Jeanette Winterson

"Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair."

Andrew Solomon

"Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss?"

Susan Gordon Lydon

"Relationships are like water. If you grab tight, clamping and clenching to gain control, you’ll lose it all. Instead, cup your hand gently, so she feels free to drink until her thirst is quenched."

Jarod Kintz

"We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie."

Michael Ondaatje

"If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?"

Jodi Picoult

"It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!"

Roman Payne

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

Junot Díaz

"Losing your mind is preferable to losing your woman, because if you lose your woman you will also lose your mind, and then you’re left with nothing."

Jarod Kintz

"I missed you, Angel. Not one day went by that I didn't feel you missing from my life. You haunted me to the point that I began to believe Hank had gone back on his oath and killed you. I couldn't escape you and I didn't want to. You tortured me, but it was better than losing you."

Becca Fitzpatrick

"I hold it true, whate'er befall;I feel it when I sorrow most;'Tis better to have loved and lostThan never to have loved at all."

Alfred Lord Tennyson

"Time is such a waste of time to think about, because the longer you ponder it, the more of it you lose. And before you know it, you don’t know it, because you are nothing but dusty worm food."

Jarod Kintz

"What you are to do without me I cannot imagine."

George Bernard Shaw

"I'll sleep forever and meet you in my dreams; it'll hurt less anyway. But the pain of losing you was worth the pleasure of having you, and I rest in bed knowing you'll know for the rest of your life what you are missing.-Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz"

Karen Quan

"I'll miss looking through the forest–your green and hazel eyes. I love the way they shimmered and changed shade with your mood, and how I could see the desire in your emerald gaze.-Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz"

Karen Quan

"A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her."

Arthur Conan Doyle

"I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible."

Robert Goolrick

"One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else."

K.L. Toth

"When I lost her I gained the future, because she was my past, and she freed me to become who I was born to be."

Jarod Kintz

"The sunset sky fades from blue to orange over Gainesville, Florida, and what I lost is less than what I gained. I gained love, I lost love, and if could do it all again, I would."

Jarod Kintz

"Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one."

Ann Druyan

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

Nessa Rapoport

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