c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
This here is your inheritance, says the senior partner. Yes, he says, Ludwig, I know, and stows the plan for the bathing house (5.5m long, 3.8m wide, outer wall construction: wood, roof construction: thatch), stows both the plan and the mosquito in his briefcase. On a German shelf, this mosquito, pressed flat between large quantities of paper, will outlast time and times, and one day it might even be petrified, who knows.
— Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation
A man walks fast along the forecourt of the station towards a gate, moving towards a train that's about to leave. I get shivery all over as I watch the back of his head, which is about Yuan's height, with hair and a neckline just like his. My eyes tell me what my mind knows cannot be true. I follow him along seeking the one thing that would confirm him as someone else. The man turns his head slightly to talk to a train official. I can see his nose in profile. My eyes sting.
— Dayo Forster, Reading the Ceiling
The man who doesn't howl at the moon when his mother dies is no man at all.
— Marty Rubin
It was a second. A blink. The flap of a bird's wing, the moment it takes to say hello, or goodbye. So quickly that it made me think of all the insignificant seconds that we throw away. And all the seconds that we don't too. The seconds that we hold on to, that we return to... I considered the fact that all it takes is a second for life to completely change.
— Aditi Khorana, The Library of Fates
Petra, people tell me that I will 'move on' and I can't believe it. But if it ever does happen, and I forget to feel this pressing absence of you, if I make it through a meaningless party and don't remember to hate everyone for their peaceful lives until the morning, please know that I am already sorry. I am going to try to be brave like you asked me to, but I don't have any idea yet what that means. Is it braver to allow the sadness of your leaving to spread into each of my bones until it is as big as you were to me? Or is it braver to let you drift out into what may very well be a brighter, finer place than this and be happy to think of your joy there? I hope, Petra, that I get it right.
— Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born: Stories
You don't even have a cross," he said. His beloved was silent. "You don't even have any candles, no face of Christ, no tears. What can I say?"Then she began to murmur and he was astonished."I'm sorry. I will believe in the eternity of souls, I am bereaved. I will see those places where death talks solemnly to the years, where the breakers roll over their sins and their regrets, where the valley of Heaven lies before the crag of immortality, and I will believe my mother has gained peace. I have lost her. Has anyone felt such terrible grief, known that for all earthly time the eyes shall never see, the heart never beat except with her shadow? What an unhappy loss, the candles are gutted, and the face wanes for this immortality. I have lost my mother."This was her only glimpse of Heaven, and she wept so much that he was afraid. Finally she held his hand. The two brothers fired the cannon at the burial.
— John Hawkes, The Cannibal
Trees, O trees, why can't you hold on to your leaves?
— Marty Rubin
Sing through your grief. Don't let your thoughts weigh you down.
— Marty Rubin
You might forget,' he said. 'You can't hold on to a person when they're gone. You can't even hold on to people who are alive sometimes. I don't remember my mother's face. Not really. But I tell myself -- I'm still here. So much of who I am and what I do comes from her, I'm remembering her just by living. Every time I tilt my head or pick up a teacup the way she used to, that's a little bit of her still in the world.
— Rose Lerner, True Pretenses
Grief was the deal God struck with the angel of death, who wanted an unpassable river to separate the living from the dead; grief the bridge that would allow the dead to flit among the living, their footsteps overheard, their laughter around the corner, their posture recognizable in the bodies of strangers you would follow down the street, willing them to never turn around.
— Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire
When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough. If we always had smiled on the one who is gone, there would be no despair in our grief; and some sweetness would cling to our tears, reminiscent of virtues and happiness. For our recollections of veritable love—which indeed is the act of virtue containing all others—call from our eyes the same sweet, tender tears as those most beautiful hours wherein memory was born.
— Maurice Maeterlinck, Wisdom And Destiny
Something significant in me snapped when I miscarried; that something hadnt unsnapped yet. It hadn't been put back together and I was afraid it never would. I knew Jesus was with me, but my insides twirled threatening to take me down from the inside out. I knew He was with me, giving me permission to be in the broken parts of my story...
— Natalie Brenner, This Undeserved Life: Uncovering The Gifts of Grief and The Fullness of Life
One day is all it takes to lose someone forever.
— Emory R. Frie, Enchanted Forest
Why do they say ghosts are cold? Mine are warm, a breath dampening your cheek, a voice when you thought you were alone.
— Julie Buntin, Marlena
Also – for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts – mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.
— Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
I remember watching those balloons as a little boy, each fall, wondering if someday I, too, would be nothing but a balloon in the sky, soaring towards the sun until I begin to fall slowly back to earth and into the hands of a stranger.
— Kenny Porpora, The Autumn Balloon
It made him sad, realising that their smell was going to be gone for good one day. Even if they kept all their clothes, the scent would vanish eventually and become only a memory, just like everything else about them. Sometimes he thought he couldn’t even remember their voices anymore. There were photos of course, but it wasn’t the same. Although he had not hugged either of his parents in years, the thought of not being able to do so was too painful to bear, especially when he felt like he needed it. Eventually he would forget what it had felt like to be near his mum or what kind of a presence his father had. They were just going to be names, mere mentions in conversation that were glazed over and didn’t mean much to anybody.
— Pamela Harju, The Truth about Tomorrow
I didn't look back. Sometimes, not looking back is the only mercy the world has left to show.
— Seanan McGuire, Magic for Nothing
all the tall mad mountains of her mind
— Anne Carson, Antigonick
Marlena's body was found on November 19, and so I consider that the anniversary of her death, though she almost certainly died on the eighteenth. Because for me, that day, she was still fully, hugely, annoyingly alive--deliberately ignoring my phone calls, up to something she'd no doubt tell me all about soon.Twelve days after November 19, I turned sixteen. Every year, it happens the same way: Marlena dies, I get older.
— Julie Buntin, Marlena
How the sadness is handled by the physician has a powerful impact on the medical care received by the patients. If the grief is relentlessly suppressed--as in Eva's experience during residency--the result can be a numb physician who is unable to invest in a new patient. This lack of investment can lead to rote medical care--impersonal at best, shoddy at worst. At the other end of the spectrum is the doctor who is inundated with grief and can't function because of the overwhelming sorrow. Burnout is significant in both these cases, and that erodes the quality of medical care.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
He had not been sleeping well over Christmas. Actually, he hadn’t been doing anything well over Christmas – eating, sleeping, exercising, talking, looking after himself, laughing, crying… No, he hadn’t really been crying despite all the pain he felt. It was just tearing him up inside, quietly. It was like his insides were being ripped up by an angered tiger.
— Pamela Harju, The Truth about Tomorrow
He loved me and I would rather have him become one with me than disappear from my life. Then I'd never have to be away from him ever again. He said I was important to him. So why did he leave me? How could he leave me?
— Hitomi Kanehara, Snakes and Earrings
Revenge itself may indeed be the best revenge, but slaying one's enemy does not give back what they stole.
— Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls
Sadness grieves the spirit. But sorrow refines soul.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
My ship had lost crew mates before, yet I sailed on.
— L M Bryski
Tears don't bring people back." Pain stabs from my chest to my fingertips."Tears aren't for the people we've lost. They are for us. So that we can remember and celebrate and miss them and feel human.
— C.J. Redwine, Deception
An Indian’s wealth   Is determined by what they lose And not by what they save.
— Sherman Alexie, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
Sometimes when a star collapses, it becomes a fiery supernova, but other times the core density is so great that it quietly consumes itself, forming a black hole, its gravitational pull so terrible that nothing can escape, not even light.You can't see a black hole, but if you look closesly, you can witness its effect on those objects nearest to it - the way it changes the orbit of solar systems or draws off a star's light a little at a time, sucking it down to its dense center,Maybe we couldn't have stopped Jesse's collapse, but we should have seen it happening.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
Every first is a loss.
— Moïra Fowley-Doyle, Spellbook of the Lost and Found
Farewell, my dearest. You have but gone ahead...but I shall follow, and run, at last, again into your arms...and laugh away the years that came between.
— Joan Walsh Anglund, The Friend We Have Not Met: Poems of Consolation
{She} considered mentioning...how she, to, was all alone. But it didn't matter. So many stupid ways to live and die. She felt a shift inside herself at the thought, a letting go...she had reached a limit now and was moving into something new.
— Michael Knight, Eveningland: Stories
Anja? What is to tell? Everywhere I look I'm seeing Anja... From my good eye, from my glass eye, if they're open or they're close, always I'm thinking on Anja.
— Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude makes us less miserable.
— Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
Over the following days and weeks I would come to see, with mounting weariness, that this was to be the pattern of my life from now on: marginal and grim; my habitual daydreams and memories of our life as a couple reduced to nothing, to stuttering salvoes, by the gunpowder of the simple physical truth of my husband's absence.
— Marie Darrieussecq, My Phantom Husband
If I have attached anything to sacrifice other than loss, I have at some level assumed a pay-off. And if I’ve assumed a pay-off, I’m only assuming a sacrifice.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
She likes to write messages on balloons and send them to the sky. She takes out a black Magic Marker and she starts writing on the dozen or so balloons, one for each member of our family who died. She doesn't think she can write well and asks me not to read her notes.She likes to think they'll soar all the way to heaven. I think she knows they end up tangled in power lines or deflated in a pile of orange leaves in someone's backyard miles away, but I can never bring myself to say that to her. I've often wondered what they must think, those people who find our balloons. I've wondered if they read the messages and understand what they mean.I remember watching those balloons as a little boy, each fall, wondering if someday I, too, would be nothing but a balloon in the sky, soaring toward the sun until I began to fall slowly back to earth and into the hands of a stranger.
— Kenny Porpora, The Autumn Balloon
I couldn't have imagined how much more there was to lose.
— Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World
This is one of the great human mysteries: why do works of art about bad things such as loss and deprivation make us feel good?
— Robert Pinsky, The Handbook of Heartbreak: 101 Poems of Lost Love and Sorrow
The feeling doesn’t always match the loss. Sometimes the bigger ones are easier to take, like ocean waves. Smaller, human losses, the ones that carry a sense of fault, a choice, a wrong turn – they haunt, fuse in you, become impossible to remove.
— Catherine Lacey, The Answers
If loss makes you doubt your belief in justice, then you never truly believed in justice at all.
— Gail Simone, Wonder Woman, Vol. 3: The Circle
I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched ... Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the chirping of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
You must understand, owing to my loss of faith in life, I had gradually, inevitably embarked upon a small world of my creation.
— Lawrence G. Taylor, Strangers In Another Country
What should I call you? A friend, a stranger, or a lover? I remember the day you laid your eyes on me the first time. There was just something unwavering about that moment. It wasn’t peaceful or absolute. It was definite. Something that was bound to happen. It was like as if our souls were waiting for us to collide. And oh we did! We collided like meteors, giving this universe a spectacular view. From my 2 am thought that used to keep me up at night, you soon became my 2 am call. From an almost stranger to my skin, you became a part of me. But just like every collision, ours also had to end in destruction. The 2 am call soon became a 2 am thought. The thought still keeps me up at night, but not for the same reasons. From strangers to lovers and lovers to strangers again, our journey hasn’t been ordinary. Someone asked me about you today and for a moment, I didn’t know what to call you. Who are you to me now? A friend – no. Definitely not a lover. I guess, you and I – we are just strangers with memories.
— Bhavya Kaushik
The beeches deep in snow,I walk the dark woodsIn sorrow, sorrow.Your hand, where is your
— Nâzım Hikmet, Poems of Nazım Hikmet
It is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace. The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in indulging the excess of grief.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
The word "lost" comes from the Old Norse "los," meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.
— Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
You were the colors to my monochrome life. My morning light and my midnight dream. Flawed, yet whole. You used to think that you weren’t enough – but you were enough for me. You were my first everything. My fire. My tornado. You were the eye of my storm. The moment I saw you, I knew you were going to destroy my life. But I let it happen. There was just something magical and outlandish about playing with fire that I couldn’t resist. I wanted to be as close as I could to the idea of destroying myself. It didn’t happen out of the blue. Day by day – moment by moment, I started to lose myself. With every kiss, you took away a part of me. Until one day, I woke up and I wasn’t myself anymore. I never thought that a disaster could be so damn beautiful. I don’t regret it. But I regret waking up next to an empty bed and how unceremoniously you left when the damage was done. I saw your picture today, holding someone else’s hand. And it made me realize that some disasters don’t make a sound. Not every destruction stands still. Some of them might walk right past you.
— Bhavya Kaushik
I realised I really didn’t know what I was doing and I felt her trace drowning in the middle of the cars and the people, in the middle of the streets and far away, in the secrets she so jealously kept.I felt it. We were ever so close, ever so far.
— Emiliano Campuzano, Cielo Por Tu Luz
I figured we really shouldn’t grieve for those who leave us for God. They’ve arrived at their destinations with lucky souls no longer burdened by our piddling human considerations. It may seem cruel when they die so young or so beautiful or so loved. Cry not for them, for the life not lived. Cry only for your own hurt in missing them. That’s the only true loss. And in those sad moments when you remember a touch, or catch them watching from the corner of your eye, understand they left you with a lesson. Everyone who touches your life teaches you something important you’re meant to learn. Somehow their visit here pushed your own soul along its path. Learning that lesson is the best way you can honor them.
— Lynnda Pollio, Trusting the Currents
Like the long gone captains of the Confederacy, he stood watch at the edge of Dauphin Island, his old life just out of sight across the water. What he felt in those moments, pelicans skimming the chop, tankers lugging cargo to ports unknown, was not loneliness or loss, as you might expect, nor the weight of tragedy but its opposite, pure lightness, the hole left inside him by Suzette’s death as big and hollow as a zeppelin and just as buoyant, as if the shape of her absence might lift him up and carrying him away.
— Michael Knight, Eveningland: Stories
Loss of any sort should stir up emotion; if it doesn’t, it’s because we’ve trained ourselves to be numb. We’ve bought into the great societal lie that emotional and sensitive is bad, is shameful, is weak, and worse yet is unlike Him.
— Natalie Brenner, This Undeserved Life: Uncovering The Gifts of Grief and The Fullness of Life
Sometimes people get taken away from you whether you want it or not. And sometimes that hurts so much, it might be easier to forget.
— Cassandra Clare, Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy
All the sorrows of life are bearable if only we can convert them into a story.
— Izak Dinesen
I felt great empathy for my friend, as one form of cancer after another emerged to challenge him. I felt sympathy for his suffering that surely clawed at his daily routines, always active and busy, but he rarely verbalized complaints while courageously challenging his archenemy. He met pain and physical decline with 600-calorie workouts; he discarded anxieties somewhere along innumerable running trails; he faced death by running through life at full stride.
— Brent Green, Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss
Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth.
— Brent Green, Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss
But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue
— Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply
Those of us who receive the blessing of a long life will also need to understand and manage grief and loss many times throughout our lives. Grief will come again, and again. Loss is a requisite part of the aging process and the human experience.
— Brent Green
I’m learning geography is about lossand so I keep moving
— Paul Guest, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge
Suffering can precipitate creativity, liberating the creator through inspiration and then many available channels of human communication, and therefore there is value in suffering.
— Brent Green, Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss
Death and parting are the same.
— Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf, Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster: Three Abbasid Poets
You know that old cliché about how millions of deaths being a statistic, while the loss of just one life is a tragedy? If that's true, what is it when you lose something that never even had a chance to be born? I've had a lot of relationships in my time, platonic or otherwise, but the ones I think about most are those that never quite made it to term. The dashing first date who didn't call you back. The lady on the train you had that amazing conversation with but never saw again. The cool neighbor kid you met the first time a week before he moved away. I guess I'm just haunted by all that potential energy. One moment, the universe presents you with this amazing opportunity for new possibilities and then...
— Brian K. Vaughan
Learning kindness late in life was a kind of torture. The pain often came from the past, form kindnesses withheld. The knife was particularly sharp when those who most deserved your kindness were long gone. And unless you wanted to die of sorrow, you had to give this unspent kindness to those you loved less.
— Victor Lodato, Edgar and Lucy
I stood staring to heaven and nothing came from there, no mercy or redemption. Whatever had come had come already and it was not sent by God. I stood, arms outstretched and empty, like a man praying but I was not praying, I was crying, because it had come to this and I had come to this place, and they were not with me... they were gone for ever.
— James Robertson, The Professor of Truth
How astounding that the largest thing he'd ever seen was still no match for the diminishing effect of distance. It made him aware of his own smallness in the world, his insignificance in the face of what might come, and for a moment his chest felt light with panic.
— Julie Orringer, The Invisible Bridge
Life becomes involuntary repetitive when you suffer from short term memory loss.
— Steven Magee
The only people in the whole world that Salim loved had been killed by the virus that traveled to America in his own blood.
— Bobby Adair, Ebola K: Book 2
I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn't even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave it behind.
— Emma Cline, The Girls
No. Really. I've thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people any more. It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It's just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a whole. I don't know. It's like you become... a doughnut instead of a bun.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
And now it's been half a winter since Harry vanished, and I can finally rest my thoughts. I ought to feel relief. Of this I'm sure. But do you know what it's like to hold proof of the last heartache you'll ever know in your own raw hands? I hadn't known, either, not until Gus delivered Harry's red hat yesterday morning, a cork bobber sewed on where the pompom should've been.
— Peter Geye, Wintering
Healing is not about moving on or “getting over it,” it’s about learning to make peace with our pain and finding purpose in our lives again.
— Shirley Kamisky
To abandon the child ‘within’ means that the adult ‘without’ will be an adult in name only. And frankly, I can only name a handful of things that are that tragic.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths:  Selected Stories and Other Writings
If I could sleep with my arms around you, the ink could stay in the bottle.
— Shelly King, The Moment of Everything
You'd be surprised how little voice you have when you lose everything.
— Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds
Missing someone is the worst form of torture because it never goes away no matter where you are or what you do with your life. When a person is gone and all you have of them is a fuzzy recollection of what it was like to hear your phone buzz with texts from them, the joy you experienced while in their company, that instance when the bond you shared shattered, you long for all that was lost and could’ve been gained. You have memories and nothing more. And no matter how much times passes, you still feel the ache of their absence whenever they rise into your thoughts. Torture.
— Caroline George, The Vestige
I know it sounds so simple but Love Is All There Is.
— Kate McGahan, JACK McAFGHAN: Reflections on Life with My Master
He was a man built to yearn for what he could not have.
— Anne Perry, Betrayal at Lisson Grove
often enough, we owe our good fortune to someone else’s loss.
— Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart
If you haven’t figured it out yet, an absolutely certain way to lose something as quickly as possible is to forget the privilege you have to possess it in the first place.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. Praise in due order; of Him as the giver, of her as the gift. Don’t we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it? I must do more of this.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
As Tom wandered back to Mrs Mewett’s, he thought about the little relics at the lighthouse – Docherty’s knitting, his wife’s jar of humbugs that sat untouched in the pantry. Lives gone, traces left. And he wondered about the despair of the man, destroyed by grief. It didn’t take a war to push you over that edge.
— M. L. Stedman
Tom thought back to the imposing, empty house: to the silence that deadened every room with a subtly different pitch; to the kitchen smelling of carbolic, kept spotless by a long line of housekeepers. He remembered that dreaded smell of Lux flakes, and his distress as he saw the handkerchief, washed and starched by Mrs Someone-or-other, who had discovered it in the pocket of his shorts and laundered it as a matter of course, obliterating his mother’s smell. He had searched the house for some corner, some cupboard which could bring back that blurry sweetness of her. But even in what had been her bedroom, there was only polish, and mothballs, as though her ghost had finally been exorcised.
— M. L. Stedman
As I load my shirt into the washer for the night, I daydream about making a sign and hanging it around my neck. It could read, I MISS CHARLIE KHAN.As I drive home, I picture other signs- one for everyone who has a secret. Bill Coro's would say, I CAN'T READ, BUT I CAN THROW A FOOTBALL. Me. Shunk's would read, I WISH I COULD TOSS YOU ALL ON AN ISLAND BY YOURSELVES. Dad's would read, I HATE MYSELF FOR NO GOOD REASON.
— A.S. King, Please Ignore Vera Dietz
As I drive home, I picture other signs- one for everyone who has a secret. Bill Corso's would say, I CAN'T READ, BUT I CAN THROW A FOOTBALL. Mr. Shunk's would read, I WISH I COULD TOSS YOU ALL ON AN ISLAND BY YOURSELVES. Dad's would read, I HATE MYSELF FOR NO GOOD REASON.My Idea grows.
— A.S. King, Please Ignore Vera Dietz
The truest form of love is where you are able to put your own needs aside to do what is best for the one you love. If you could know where I am now and if you love as you say you do, you would never ever wish me back from the love and the comfort and the bliss of where I am and where I wait for you.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
John Donne's 'A Valediction: forbidding mourning' concerns a sea voyage, and uses the image of a circle as an antidote to the abyss of loss and separation. He pictures the invisible but precious bonds which link carer and cared-for, lover and beloved in an attachment relationship as slender threads of gold.
— Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory
I would have to confess that in the land of the toubabu, I had managed to save only myself.
— Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes
COME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!”In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan
...she did remember on time when she got her period, sliding open the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get a sanitary napkin; she remembered looking at the box of Stayfree pads and thinking that the box looked almost smug, seemed almost to be saying: Hello, Patty! We are your children. We are the only children you will ever have, and we are hungry. Nurse us. Nurse us on blood.
— Stephen King, It
But forever was a useless term, relevant only for the dead.
— K. Martin Beckner, A Million Doorways
I stand, and wait among the sea foam. I swim in my own tears-I sing without my voice. I do not reach for higher ground, because I have lapped in the churning waters.
— Meredith T. Taylor, Churning Waters (The Churning Waters Saga)
And then I got to thinking about how, if someone met me for the first time now, they would need to know about Uncle Ed and my parents in order to understand me. Sometimes it feels as though I’m defined by all the people I’ve lost , like one of those negative-space pictures, where what’s not there is just as important as what is.
— Claire Wong, The Runaway
Whether the judge all those years ago agreed that Jenny had no right to what she wished, or whether her plainspoken grief, which she shouted out in silence from her eyes, moved him, or disturbed him, or confused him, doesn't matter. He whispered, 'Life.' And so she lived. Is living still. Will go on living, to the end of that whisper.
— Emily Ruskovich
The journey across the landscape of loss to the inner self takes courage and persistence. It is a risky venture, with lots of false trails and humanising errors. It requires gentleness to know your limits, yet willingness to apply pressure in the direction of growth. It is a journey that is not cost-free, nor is it ever finished. But, especially in the pitch darkness, it is a journey on which there is always hope.
— Dr Brian Babington, Bouncing Back
When all you have is the memory of a thing, all you can think about is how the thing is gone.
— Nathan Hill, The Nix
Today’s ashes are tomorrow’s soil.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Yes, you are right. I lost my home, my mother, my identity. I lost it. Not you, Inspector Imandar. I did. They I don't understand, what did you lose? What did you lose that you hate them so much?
— Sanchit Gupta, The Tree with a Thousand Apples
They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity.
— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Sinto que há uma estranha eternidade naquilo que amámos e foi destruído.(I feel that there lies a strange eternity in that which we loved but has been destroyed.)
— Al Berto, O Anjo Mudo
You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since--on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God Bless you, God forgive you!
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
There is only one thing worse than losing the one you love, and that is losing them without knowing why. If you are a dog, then your master is like a god to you, and the pain of losing him is greater still.
— Louis de Bernières, Red Dog
During that time, The Mouth came by to pray with us, and my dad began to spend his evenings sitting in the yellow lawn chair and staring at the highway, or down in the basement with his isotope material, finding comfort in the stability that's created from decay.
— Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness
We shouldn't confuse grief over the passing of our favorite technology with resentment because some digital alchemy failed to preserve analog experiences. Whether or not we admit it, the internet and its artifacts are not just like their cultural precedents. They're not even a rough translation -- or a strong misreading -- of those precedents.
— Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art
We have…Settled into a region called “don’t ask don’t tell” and it is hard, i imagine for people who have not experienced this to understand the weight of silence and how the absence of language can feel like a death
— Daisy Hernandez, A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir
Then I looked out onto the horizon myself and realized that loss is the same wherever you go: overwhelming, inexorable, deafening. How resilient human beings are that we can learn slowly to carry on when we are left all alone, left to fill the void as best we can. Or disappear into it.
— Jennifer    Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir
When he left us, he stole all the words.
— Alex George, Setting Free the Kites
Our stars are not where we last admired them. Our homes crumble and we don't know which place to long for.
— Ann Druyan, A Famous Broken Heart: A Fantasy Novel
To lose a sibling is to lose the one different from you. There’s no one now against whom to say: But I am like this. I am this.
— Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories
I cut all my words out. My heart was too full of them.
— Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s
And in that vastness, it felt like every memory existed only to disappear one day.
— Vatsal Surti, 20
Valentine reposes within the walls of Paris, and to leave Paris is like losing her a second time.""Maximilian," said the count, "the friends that we have lost do not repose in the bosom of the earth, but are buried deep in our hearts, and it has been thus ordained that we may always be accompanied by them.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
He was still so very young. Faeries—true faeries, not their changeling throwaways—live forever, and when you have an eternity of adulthood ahead of you, you linger over childhood. You tend it and keep it close to your heart, because once it ends, it’s over. Quentin was barely fifteen. He’d never seen the Great Hunt that came down every twenty-one years, or been present for the crowning of a King or Queen of Cats, or announced his maturity before the throne of High King Aethlin. He was a child, and he should have had decades left to play; a century of games and joy and edging cautiously toward adulthood.But he didn’t. I could see his childhood dying in his eyes as he looked at me, silently begging me to answer for him.
— Seanan McGuire, An Artificial Night
My lord was never sane, but he was my love, once. He always will be, somewhere. Wherever it is that the once upon a times go when they die.
— Seanan McGuire, An Artificial Night
Once you experience a major loss and survive, everything else after that you lose seems petty and doesn't affect you much.
— Himmilicious
Your image has receded till it is like the thinnest shadow of the old moon... a thin silver edge appeared, and now you hang like a sickle over my life.
— Virginia Woolf
When's something difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder- if not impossible- to lose.
— Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
Which is why we have now added a vow to our friendship that we will never ever "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" each other. That at we will always talk things out and never allow miscommunication to derail our relationship. But the whole conversation made me think about times in my life when I've felt that way, like I've been dropped with no sign that it was about to happen. And I think Gulley is right- it's the worst feeling in the world because it leaves you feeling completely helpless.
— Melanie Shankle, Nobody's Cuter Than You: A Memoir about the Beauty of Friendship
We treat what’s lost, what could have never been, what we could have never dreamed of, again. We treat it like heirlooms for it is so precious. For we know it can be lost, again.
— Kevin Focke, Bandorv: The Broken & Rotten
This is what loss was, what death was: an escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the ineffable speed of the light-years and the parsecs, the eternally receding distances of the cosmos.
— Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown
Loss is like a wind, it either carries you to a new destination or it traps you in an ocean of stagnation. You must quickly learn how to navigate the sail, for stagnation is death.
— Val Uchendu
The feeling of abandonment overwhelmed me as I realised that no one had waited, or cared where I was.
— Emily  Williams, Letters to Eloise
Maybe you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value.
— Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle
I hate the way the world feels when love is gone
— Corey Ann Haydu, The Careful Undressing of Love
Once I was in the cold dim room, without furniture or carpet or rugs, only a dollhouse that wasn't as wonderful as the original, I opened the tall and narrow closet door and began my ascent up the steep and narrow stairs. On my way to the attic.On my way to where I'd find my Christopher, again...
— V.C. Andrews, Seeds of Yesterday
Lost love belongs in a three-minute song, pullling back feelings from a time when they came unbidden, recalling the infatuation, the walking on sunshine that cannot last and the pain of its loss, whether through parting or the passage of time, reminding us that we are emotional beings
— Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp
Death always feels far away from life, until it isn’t.
— Corey Ann Haydu, The Careful Undressing of Love
Everyone else’s Minute of remembering is over, but ours stretches on and on. It doesn’tend.
— Corey Ann Haydu, The Careful Undressing of Love
This is another awful truth of losing people you love: everyone needs something different. And the needs almost never match up.
— Corey Ann Haydu, The Careful Undressing of Love
Sleep comes, no matter how deep the sadness cuts. It’s like a gift from the universe.
— Corey Ann Haydu, The Careful Undressing of Love
What do you live for when everyone and everything you love is gone? Do you keep going, keep stumbling through the dark, or do you find something new to cherish? Maybe neither. Maybe you walk silently and ignore the blows time takes on your heart.
— Courtney M. Privett, Mayfly Requiem
There are people that have had worse happen to them. All those people that died in the hotel bombing? All those that were maimed and left orphaned?
— Sonal Panse, The Sunshine Time: Season 1 Episode 4
I think about the people I know with the absolutely largest hearts, people with a stunning capacity for endurance and grace and kindness against the most screaming terrors and pains. My Mom and Dad, for example, enduring the death of their first child at six months old, the boy the brother I never met, dying quietly in his stroller on the porch in the moment that my mother stepped back inside to get a pair of gloves because the crisp brilliant April wind was filled with a whistling cutting wind.... Fifty years later after five more children and two miscarriages she is standing in the kitchen with her usual eternal endless cup of tea and I ask her: How do you get over the death of your child? And she says, in her blunt honest direct terse kind way, You don't. Her face harrowed like a hawk for a moment in the swirling steam of the tea.p112-13
— Brian  Doyle, The Wet Engine: Exploring Mad Wild Miracle of Heart
Their world seemed made of little losses. she was always having to say goodbye, part with something. A brilliant sunset. A blossom. A sweet feeling.
— Laura Frantz, A Moonbow Night
Abelard to Heloise – Banish me, therefore, for ever from your heart – it is the best advice I can give, for the remembrance of a person we have loved guiltily can not be hurtful, whatever advances we may have made in the way of virtue.
— Emily  Williams, Letters to Eloise
Sometimes you're going to have to let one person go a thousand different times, a thousand different ways, and there's nothing pathetic or abnormal about that. You are human.
— Heidi Priebe, This Is Me Letting You Go
If you love something, know that it will leave on a day you are far from ready.
— Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
I need to confront my loss, not run away from it. I wanted to wade in with my eyes open and all my senses alert. I wanted to register everything, from the giant waves of sorrow to the inkiest ripples of remorse. I didn't want to miss any of it.
— Alex George, Setting Free the Kites
Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. 'It wasn't meant to be', Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
I had heard the wind from the mountains calling me last night, telling me it was my time to go, and I woke up, knowing what to do.
— V.C. Andrews, Seeds of Yesterday
I was the last of the four Dresden dolls. Only me... and I didn't want to be here.
— V.C. Andrews, Seeds of Yesterday
Okay.' I can feel the letters vomit off my tongue.O.K.A. Y.I watch the vet insert the syringe into the catheter and inject the second drug. And then the adventures come flooding back:The puppy farm.The gentle untying of the shoelace.THIS! IS! MY! HOME! NOW!Our first night together.Running on the beach.Sadie and Sophie and Sophie Dee.Shared ice-cream cones.Thanksgivings.Tofurky.Car rides.Laughter.Eye rain.Chicken and rice.Paralysis.Surgery.Christmases.Walks.Dog parks.Squirrel chasing.Naps.Snuggling.'Fishful Thinking.'The adventure at sea.Gentle kisses.Manic kisses.More eye rain.So much eye rain.Red ball.The veterinarian holds a stethoscope up to Lily's chest, listening for her heartbeat.All dogs go to heaven.'Your mother's name is Witchie-Poo.' I stroke Lily behind her ears the way that used to calm her. 'Look for her.'OH FUCK IT HURTS.I barely whisper. 'She will take care of you.
— Steven Rowley, Lily and the Octopus
The sun was hot and bright. A day for fishing, for swimming, for playing tennis and having fun, and they put my Christopher in the ground.
— V.C. Andrews, Seeds of Yesterday
Grief seems to create losses within us that reach beyond our awareness--we feel as if we're missing something that was invisible and unknown to us while we had it, but is now painfully gone...Longing is not conscious wanting; it's an involuntary yearning for wholeness, for understanding, for meaning, for the opportunity to regain or even simply touch what we've lost.
— Brené Brown, Rising Strong
Sometimes a tragedy must happen to keep a soul on schedule. This is the reason for things that seem to have no reason. This is the reason that we cannot fathom when we are going through it.Perhaps I will get very sick. People wonder why cancer exists when it is just a clever method to teach people lessons about love and loss. It borrows time or steals it depending on the needs of Heaven. It is a vehicle to get us where we need to be. It calls us home because something needs us there.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
I know why she cried like that. She cried because she wasn't finished grieving the loss of me. When someone has an exaggerated emotional reaction to something in the present, it's usually because they haven't resolved something in their past.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
Heartbreak is an altogether different thing. Disappointment doesn't grow into heartbreak, nor does failure...It comes form the loss of love or the perceived loss of love...Heartbreak is what happens when love is lost.
— Brené Brown, Rising Strong
Only I had dry eyes, a dry heart.
— V.C. Andrews, Seeds of Yesterday
You seem to forget that the sun must set. You knew perfectly well that I would not be with you long enough. Still, you weep and cry and ask God ‘Why’ as if it were some kind of surprise. Why? Because love changes everything. Love’s the surprise.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
Grief leads you to believe that life will never be ordinary again, and it never really will be for it is made extraordinary as it is touched and transformed by our greatest loves and deepest losses.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
One gains by losing and loses by gaining.
— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
The things left unsaid to people we care about, and the void those unspoken words leave, often have more impact than what is said.
— Tyler Knight, Burn My Shadow: A Selective Memory of an X-Rated Life
Grief is an emotional rollercoaster.You will have your ups and downsand moments of terrorand brief moments of peace.You can only go as fastas the ride will take you.Just remember:It will end and you will be okay.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.
— Louise Erdrich, LaRose
After she was gone, I sheathed her sword at my belt, draped her cloak over my shoulders, carried her heart in my arms, and, somehow, went on.
— Marie Lu, The Midnight Star
You will never know loneliness when you have a dog, when you lose that dog it will be loneliness like you've never known.
— Michael P. Naughton
Something or someone is always waving goodbye.
— Marty Rubin
Riley's sway as he disappeared down the alley, I recognized it. It wasn't booze. It was the thing that happened when a little too much got a little too messed up. They sway, it's what creeps over a person when they've begun to empty out and don't care enough to put anything back, to replace what has been lost.
— Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces