c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
instead of mourning, instead of a moment of silence or a hateful, islamophobic message, how about today we make the world a little brighter?be kinder. be a little gentler, with yourself and others. take more pictures. tell more jokes. be a better human.today is a lot more than a tragedy. today is a birthday. a day of suicide awareness. a wedding. a birth. a new job. today is a kiss and someone on a tarred over warehouse roof whispering about the day the earth stood still and the day it began spinning again.be kind. just be kind. it's time we took this day back for the wild ones, for the fiery eyes, for the happy and the brave and the new. no more mourning. let it just be a sunday.
— Taylor Rhodes, calloused: a field journal
There are few things emptier than the space where a Christmas tree used to be.
— Kate Lord Brown, The House of Dreams
Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed.
— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries
I used to get so worked up about this or that boy, or who was passing notes in math class. All that stuff seems so far away now, ever since Real Life came along and punched me in the face.
— M. Verano, Diary of a Haunting
One small decision can shape an entire life. Sometimes, if you're lucky, the biggest hardship can lead to your greatest blessing. It just takes time to see that God works in mysterious ways.
— Penelope Ward, My Skylar
By the time we hit our forties, we've all known pain--it's been layered on us like so many coats of paint. Who's to say which heartbreak is the greatest: Losing a child or never having a romantic relationship? Surviving cancer or having a mentally ill son? All painful life events gouge deep furrows and cause emotions to bleed out of us--shock, sorrow, and dismay. Through these tragedies, we are constantly rediscovering ourselves, peeling off the personas we've created to fit in socially and reaching for the unaltered seed of self within us. We'll never completely know our raw core--never completely be able to separate the white of external influences from the yolk of our true selves. But we can ask the questions, keep on with the quest.
— Colbert, Wendy Staley
Their boots were black and shiny and your treasures gleamed like stars,Bones from deep down in the fertile crescent.
— John Darnielle
If the thought of losing someone doesn't scare the shit out of you, then it's not love
— Penelope Ward, My Skylar
Love and loss come in equal measure.
— Kate Lord Brown, The Christmas We Met
One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself’. But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.
— C.S. Lewis
Sometimes we hold the world in our hands, but in our greed for more let it fall, losing everything that we once had.
— Felix O. Hartmann, Dark Age
Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can't, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.
— Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers
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?
— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries
Grief"Woke up early this morning and from my bedlooked far across the Strait to seea small boat moving through the choppy water,a single running light on. Rememberedmy friend who used to shouthis dead wife’s name from hilltopsaround Perugia. Who set a platefor her at his simple table long aftershe was gone. And opened the windowsso she could have fresh air. Such displayI found embarrassing. So did his otherfriends. I couldn’t see it.Not until this morning.
— Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems
It was magic to be above [the clouds], to see their uppermost contours, the way they caught the light and held it, their vast shadows moving upon the face of the earth. I wished I could open the window and know what the world sounded like at that altitude. I thought about the solitude of that world, how it must be inhabited by the voice of the wind, only. ... I thought about what my crows saw as they flew above canyons and treetops, the birds-eye view of life. They would recognize specific trees, perches, and nesting sites from a completely different perspective than I could. Their maps differed from mine; they knew the topography, the contours of the landscape, on a much grander scale.
— Elizabeth J. Church, The Atomic Weight of Love
I wanted to pretend for just a little longer that I was whole again. Happy. Then I'd figure out how to pick up the pieces and move on.
— L.A. Fiore, Collecting the Pieces
And in the silence what followed, I reckon our eyes had some long conversation our mouths could’ve never talked through. Some long, looking talk about things gone and long since said. About cries out in the night and some long ago tangling of limbs. And about them betrayals done time and time again—by both of us—what led to me pointing the Green Man’s rifle at the man what once loved me under the Green Man’s stars.
— J.D.  Jordan, Calamity: Being an Account of Calamity Jane and Her Gunslinging Green Man
Maybe I’d lost something. Maybe I’d lost a lot—more, even, than I could suffer—but I still had my own self. And lonesome as I might be, wasn’t no force on Earth or from above what could make me less.
— J.D.  Jordan, Calamity: Being an Account of Calamity Jane and Her Gunslinging Green Man
As when we can recall so vividlyWe almost touch,Or think of all the gestures that we failedTo make.
— Herbert Mason, Gilgamesh: A Verse Narrative
Her mother’s quiet disapproval and withdrawal was a death in itself, and Franckline’s despair at it was transmitted, she was sure of it, to the child. She transgressed twice, first by making the child, then by giving it her despair, the despair that left it unable to live.
— Pamela Erens, Eleven Hours
It could be kindness. Faith felt hollow at the thought. She had needed kindness before, and has received none. Now it was too late, and she did not know what to do with it.
— Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree
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i smile. things taken for granted have a way of catching you offguard when you least expect it, and then you're taken by what the portuguese calls saudade, a sense of longing for something, someone not there anymore.
— Yeow Kai Chai, lost bodies: poems between portugal and home
Pages burnt, memories buried, I wakeor think I'm awake. Or dreaming still?
— Yong Shu Hoong, lost bodies: poems between portugal and home
Each of us repeats Adam’s journey and acknowledges, with the loss of innocence, that he is mortal. Weep and pray, O Arseny. And do not fear death, for death is not just the bitterness of parting. It is also the joy of liberation.” (Laurus, p. 30)
— Eugene Vodolazkin
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 I start to run?
— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries
If grief kills us not, we kill it. Not that I cease to grieve; for each hour, revealing to me how excelling and matchless the being was, who once was mine, but renews the pang with which I deplore my alien state upon earth. But such is God's will; I am doomed to a divided existence, and I submit. Meanwhile I am human; and human affections are the native, luxuriant growth of a heart, whose weakness it is, too eagerly, and too fondly, to seek objects on whom to expend its yearning.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck
Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
YOU WERE MY FAVORITE THING AND IN IMAGINATION YOUR DEATH WILL NOT EXIST IT IS ALL 'AS IF' FROM NOW ONAS IF YOU ARE NOT GONEYOU WILL BE THE GIRL BESIDE MENEVER MORE THAN A HEARTBEAT LENGTH AWAYTHE WOMAN WHO WILL BE THE HILL OF MY BED A CLIMB TO THE TOPAND SUCH VIEWS TO MAKE LITTLE THINGS OFLITTLE US THAT WILL BE PART YOU AND PART MEAND WHOLE IN THOSE TWO THINGSAS IF YOU ARE NOT GONE AND WILL BE WITH ME TO GET THE WRINKLES THE WHITE HAIRTHE SPINE SHAPED LIKE A ROCKING CHAIRAS IF YOU ARE NOT GONE AND SO WILL HAVE THE LOVE OF GOING IN MY ARMSWARM AND WITH MEYES, YOU ARE MY FAVORITE THINGYOU ALWAYS WILL BE.
— Tiffany McDaniel, The Summer that Melted Everything
Time heals nothing. It only brings other issues and tissues, and takes what is incurable or unacceptable out of the center of our attention.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, The Tao of Physical and Spiritual
Because we had known the good times, I think my brother and I felt the loss more acutely. My father's waning presence, his chronic absence, his disappearance. Now he was just a memory.
— Bryan Cranston, A Life in Parts
Loss was a night that never ended.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
Loss is the uninvited door that extends us an unexpected invitation to unimaginable possibilities.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
A loss may be sometimes a gain.
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Maybe the thing that we’re losing is the very thing that has caused us to lose everything else in the first place.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
I am sad when I think that the years go by like sacks that we mark "Returned Empty," sad when I think that we shall be separated from one another and from ourselves.
— Eugène Ionesco, The Colonel's Photograph
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Gospel of Mark ~ Mark 8:36
— Jesus Christ
We would prefer all gain and no loss in life, yet that would gain us nothing more than great loss.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
After a few minutes, she speaks up again. “You’re next. Sing.”Anxiety grips Hallelujah’s chest, squeezing. “I don’t sing,” she says.“C’mon, it doesn’t matter if you’re bad. It’s not like this is a concert hall—”“She’s not bad.” Jonah’s back. “She has a great voice.”Rachel swings around to look from Jonah to Hallelujah. “Really? Now you have to—”“No."“But—”“I don’t sing,” Hallelujah repeats, turning away.Jonah joins them by the fire. The silence stretches out. Except it’s not really silent, not with the birds and wind and fire and how loud Hallelujah’s heart is beating. And then Jonah clears his throat. “You used to sing,” he says. “You were great.”Hallelujah ignores the compliment. She looks into the fire. She feels the last of the day’s happiness fading away, already a memory.“Why’d you quit?” Jonah asks. “Was it ’cause of Luke?”Hallelujah inhales deeply. She feels the familiar spark of anger in her gut. “Yes,” she says. “It was because of Luke. And you. And everyone else. So thanks for that.” Jonah’s face drops. She can see that she’s hit a nerve. Well, he hurt her first. The way he took Luke’s side, shutting her out. The loss of his friendship, when she needed a friend most. The loss of their voices harmonizing, when she needed music most. How she just hurt him can’t begin to compare to all of that.
— Kathryn Holmes
Loss eventually arrives when something departs. Grief is working through both.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
I don't know about the first steps in a geography of loss, and I know that it's unmapped. I know that we all have to go by ourselves.
— Wayne Earl, This Star Won't Go Out: The Life and Words of Esther Grace Earl
The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
What is gone is gone and will not come back. When the earth swallows, it swallows forever and we are left to stumble along feeling the absences. These are our burdens.
— Nadia Hashimi, When the Moon is Low
As children inch their way into adolescence, the parent changes. He is an authority, a source of answers, and a chastising voice. Depending on the day, he may be resented, emulated, questioned, or defied.Only as an adult can a child imagine his parent as a whole person, as a husband, a brother, or a son. Only then can a child see how his parent fits into the world beyond four walls. Saleem had only bits and pieces of his father, mostly the memories of a young boy. He would spend the rest of his life, he knew, trying to reconstruct his father with the scraps he could recall or gather from his mother.
— Nadia Hashimi, When the Moon is Low
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Well, this might sound stupid but I think he was my best friend. Like the other half of me. I'm so scared something might have happened to him when he went back. I miss him so much sometimes I look at windows and I want to just walk right through them -- like press myself through the glass. I want their sharp edges to fragment me.
— Jaclyn Moriarty, A Tangle of Gold
I guess when someone's gone from your life for a while, all you think about are the big things. The big regrets, the could-have, should-haves. Or the big moments, the memories that are going to be with you forever, those life-changing moments, like first kisses and first confessions and first trusts. And you think about the lasts too: the last kiss, the last words, the last moments.
— Beth Revis, A World Without You
Isobel had entrusted the note to Gwen just before Baltimore. And the small scrap of paper still remained her only tangible evidence that Varen had loved her.Expect...he didn't anymore.
— Kelly Creagh, Oblivion
If I only looked at what I've lost, I'd never be able to see what I have.
— Cindy Charlton
from “The Unquarried Blue of Those Depths Is All But Blinding,” There are some things we just don’t talk about—Not even in the morning, when we’re waking,When your calloused fingers tentatively walkThe slope of my waist: How love’s a rust-worn boat,Abandoned at the dock—and who could doubtWaves lick their teeth, eyeing its hull? We’re takingOur wreckage as a promise, so we don’t talk.We wet the tired oars, tide drawing us out.
— Ashley Anna McHugh, Into These Knots: Winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize
Betty Knot was sitting on the porch now with her old mongrel dog. Both of them fast and peacefully asleep in the shade, almost comically so, the widow leaning in her rocker with her mouth open wide and the old dog sprawled at her feet. And seeing them there made him smile and then unexpectedly saddened him with a sudden forceful clarity. It was as though he had looked behind the scene on the porch across the street into some terrible scene in the future. Because they each were all the other had in the world by way of comfort and it was possible for him to understand in that moment the cruel eventuality that was blooming there. They were both so damn old. He sensed a sort of fate about them and sensed too that it would descend upon them soon, that soon either the woman would lose the dog or the dog would lose the woman and they had been together since the dog was a pup. When death came to one the other would be left alone, no familiar hand to pat the dog or cool wet nose to nuzzle the hand, and there would be no consoling either dog or woman, something fragile lost forever in some awful rending.
— Jack Ketchum, The Lost
You loved her," Isobel
— Kelly Creagh, Oblivion
Love came from all directions. On paper, on screens, in dishes and words and deeds. We’re thinking of you every minute.I’m sorry.We’re sorry.We’re so sorry…
— Suanne Laqueur, Here to Stay
There is the softest of sobbing as the coffin is lowered into the ground, but it is difficult to pinpoint who it is coming from, or if it is instead a collective sound of mingled sighs and wind and shifting feet.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
We burn out not because we don't care but because we don't grieve. We burn out because we have allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that we have no room left to care.
— Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal
Loss of cell phone reception inside of a building generally indicates that the following two issues may be present: 1. High electromagnetic interference (EMI) environment from dirty electricity that is being generated by electronic products. 2. Shielding and Faraday cage effects from metalwork in the building.
— Steven Magee
Time does not heal all wounds; if a man is not careful, time erases wounds. Then what is he left with? The cold and the silence.
— Doug Rice, An Erotics of Seeing: The force of photography as philosophy's broken sentence
A hole is a space where everything has been moved out so that opportunity has space to move in.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
It doesn't matter if you never see someone again, I told myself. There are millions of people in the world, and most of them never see each other in the first place. You hoped to know Ellington Feinr forever, but there's no such thing as forever, really. Everything is much shorter than that.
— Lemony Snicket, Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?
Celaena knew where she was before she awoke. And she didn't care. She was living the same story again and 
— Sarah J. Maas, Crown of Midnight
Dare my guilty heart admit the horrible acknowledgement that I love you still?
— Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya
I'm sorry, I didn't mean--""To speak of it?" asked the K'mir. Diane nodded. "You have to, just to bleed off the poison from the memory.
— Tamora Pierce, Wild Magic
Denise would never get over it. She knew that. Tommy's bones at the bottom of the well. She and Henry had spent some time with those bones. When the police had finished testing and tagging and photohgraphing them the funeral parlor had given them time before the burial. She'd clutched them to her chest. Run her fingertips along the smooth sockets that had held his shining eyes. There but not there. Some part of her wanted those bones. Wanted to put the femurs under her pillow at night when she went to sleep. To carry his skull around in her purse so she'd be with him always. She understood now how people went crazy and did crazy things.
— Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time
If misery were water, he thinks as he climbs into his car and turns the key, I could just drown or let it wash me away entirely.
— Dennis Sharpe, Distant Thunder
I miss you so much. Maybe if I say your name over and over again, it will eventually feel wrong to me. Like a word you write too many times suddenly doesn't look right anymore. I will try that.
— Kate McGahan
She did not belong to the healthy group of widows and widowers who, after mourning, would nurture the seed of their grief into growing from loss—perhaps continuing the dreams of the lost, or learning to cherish alone the things they’d cherished together.She belonged instead to the sad lot who clung to grief, who nurtured it by never moving beyond it. They’d shelter it deep inside where the years padded it in saudade layers like some malignant pearl.
— Darrell Drake, A Star-Reckoner's Lot
Have you ever lost someone close to you? Someone who is at the core of your universe, the hero of all your stories...when that happens, it isn’t just the loss of one life, it’s the loss of two lives - one who found another world, perhaps...and one who is left behind.
— Faraaz Kazi, More Than Just Friends
It was too quiet for hope, and then too loud for safety.She thought of the people she had lost, of the affection, the smiles, the belonging she could never again take for granted. It was the end of a life, and as she stood there, shivering in the brief night-time chill, it dawned on her that it was the end of her childhood.
— Radhika Swarup, Where the River Parts
She felt the intimate loss of who was meant to become.
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
Nothing is lost that love remembers.
— Kate McGahan
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
— Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
He may take long walksin the raining darkalmost aimlesslyto a spot of soaked grassin a neighbor’s open field.He’s decided this is the placefor you and him to meet again.
— Kristen Henderson
I missed my one true friend, my mother. She and I were close in a way I don't think many other mothers and daughters were. I slept beside her every night of my childhood: so near to her back, I could probably sketch the constellation of moles and freckles on her skin there. When I was a very little girl, every morning I would wake before her and arrange myself so that when she woke, we were eye-to-eye. I miss her, with a never-ending ache that I did not think was possible, that crowds out any other feeling and certainly all reason, and any good sense.
— Kaitlyn Greenidge, We Love You, Charlie Freeman
Do youOr do you not knowYou're with me more deadThan you were livingReach me some timeIn a dream may beLet me remember how sweetYour presence can beReach out your handsAnd call to meFor soon it will beAnother anniv
— Semba Jallow-Rutherford, Sweet and Bitter Twisted
No matter where you live, you have the memory of something you used to eat that is no longer a part of your diet - something your grandmother used to make, something a small shop used to carry. Something we have lost. This extinction is a process; it happens one meal at a time.
— Preeti Simran Sethi, Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love
Love and Friendship, when you have them or lose them they are much like the Greek story of Icarus...You can make you feel like you're soaring above the clouds with happiness when you have them or feel like you are plummeting to the depths of hell with despair when you lose them.
— Anonymous
Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was n longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
GRIEF TAUGHT ME TO LIVE NUMB. Death takes more than just the one life. It thieves tiny particles from the ones left behind until you feel only half alive.
— Kennedy Ryan, My Soul to Keep
A lie doesn't become dangerous only with exposure; it is toxic, however well buried.
— Decca Aitkenhead, All at Sea
True photographs tend to remain on the streets, the story almost about to enter the edge of the frame of the snapshot or the shutter closing a moment too late, the story having just abandoned the frame.
— Doug Rice, An Erotics of Seeing: The force of photography as philosophy's broken sentence
That is the tragedy of losing an older brother. He stays still. You keep on and one day become the older one. It's unnatural, that reversal. It's the thing that keeps the family from ever being whole again.
— Tiffany McDaniel, The Summer that Melted Everything
I saw her disappear from my life like a star that fades into obscurity behind a veil of clouds.
— Trevor Driggers
Sometimes you have to let go of a career you love, a beloved home, or a loved one. Take time to grieve a loss of this nature. If you find yourself disoriented, consider surrounding yourself with people who see your strengths, goodness, gifts, and talents. They will help you find your way.
— Laura Staley
Dear Jesus! you are so precious to me. I thank God that even if I went through so much loss in life, I still have you.
— Gugu Mona
Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness descends.
— Julian Barnes, Levels of Life
Losing will not always amount to a loss, sometimes you have to lose those toxic relationships and bad habits to create a space for better things.
— Gugu Mona
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.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen, With Burning Hearts: A Meditation on the Eucharistic Life
What is left when there is no love? A rope and rock.
— Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors
He let himself into the house and sat down with his back against the door, where the tiles were cool on his legs and he tried to hear, as he had earlier imagined, every single thing that his wife was not doing in their home on this Sunday night. He could hardly keep track of it all, she was so busy being absent. She was not pouring water into a glass or a pitcher. She was not kicking his shoes out of the hall. She was not switching the laundry into the dryer. She was not opening the screen door and going outside barefoot and calling for him to come look at the sunset. She was not putting lotion on her elbows or flattening the newspaper or picking up the ringing telephone, which would go on calling out the absence of Petra in nine-ring sequences dozens of times every day.
— Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born: Stories
Sometimes life events break your heart. Even as you grieve, allow light to seep through the cracks, uplift, and illuminate a healing. Baby turtles emerge from the cracking of shells; new life can burst forth. Clear away all broken belongings as a metaphorical pathway fresh, loving experiences in uncharted waters.
— Laura Staley
How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions? —how had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them, But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate.
— Edgar Allan Poe
It was as if I'd lost some cosmic game of musical chairs; the song had stopped, I was left standing, and there was simply nothing to be dine about it.
— Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors
A woman in Charlotte approached me and said that she’s tired of the dysfunction in my novels. I told her I was sorry, but that is how the world has presented itself to me throughout my life.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
Like humans, birds mourn the loss of fledglings and mates. There are a thousand variant weeping songs to sing. I had to sign mine and get on with it. That is what I did
— Michele Young-Stone, Above Us Only Sky
Ravaged all,Bogo tabalTimore toronTotoo now gone...
— Lois Lowry, Gathering Blue
...the way we ended things was not uncommon for kids like us. She said we'd lost enough in our short lives to want to cauterize our wounds before they happened. We burned our connection closed before we felt the holes.
— Joshilyn Jackson, The Opposite of Everyone
I felt guilty because I was upset by the loss of one friend when the Old Man had lost nearly everyone he loved. Loss, I soon learned from him, is not measured in numbers. It's not comparative. It's in here. I'm touching my chest now.
— Michele Young-Stone, Above Us Only Sky
When you lose a beloved belonging, rather than being unkind to yourself, imagine finding it and feeling relief and joy. Sometimes when things get lost, it’s a reminder to appreciate all you still have. The experience of reconnecting with something you love and use often increases one’s sense of gratitude.
— Laura Staley
When did you stop caring? he asked.When did you start noticing? she replied.
— Lang Leav
You must remain. I must depart.Two autumns falling in the heart.
— Buson
A healing heart has no time frame.
— Nikki Rowe
People like me are blamed for curiosity; having lost part of our lives, we are apt to fill the gap from the lives of others. In this I am like the rest, and make no pretences.
— Mary Renault, The Persian Boy
The bereaved need more than just the space to grieve the loss. They also need the space to grieve the transition.
— Lynda Cheldelin Fell
Bill Hodges is her touchstone, the way she measures her ability to interact with the world. Which is only another way of saying that he is the way she measures her sanity. Trying to imagine her life with him gone is like standing on top of a skyscraper and looking at the sidewalk sixty stories below.
— Stephen King, End of Watch
And then our Mum and Dad were in love and they were truly dry-stone strong and durable and people speak of ease and joy and spontaneity and the fact that their two smells became one smell, our smell. Us.
— Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers
Life… has a way of testing the fault line
— Josephine Hart
Death had marked his family with unbreakable black halos, until only two remained.
— R. W. Patterson
...hope nourishes while loss empties a person out," he said.... "Lila, my love, my love,...lay down your weapons. Don't punish us because I told myself a different story than the one you told yourself.
— Anat Talshir
I do not know where I am going or what I will do when I get there. I know only that to put one foot in front of the other, moves me on, away from you to a place, where I do not want to be.
— Jane Yolen, Things to Say to a Dead Man: Poems at the End of a Marriage and After
April ended and May came along, but May was even worse than April. In the deepening spring of May, I had not choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart. It usually happened as the sun was going down. In the pale evening gloom, when the soft fragrance of magnolias hung in air, my heart would swell without warning, and tremble, and and lurch with a stab of pain. I would try clamping my eyes shut and gritting my teeth, and wait for it to pass. And it would pass - but slowly, taking its own time, and leaving a dull ache behind.
— Haruki Murakami
from Taking Your Clothes to the Salvation Army:Okay, so strangers will be grateful for this, will wear the socks to keep their feet warm, blow their noses in your handkerchiefs, pull up the shorts, tuck in the size large shirts (too small for our boys, too big for our daughter), and bits of you will be out there, engaging in a life you no longer have.
— Jane Yolen, Things to Say to a Dead Man: Poems at the End of a Marriage and After
At first I thought he was laughing because his shoulders were shaking, but then he put his palms on his eyes and I realized he was crying. It was the quietest crying I've ever heard. Like a whisper. I was going to go over to him, but then I thought maybe he was whisper-crying because he didn't want me or anyone else to hear him.
— R.J. Palacio
Tears are God's gift to us. Our holy water. They heal us as they flow.
— Rita Schiano
I watched something vanish, as if I was in a dream from which I couldn't wake.
— Mu Xin, An Empty Room
Killing me will not end your grief. It will only create more of it.
— Elizabeth Carlton, Chivalry's Code
The effects of loss are acute, and unique to each individual. Not everyone mourns in the same way, but everyone mourns.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
It must be terrible to be old, when you love someone who died young. They never change in your mind, and every day you see yourself grow away from that person you were when you loved and knew them. Until you are more of a shadow than they are, and the girl you were is altogether gone, more dead even than that young man on the battlefield.
— Paul Kearney, The Wolf in the Attic
I couldn't stand the waiting anymore. I couldn't stand how alone it made me feel."And a part of you wished it would just end, said the monster, even if it meant losing her.And the nightmare began. The nightmare that always ended with -"I let her go," Conor choked out. "I could have held on but I let her go."And that, the monster said, is the truth."I didn't mean it, though!" Conor said, his voice rising. "I didn't mean to let her go! And now it's for real! Now she's going to die and it's my fault!"And that, the monster said, is not the truth at all.
— Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls
And what will bow your shoulders downwill be the vicious and worthless company with whom you will fall into this abyss.
— Dante Alighieri, Paradiso
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.
— Elisabeth Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor
Taking your language into my soul, feeling it separate from sentences to words burning with flight, ‘til all I have left are meaningless letters pushing fire through my veins. Words can draw blood if you’re very, very careful. - Broken Places
— Rachel Thompson
You used words, discarding them meaninglessly, without thinking, whereas I thought they held meaning. I found what you will never see: that my love resides on the other side of words. - Broken Places
— Rachel Thompson
I’ve traveled this road for many decades and I still don’t know how to go. I am a wanderer, traversing mountains of time. There is no fault, only fault lines that tremor and quake, barring me, no warning. Aftershocks. -Broken Places
— Rachel Thompson
No! It was not me. I did not touch him!""But you know who did. You were there," Shanti whispered, her face cracking, revealing visions of death. Of loss. Of misery so intense it sucked all the happy thoughts from the room and corroded their memories.Sanders took a step forward even as the Captain did, not knowing exactly what to do, but wanting to cure this woman of that pain. The sight of it broke his heart. No one deserved to see a loved on killed, and then get confronted with it like this. No one.
— K.F. Breene, Chosen
At the graveyard there was no hope, so there was nothing to lose and no chance for disappointment.
— Calista Lynne, We Awaken
The inscription on his gravestone had felt so wholly insufficient the moment she saw it. Just a name and dates, carved by machine. Just the inadequate and impersonal. Loving Father and Husband, like every other headstone there, whether it was true or not. This was the tasteful way to do it, she knew, even though it showed none of the true shape of the man
— Stuart Nadler, The Inseparables
On the positive side, a strong sense of comradely loyalty triggers genuine affection and friendship. On the negative side, it may strengthen contempt for the lives of opponents and, of course, the loss of a comrade may be followed by even greater brutality in battle.
— Nel Noddings, Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War
It was only one man who had gone, but it felt like forever, something so permanent and unstoppable that it blasted her. If she were a tree, she would drop all her leaves.
— Jenny Downham
What was wrong with her? Why did things like this keep happening to her? Love wasn't supposed to hurt, yet it felt like all she knew when it came to love was pain. Every time she opened her heart, she just got burned. Or, in this case, frozen. And she was getting sick and tired of it.
— Elizabeth Rudnick, A Frozen Heart
That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem's side of the closet, which he has still not emptied. Here are Willem's shirts on their hangers, and his sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lined up beneath. He takes down the shirt he needs, a burgundy plaid woven through with threads of yellow, which Willem used to wear around the house in the springtime, and shrugs it on over his head. But instead of putting his arms through its sleeves, he ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a straitjacket, but which he can pretend—if he concentrates—are Willem's arms in an embrace around him. He climbs into bed. This ritual embarrasses and shames him, but he only does it when he really needs it, and tonight he really needs it.
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
The idea that a loss will get easier as time passes, is complete bullshit. It doesn’t get easier; you just learn to function while balancing the large burden on your shoulders.
— S.D. Hendrickson, The Mason List
The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There's little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?
— Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
I do not want to eat or drink, or i will lose the taste of you in my mouth
— Jandy Nelson
The problem with love is this: It dies. And when it does, you die with it.
— Apollo Blake, Shadows of Ourselves
Then you know. You know what it's like to love someone like you love yourself and lose them.
— Monica Hesse
Letting her go wasn't a choice because he would never let her go
—  she was taken away from him.
With time one ages, and with age one comes closer to their end. With time one builds a family, a house, a name and with age one learns to live without them.
— Mrinalini Mitra, Belief
We put our lives on hold for people who so easily forget about us.
— Trevor Driggers
But when it comes down to it, we all die alone.
— Monica Hesse, Girl in the Blue Coat
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?
— Yann Martel, The High Mountains of Portugal
The world went on. People left and people died and people went to memorial services and put orange blocks of cheese into their purses. People confessed to you that they were hungry all the time. And then you got up in the morning and pretended that none of it had happened.
— Kate DiCamillo, Raymie Nightingale
There were many tears, many unsure times, many troubled moments. The fun memories were only a few, but even so, those memories will shine bright like stardust, and continue to shine on in my heart.
— Mika Yamamori, ひるなかの流星 12 [Hirunaka no Ryuusei 12]
Because Dad told you he'd be here forever. Because I thought forever was like Mars -- far away.
— Kwame Alexander
When I go out by the gateway, taking the road I drove along that first time I picked up Lotte for the ball, how very different it all is! It is all over, all of it! There is not a hint of the world that once was, not one bulse-beat of those past emotions. I feel like a ghost returning to the burnt-out ruins of the castle he built in his prime as a prince, which he adorned with magnificent splendours and then, on his deathbed, but full of hope, left to his beloved son
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Sometimes the worst failures in our lives turn out to be for the best. Sometimes our path leads through darkness, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't walk it. Sometimes our path leads to loss. But that doesn't mean we've gone astray.
— Anne Elisabeth Stengl, Golden Daughter
I've decided. The next time I cry, it'll be for "someone special", and it'll definitely be "tears of happiness.
— Mika Yamamori, ひるなかの流星 8 [Hirunaka no Ryuusei 8]
If you lose something, do not worry.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
This is probably going to be one wound that can never be healed.
— Mika Yamamori, ひるなかの流星 8 [Hirunaka no Ryuusei 8]
I do not know, not do I care to rememberThe time in which I knew distinctly that you were goneYou fade in and out of memoryUpon which I can not feign to touchOr feelHow cruel to leave me With paper but no penWhat a way to leave meYou give me cups, but not water to fill themSo they sit thereEmpty Your reflectionBouncing to and froFrom every surface
— Queenbe Monyei
...I did what most kids do when their world feels destroyed. I tried to care less about what remained...It was untrue, of course.
— Adam Haslett
...I did what most kids do when their world feels destroyed. I tried to care less about what remained...This was untrue, of course.
— Adam Haslett
I'm going to move on, while carrying these feelings with me.
— Mika Yamamori, ひるなかの流星 8 [Hirunaka no Ryuusei 8]
I do not know, nor do I care to rememberThe time in which I knew distinctly that you were goneYou fade in and out of memoryUpon which I can not feign to touchOr feelHow cruel to leave me With paper but no penWhat a way to leave meYou give me cups, but not water to fill themSo they sit thereEmpty Your reflectionBouncing to and froFrom every surface
— Queenbe Monyei
Listen, said Beverly. Let me tell you something. There is no Very Friendly Animal Center. That cat is long gone.
— Kate DiCamillo, Raymie Nightingale
Only marriage combines all three forms of companionship - spouse is family, best friend, and permanent companion. This is why it is widely held that while the death of a child is the most painful loss, the death of a spouse is the most disorienting one.
— Dennis Prager, Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual
Silence then, and the scent of apple trees, and the nightmare sense of grief that comes when a man wakes again to feel a loss he has forgotten in sleep.
— Mary  Stewart
Mother was comfort. Mother was home. A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean. Some boats eventually floated ashore. And some boats, like me, seemed to float farther and farther from land
— Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea
Let us also acknowledge that the hearts which suffer the most from our wars are those of mothers. Their vital voices have been left out of the political equation for too long. An Iraqi or American mother cries the same as an Israeli or Afghan mother. The eyes of a mother who has suffered the loss of a child can destroy the soul of anyone who gazes upon them. More souls become casualties of war than physical bodies. War is a soul-shattering experience for the innocent.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
I still wonder what made him leave. Were they my demons or his own?
— Vaishnavi Hajari
When I lost my son, I became a citizen of a country I never knew existed.
— Stephanie Oakes, The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly
My boys. I don't have them to hold. What do I do with my arms?
— Sonali Deraniyagala
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.
— Rebecca McNutt, Shadowed Skies: The Third Smog City Novel
Because she is in God's hands.' But if so, she was in God's hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body and if so, why? If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is not good or there is no God: for the only life we know He hurts us beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine. If it is consistent with hurting us, then He may hurt us after death is unendurably as before it.
— C.S. Lewis
Passing beneath the dance hall, thinking again of this book, I realized suddenly that our life had come to an end: I realized that the book I was planning was nothing more than a tomb in which to bury her - and the me which had belonged to her. That was some time ago, and ever since I have been trying to write it. Why is it so difficult? Why? Because the idea of an "end" is intolerable to me.
— Henry Miller
I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once.
— Sarah Manguso, The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend
There is no loss in life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
There was a time when I was lucky enough to believe that 'There's this girl in Pakistan' would be the worst five words that Al ever said to me. Years later, they would be totally eclipsed by 'They can't find a heartbeat'.
— Ruth Ahmed, When Ali Met Honour
It wasn't a rock. It was a dog's rubber bone, left behind months ago to be buried first under autumn leaves, then winter snow. Just an old rubber bone, but Batty was already braced for what she knew would come—the rushing in her ears, the stab in her stomach, and the seeping away of the colors from her world. The soft blue spring sky, the yellow forsythia hedge, even Ben's bright red hair—all dulled, all gray and wretched.
— Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks in Spring
I was terrified that tomorrow the truth would start.
— Sonali Deraniyagala
It was possible, I found, to both mourn a loss and yet be grateful it happened.
— Jennifer S. Brown, Modern Girls
Why did the sun rise this morningIt's not naturalI don't want to see the lightIt's not time to close the casketOr say Kaddish for my sonI've already buried two fathersWith a mother to comeIsn't that enough Lord who wants usTo exalt and santify HimI don't want to wear the mourner's ribbonOr wake up crying every morningFor God knows how longI don't want to tuck my son into the groundAs if we were putting him to bedFor the last timeClose the prayer book I will not pretendThat God brings peace upon usAnd upon all IsraelI don't want to hear anyoneScolding me from her wheelchairBecause I'm crying too hardI'm not worried about a heart attackNothingnessYou've already broken my heartI will not forgive youSun of emptinessSky of blank cloudsI will not forgive youIndifferent GodUntil you give back my son
— Edward Hirsch, Gabriel: A Poem
Friedrich Rückert wrote 425 poemsAfter his two youngest childrenDied from scarlet feverWithin sixteen days of each otherIn 1833 and 1834 he could not copeAnd often thought they had gone outFor a while "they'll be home soon"He told himself to tell his wife"They're only taking a long walk"Mahler scored five of those poemsIn 1901 and 1904 for a vocalistAnd an orchestra to break your heartAs soon as I heard the plaintive oboe And the descending movement of the hornAnd the lyric baritone enteringI felt I should not be listeningTo Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singingKindertotenlieder with the Berlin PhilharmonicMahler's wife was superstitiousAnd thought he was chancing disasterWith Songs on the Death of Children"Now the sun wants to rise so brightlyAs if nothing terrible had happened overnightThat tragedy happened to me alone"Mahler knew he could never have written themAfter his four-year-old daughter diedFrom scarlet fever three years laterHe said he felt sorry for himselfThat he needed to write these songsAnd for the world that would listen to them
— Edward Hirsch
Saying goodbye to someone you love isn’t really the hard part. It’s living every day, not being able to say anything to them at all.
— Laurel Ulen Curtis, Hate: A Love Story
The sorrow we feel when we lose a loved one is the price we pay to have had them in our lives.
— Rob Liano
We may be different, but in this moment we're feeling the exact same thing: the sad kind of bliss where you realize, suddenly, how perfect your life really has been all along. So perfect it hurts, and you could let yourself weep if you wanted. So perfect that even though everything you know is ending, you truly believe life will continue to be beautiful, even—or maybe especially—in those pure moments of loss.
— Emily Henry, The Love That Split the World
Time is pulling us apart. With every second that passes, the space between us widens. Today, I saw him yesterday. In a few days, it will have been last week. Then, last month. And there is nothing I can do to keep time from wedging more of itself between us. It is inevitable. - Miles
— Will Kostakis, The Sidekicks
They are dead. We are dead. It is over.
— Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen
We get sombre about death. Think about Charon the ferryman rowing the souls across the Styx to the Isle of the Dead. Pretty grim stuff. Unless you think that, perhaps, at times, old Charon rows souls back to the land of the living too. Perhaps I have merely gone to rest awhile…
— Sean J Halford, Stronger Than Lions
I'm crying again. I cry so often now that sometimes I don't even realize it until the tears are already streaming down my cheeks.
— Kim Holden, Bright Side