c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need.
— Michelle Latiolais, Widow: Stories
She had been grief stricken as her father lay dying but now she felt weightless, the way people do when they're no longer sure they have a reason to be connected to this world. The slightest breeze could have carried her away, into the night sky, across the universe.
— Alice Hoffman, Skylight Confessions
More tears rushed from the depths of her tortured soul. ... The losses piled up.
— Karen Kingsbury, The Chance
I stare at the pile of discarded remnants and think of my mother. Did she touch that pillar there? Does her scent still linger in a fragment of glass or a splinter of wood? A terrible emptiness settles into my chest. No matter how much I go about living, there are always small reminders that make the loss fresh again.
— Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing
Everything worth having can be carried in your heart.
— Spoken by pirate captain Raider Prescott to the heroine  in Betina Krahn's PASSION'S RANSOM
The more one loves, the heavier the meaning of death becomes, and the deeper the sense of loss.
— Otsuichi, ZOO〈２〉
When you lose someone who's as close as your own skin, the only place you can find him again is hidden inside your memories.
— Deborah Blumenthal, The Blue House Dog
May you hear my feeble voice! It will tell you that here below there is a heart full of the memory of you.
— Herculine Barbin, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite
Walk openly, Marian used to say. Love even the threat and the pain, feel yourself fully alive, cast a bold shadow, accept, accept. What we call evil is only a groping towards good, part of the trial and error by which we move toward the perfected consciousness…God is kind? Life is good? Nature never did betray the heart that loved her? Why the reward she received for living intensely and generously and trying to die with dignity? Why the horror at the bridge her last clear sight of earth?...I do not accept, I am not reconciled. But one thing she did. She taught me the stupidity of the attempt to withdraw and be free of trouble and harm... She said, “You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Now you know. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born, just to be!”I had had no answer for her then. Now I might have one. Yes, think of it, I might say. And think how random and indiscriminate it is, think how helplessly we must submit, think how impossible it is to control or direct it. Think how often beauty and delicacy and grace are choked out by weeds. Think how endless and dubious is the progress from weed to flower.Even alive, she never convinced me with her advocacy of biological perfectionism. She never persuaded me to ignore, or look upon as merely hard pleasures, the evil that I felt in every blight and smut and pest in my garden- that I felt, for that matter, squatting like a toad on my own heart. Think of the force of life, yes, but think of the component of darkness in it. One of the things that’s in whale’s milk is the promise of pain and death. And so? Admitting what is so obvious, what then? Would I wipe Marion Catlin out of my unperfected consciousness if I could? Would I forgo the pleasure of her company to escape the bleakness of her loss? Would I go back to my own formula, which was twilight sleep, to evade the pain she brought with her?Not for a moment. And so even in the gnashing of my teeth, I acknowledge my conversion. It turns out to be for me as I once told her it would be for her daughter. I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow.
— Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things
Verily, a man should not cling to those who have passed, for he will likely neglect service to the living.
— Wayne Gerard Trotman, Veterans of the Psychic Wars
For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.
— Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood
He passed through her with his soul caressing hers goodbye. And in that final hour he was with her one last time.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Jack sprung to his feet out of reach. "I'd prefer to finish this intact. " "My apologies,” Cabal said, grinning viciously. "l keep forgetting, you're only human." His smile softened to full amusement as Jack raised his sword in challenge."Human or not," Jack said as he slowly approached him. "I carry the advantage of unworldly knowledge. "" Is that what you're doing?" Cabal laughed; "Something unworldly?""I have a vast library of knowledge inside my head from my homeland.""What knowledge could your world offer that would be useful here?""How about a toilet?" Jack winked at Nicole.“Perhaps you should build one and leave us all in awe.” Cabal declared.“People could call them ‘Jacks’ for short.” Nicole added to the conversation.
— Alaina Stanford, When Magic Fails
By seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself, in a divine sense forgets his own name, dares not believe in himself, finds being himself too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, along with the crowd. Now this form of despair goes practically unnoticed in the world. Precisely by losing oneself in this way, such a person gains all that is required for a flawless performance in everyday life, yes, for making a great success out of life. Here there is no dragging of the feet, no difficulty with his self and its infinitizing, he is ground smooth as a pebble, as exchangeable as a coin of the realm. Far from anyone thinking him to be in despair, he is just what a human being ought to be. Naturally, the world has generally no understanding of what is truly horrifying.
— Søren Kierkegaard
Funny how an absence can feel like a presence, like that space practically glows with her outline and make me notice how she's not here.
— Joan Steinau Lester, Black, White, Other: In Search of Nina Armstrong
What I never expected is how much nothing there is afterwords. In life,, he was not nearby. Now he is everywhere I dream and every place I wake. Or if not him exactly, then a nothing so much like him I cannot seem to wish it goodnight.
— Jim Moore, The Long Experience of Love
Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels.
— Laini Taylor, Days of Blood & Starlight
Heart, we will forget him!You and I, to-night!You may forget the warmth he gave,I will forget the light.When you have done, pray tell me,That I my thoughts may dim;Haste! lest while you’re lagging,I may remember him!
— Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers - as in a looking glass, darkly - one's absent friends.
— Vincent van Gogh
She has been surprised by grief, its constancy, its immediacy, its unrelenting physical pain.
— Michelle Latiolais, Widow: Stories
Women can go mad with insomnia.The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird -- a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home.Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one.
— Cathy Ostlere, Lost
I don't dare touch her. Loss is a knowledge I'm sorry to have. Perhaps the only thing worse than experiencing it, is watching it replay anew in someone else--all the awful stages picking up like a chorus that has to be sung.
— Lauren DeStefano, Sever
Haymitch isn't thinking of arenas, but something else. "Johanna's back in the hospital."I assumed Johanna was fine, had passed her exam, but simply wasn't assigned to a sharp shooters' unit. She's wicked with a throwing axe but about average with a gun. "Is she hurt? What happened?""It was while she was on the Block. They try to ferret out a soldier's potential weakness. So they flooded the street, " says Haymitch.This doesn't help. Johanna can swim. At least, I seem to remember her swimming around some in the Quarter Quell. Not like Finnick, of course, but none of us are like Finnick. "So?""That's how they tortured her in the Capitol. Soaked her then used electric shocks," says Haymitch. "In the Block, she had some kind of flashback. Panicked, didn't know where she was. She's back under sedation." Finnick and I just stand there as if we've lost the ability to respond.I think of the way Johanna never showers. How she forced herself into the rain like it was acid that day. I had attributed her misery to morphling withdrawal. "You two should go see her. You're as close to friends as she's got," says Haymitch.That makes the whole thing worse. I don't really know what's between Johanna and Finnick, but I hardly know her. No family. No friends.Not so much as a token from District 7 to set beside her regulation clothes in her anonymous drawer.Nothing.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
And then Jonah heard God’s voice.	“Jonah, do you know what the difference is between you and the trees?”		He was confident it was God because God usually asked questions but gave no answers. Jonah didn’t need a divine answer to this question, he knew it.	“Yes,” he said. “The difference between me and the trees is that the trees let go of their leaves. I keep holding onto mine. The trees make room for new life. I don’t.
— David W. Jones, Going Nuts!
Wandering is better than place sometimes, than home, than destination. Sometimes she can eke out the idea that wandering is possibility, chance, serendipity--he might be there, that place she didn't think to look, hadn't worked hard enough to find....
— Michelle Latiolais, Widow: Stories
If those we love visit us when we dream, those who torment us almost always visit us when we're still awake.
— Alyson Richman, The Lost Wife
MOTHER – By Ted KooserMid April already, and the wild plumsbloom at the roadside, a lacy whiteagainst the exuberant, jubilant greenof new grass and the dusty, fading black of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet,only the delicate, star-petaledblossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume.You have been gone a month todayand have missed three rains and one nightlongwatch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellarfrom six to eight while fat spring cloudswent somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured,a storm that walked on legs of lightning,dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.The meadowlarks are back, and the finchesare turning from green to gold. Those sametwo geese have come to the pond again this year,honking in over the trees and splashing down.They never nest, but stay a week or twothen leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts,burning in circles like birthday candles,for this is the month of my birth, as you know,the best month to be born in, thanks to you,everything ready to burst with living.There will be no more new flannel nightshirtssewn on your old black Singer, no birthday cardaddressed in a shaky but businesslike hand.You asked me if I would be sad when it happenedand I am sad. But the iris I moved from your housenow hold in the dusty dry fists of their rootsgreen knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that. Were it not for the way you taught me to lookat the world, to see the life at play in everything,I would have to be lonely forever.
— Ted Kooser, Delights and Shadows
You can't know how much a mother loves.
— Jessica Fortunato, Steam
...she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk's bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs, flooding across the rough wooden floor, down the narrow wooden stairs and out into the old soil of the garden. No roses, no, she does not even ask to make roses, just dissolution; most any night she asks just for that.
— Michelle Latiolais, Widow: Stories
She wasn’t crying at all. This was what scared him the most. Where had she locked up the things he’d seen her feeling that day when she heard? She wasn’t that big a girl to hold all of it—to hold her brother’s life and his death inside of her. To hold all his long-limbed raging tidal motion and all the loss of that.
— Francesca Lia Block, Wasteland
I wouldn’t be who I am today if it wasn’t for the people I had met and the people I had lost.
— Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow
That's the tragedy of falling in love
—  it brings with it the potential for loss.
For all her culture's attention to the physical, it seemingly has little to salve the creatural anguish of losing someone else's body, their touch, their heat, their oceanic heart...she doesn't want another body, she wants the body she loved, the forceps scar across his cheek that she traced with her hand, his penis, its elegant sweep to the side, the preternaturally soft skin. One wants what one has loved, not the idea of love.
— Michelle Latiolais, Widow: Stories
There is a widespread sense of loss here, if not always of God, then at least of meaning.
— Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
In other words, I was a moderately happy penguin who was occasionally attacked by sadness.
— Takuji Ichikawa
The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
Yes, I've lost him. But I don't have to lose myself.
— Lenore Appelhans, Level 2
I thought of all the hardships and people that I had lost in the past few days alone, but, most of all, I thought of how I didn't regret any of it.
— Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow
It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people's too - yours, Leo's, Dad's. We have to expand at the moment we feel the most shrunk.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
Mother (fragment)...You asked me if I would be sad when it happenedand I am sad. But the iris I moved from your housenow hold in the dusty dry fists of their rootsgreen knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.Were it not for the way you taught me to lookat the world, to see the life at play in everything, I would have to be lonely forever.
— Ted Kooser, Delights and Shadows
The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces— those, I think, are the sensations of grief.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Silently and Very Fast
He sank to his knees, absolutely full of despair and sadness. For a long time, droplets of blood continued to fall into his lap.
— Phillip W. Simpson, Rapture
I always wondered what it must be like to lose a twin—if somehow Mary felt it like it was happening to her. If she felt physical pain.
— Francesca Lia Block, Wasteland
I see you in the grass,Running through the snow,But where you have gone,I cannot go.
— Helen Pearson
He felt something trickle down his face and he wiped it away irritably. When he looked at the back of his hand, he found trails of red. He had never cried in his life; in fact, he could not cry with no tear ducts. But now, at last, he was. He was crying tears of blood. For her.
— Phillip W. Simpson
She looked so disappointed, so grieved and desperate that Clem longed to comfort her, only he couldn't think of thing to say that she hadn't heard a hundred times from Dad and Dr. Snow and Mrs. Mack: how things would get better in time, though no one knew how much time, and that life might be a little better for her and Jess once school began again.
— Judith Clarke, Starry Nights
We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.
— Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
I am ashes where once I was fire...
— George Gordon Byron, Selected Poems
I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.
— Robin McKinley, Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast
A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.
— Jay Neugeboren, An Orphan's Tale
...and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
You have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.
— Jodi Picoult, Sing You Home
My heart broke when he died, split in half and fell down into my stomach or somewhere deep and muddy, and I'm still not sure where it is now. I hear it beating sometimes in my ears, or feel its fast pulse in my neck, like I do now; but in my chest, where it should be, it mostly just feels empty.
— Jen Violi, Putting Makeup on Dead People
I wish I could take my brain and put it inside your head,” Winslow said. “Just for a moment. Then you’d know what all I can’t find how to say.
— Alan Heathcock, Volt
This wasn't the first time that I'd come close to death, but it was the first time I'd been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you've loved.
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Ring of Endless Light
We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believed Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.
— Paula McLain, The Paris Wife
I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game
I believe that our world was created with a sense of order. For every loss, there's a gain. Sometimes we're so blinded by the loss that we don't see the gain, don't recognize the gift.
— Debbie Macomber, Angels at Christmas: Those Christmas Angels / Where Angels Go
The moonlight rained down on the beach as if to shine a spotlight on my solitude, and I wanted to cry out at it, ‘Why did you take her? You, surrounded by all of your twinkling stars and infinite wonders and darkness. There’s already enough beauty where you are.
— Rachael Wade, Love and Relativity
I realized, it is not the time that heals, but what we do within that time that creates positive change.
— Diane Dettmann, Twenty-Eight Snow Angels: A Widow's Story of Love, Loss and Renewal
I still want to feel you against me.” Her gaze dropped to his hands. “I want you to stay with me. Hold me. Just tonight. If I lose you again tomorrow then it will still be worth it. I will lose you a hundred times, if you would but hold me in your arms each time before my loss.” She saw his eyes water, but no tears emerged...
— B.C. Morin, Blood of the Sorcerer
Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever.
— Jack Kerouac, Maggie Cassidy
Death is only final when you know you're not going to see them again!
— Evinda Lepins
Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength.
— Oivd
When nothing becomes the vocalThen nothing becomes the focalAnd nothing’s becoming at all
— Kate Kaiser, Letters to my Mother
Loss makes the soul sick
— Laurie Alice Eakes, Lady in the Mist
He felt like his own heart might stop beating just from acknowledging the concept. The sadness, the sorrow, and the loss, they were living things, funnily enough.
— Adam P. Knave, Stays Crunchy in Milk
Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?
— Henry David Thoreau
There is no place for innocence on the battlefield.
— Jocelyn  Murray, Corfe Castle
Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinigar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favourite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone.
— Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown
And then there's the truth beyond that, sitting like an old rock under green creek water: none of these things matter. Right now, in this moment, we have love. We have it in the sound of my daughter's laugher, in Mom's and Georgia's locked fingers, in the warm pressure of J.T.'s hand. It will leave, and it will come again, and when it does I'll give up everything and take it. Just like an addict. Like dry grass in new rain. It's not something I'm proud of necessarily. Then again, maybe I am.
— Katie Crouch, Girls in Trucks
Suddenly the memory of his wife came back to him and, no doubt feeling it would be too complicated to try to understand how he could have yielded to an impulse of happiness at such a time, he confined himself, in a habitual gesture of his whenever a difficult question came to his mind, to passing his hand over his forehead, wiping his eyes and the lenses of his lorgnon. Yet he could not be consoled for the death of his wife, but, during the two years he survived her, would say to my grandfather: “It’s odd, I think of my poor wife often, but I can’t think of her for a long time.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
How we respond to grief can shape our present
— K.C. Rhoads, The Corn Stalker
Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.
— Alice Walker
I think there were times when I was so afraid of losing you that I forgot I even had you at all.
— Ashly Lorenzana
In the games of queens and kings, we leave our dreams at the door and we make do with what we have. Sometimes if we’re fortunate, we still manage to have a good life.
— Melina Marchetta, Quintana of Charyn
LXXIXWhen I die, I want your hands on my eyes.I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once moreLI want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.I want what I love to continue to live,and you whom I love and sang above everything else.to continue to flourish, full-flowered.So that you can reach everything my love directs you to. So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,so that everything can learn the reason for my song.
— Pablo Neruda
There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.
— Ann Patchett, State of Wonder
The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.
— Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women
Yes, it's worth it. The pain of sorrow is terrible and hard to bear, but the joy of love makes it worthwhile. p123
— Kate Sherwood, Dark Horse
Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s what part of it means to be alive. But inside our heads — at least that’s where I imagine it — there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let fresh air in, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live for ever in your own private library.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
But I’ve learned that sometimes, somehow, no matter how much time we spend apart from the ones we care most about, our love for them never fades, for time apart only makes our love grow stronger.
— Rebecah McManus, Colliding Worlds
One always has to be willing to lose to be able to win... in battle and in life. I wonder. Are you willing to lose, Rayla?
— Christie Rich, Dark Matter
One night when we were lying under the stars together she pointed to this beaming bright star beside the moon and said wherever she was in the world, whether we were together or apart, that I should remember her with that star because it would always be there-that it was her with me.
— Rebecah McManus, Colliding Worlds
I knew it would be all of those things and so much more to me, but it was his heart I was yanking from his chest with my decision, and that’s what mattered to me. I was giving up a piece of my own as well, but it was a choice. His was just collateral.
— Rachael Wade, The Tragedy of Knowledge
We are meant to love. We are meant to lose. Love is our promise of a bittersweet end, and our desperate, hopeless struggle not to hurt anyone along the way.
— Courtney M. Privett, Mayfly Requiem
That’s how it felt – that the loss of him had a life of its own. I lived with it as I could have lived with him. Some nights it was quiet and sometimes it pounded on my door.
— Kimberly Novosel, Loved
When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love.
— Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown
If she lives, she shall be my wedded wife. If she dies--mother, I can't speak of what I shall feel if she dies." His voice was choked in his throat.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton
Eternity is a long time and it doesn't always work out that way," Jareth says, a bit bitterly. "It's worse to love someone and then lose them, then to never love at all.
— Mari Mancusi, Stake That
To the poor memories of drunks,' she said. 'To all the lovely nights forever lost.
— S. Fitts
I feel like people are only really dead once you stop learning about them. This is why it is important to me to keep learning about my mother, and what she wanted, and what her life meant, what she meant by the life she led. Then she will be alive, somehow, and her wish for me will have come true. My vow is to learn more about her. To see her as she saw herself.
— Liz  Moore, Heft
Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn’t remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts.
— Michelle Sagara West, Silence
Every choice is a loss. The past is not where you left it.
— Ruth Padel
I was so much in the habit of having Albertine with me, and now I suddenly saw a new aspect of Habit. Hitherto I had regarded it chiefly as an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of one's perceptions; now I saw it as a dread deity, so riveted to one's being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one's heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this deity that one had barely distinguished inflicts on one sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself.
— Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
Pain and guilt tore through him. His soul was bleeding to death. He stood there, waiting to die. How could he not? But such wounds were not fatal.
— Diana Pharaoh Francis, Path of Blood
I've seen too much sacrifice to believe that God is behind all of it, and I've seen sacrifice that has no indicia of the hand of God at all. Loss is not always part of some greater plan explainable by reference to the actions of a divine being with a divine purpose.
— Neil Abramson, Unsaid
I could feel my insides sink. My knees too. So I sat on the ground, against the wall, letting it support me. I thought I knew what heartbreak felt like. I thought heartbreak was me, standing alone at the prom. That was nothing. This, this was heartbreak. The pain in your chest, the ache behind your eyes. The knowing that things will never be the same again. It’s all relative, I suppose. You think you know love, you think you know real pain, but you don’t. You don’t know anything.
— Jenny Han, It's Not Summer Without You
I guess this was what it felt like to love someone and feel like you had lost them. Even when you were still holding them in your arms.
— Margaret Stohl, Beautiful Creatures
Each memory rips through me, and although I stow myself against the emotions, I can’t prevent the pain that accompanies each image. Pain for a love never acknowledged, pain for a friendship now gone. Pain for a loss I can’t possibly endure.
— Christine Fonseca, Mea Culpa
You just know something is amiss, when you look at someone and long for something that is not yours or you cannot have. It's an absence--a loss of a heartbeat.
— Nadège Richards, Burning Bridges
...real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.
— Emma Donoghue
The guy who broke up with me... he was exactly like you, in the beginning. Charming, and nice. They're all like you in the beginning. But I always end up like this. And I can't do it anymore.
— Lisa Kleypas, Rainshadow Road
Love built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever.
— Louise Doughty, Whatever You Love
The gastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody's sister now.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.
— Paul Celan
I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy,why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why.Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my pastwas my life.
— Janet Fitch
I wanted to ask my father about his regrets. I wanted to ask him what was the worst thing he'd ever done. His greatest sin. I wanted to ask him if there was any reason why the Catholic Church would consider him for sainthood. I wanted to open up his dictionary and find the definitions for faith, hope, goodness, sadness, tomato, son, mother, husband, virginity, Jesus, wood, sacrifice, pain, foot, wife, thumb, hand, bread, and sex. "Do you believe in God?" I asked my father."God has lots of potential," he said."When you pray," I asked him. "What do you pray about?""That's none of your business," he said. We laughed. We waited for hours for somebody to help us. What is an Indian? I lifted my father and carried him across every border.
— Sherman Alexie
Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss equaled the need to love again, more.
— Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe
It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...
— Emma Donoghue
Reshuffllng of thoughts - facilitates a refreshed perspective to a mental deadlock!
— Deeba Salim Irfan
... 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.
— Carsten Jensen
Jo claimed that the reason people survived breakups was that within days of the amputation, Mother Nature started reminding you of what you had been doing without, what could have been better, all the samll discontents you had been filing away.
— Emma Donoghue
And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.
— Emma Donoghue
I was never hurt by loss as much as I was hurt by the people who tried to make me feel like a winner,they made it worse
— Mhd.Ferzat Alchayah
She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Steven dreamed of you the very secondyou died(So the poem goes)and you may have visited himBut I'm pretty sure you don't believein poems
— Jon Paul Fiorentino, Indexical Elegies
Kavita’s arms are still outstretched, but they hold nothing. After the metal gate clangs shut behind them, Kavita can still hear Usha’s piercing wail echoing inside.
— Shilpi Somaya Gowda
Blazing? Droplets of thoughts can soothe it all. Don't feel depleted. Bask in the residue. That remains!
— Deeba Salim Irfan
It was "Boom Boom" Dupont who had ripped Kit out of the Humvee after the IED went off, the IED that turned the entire undercarriage of his truck into a fiery wall that consumed the five men inside.
— Siobhan Fallon, You Know When the Men Are Gone
The Greatest loss in life is the loss of a mother: The second greatest, the loss of Self.
— Med Saidi
I will not say: do not weep
—  for not all tears are an evil.
In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life
— Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook
She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Grief can destroy you --or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see that it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Hours
Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.
— Veronica Roth, Insurgent
To weep is to make less the depth of grief.
— William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 3
Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.
— Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you...
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Often I wish this would all be over, Liesel, but then somehow you do something like walk down the basement steps with a snowman in your hands.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
The tears I feel todayI'll wait to shed tomorrow.Though I'll not sleep this nightNor find surcease from sorrow.My eyes must keep their sight:I dare not be tear-blinded.I must be free to talkNot choked with grief, clear-minded.My mouth cannot betrayThe anguish that I know.Yes, I'll keep my tears til later:But my grief will never go.
— Anne McCaffrey, Dragonsinger
Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one
—  you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.
And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.
— Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger
Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.
— Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase: By Andrea Gibson
Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.
— Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium
Isn't it weird," I said, "the way you remember things, when someone's gone?"What do you mean?"I ate another piece of waffle. "When my dad first died, all I could think about was that day. It's taken me so long to be able to think back to before that, to everything else."Wes was nodding before I even finished. "It's even worse when someone's sick for a long time," he said. "You forget they were ever healthy, ever okay. It's like there was never a time when you weren't waiting for something awful to happen."But there was," I said. "I mean, it's only been in the last few months that I've started remembering all this good stuff, funny stuff about my dad. I can't believe I ever forgot it in the first place."You didn't forget," Wes said, taking a sip of his water. "You just couldn't remember right then. But now you're ready to, so you can."I thought about this as I finished off my waffle.
— Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
There is much asked and only so much I think I can or should answer, and so, in this post I would like to give a few thoughts on what seemed to be the overwhelming question: “WHY?”And here is the best answer I can give: Because.Because sometimes, life is damned unfair.Because sometimes, we lose people we love and it hurts deeply.Because sometimes, as the writer, you have to put your characters in harm’s way and be willing to go there if it is the right thing for your book, even if it grieves you to do it.Because sometimes there aren’t really answers to our questions except for what we discover, the meaning we assign them over time.Because acceptance is yet another of life’s “here’s a side of hurt” lessons and it is never truly acceptance unless it has cost us something to arrive there.Why, you ask? Because, I answer.Inadequate yet true.
— Libba Bray
It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Monday, June 9: People think they know you. They think they know how you're handling a situation. But the truth is no one knows. No one knows what happens after you leave them, when you're lying in bed or sitting over your breakfast alone and all you want to do is cry or scream. They don't know what's going on inside your head--the mind-numbing cocktail of anger and sadness and guilt. This isn't their fault. They just don't know. And so they pretend and they say you're doing great when you're really not. And this makes everyone feel better. Everybody but you.
— William H. Woodwell Jr.
I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried.
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
In days that follow, I discover that anger is easier to handle than grief.
— Emily Giffin, Heart of the Matter
As far as you can avoid it, do not give grief to anyone. Never inflict your rage on another. If you hope for eternal rest, feel the pain yourself; but don’t hurt others.
— Omar Khayyám, Quatrains
I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it.
— Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.
— Christopher Moore
Grieving doesn't make you imperfect. It makes you human.
— Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
Love is an engraved invitation to grief.
— Sunshine O'Donnell, Open Me
...we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.
— Michelle Moran, Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution
(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
What happens when you let go, when your strength leaves you and you sink into darkness, when there's nothing that you or anyone else can do, no matter how desperate you are, no matter how you try? Perhaps it's then, when you have neither pride nor power, that you are saved, brought to an unimaginably great reward.
— Mark Halperin
My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.
— Alice Hoffman, Green Angel