c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I had often said that I would write, the wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. In short, I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.' Gertrude Stein wrote this in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas, Stein being apparently the genius, Alice apparently the wife. 'I am nothing,' Alice said after Gertrude dies, 'but a memory of her.'...the flashing blues and red made him look ill, then well, then ill again...
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Can anyone actually find a replacement for a lost loved one?Isn't there a difference between things and human beings?
— honeya
At the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that's all. Sometimes they come back.
— Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis
Whoever said it was better to have loved and lost was completely full of shit.
— Paula Stokes
To be honest about it, I didn’t even always like Sharley. Maybe that’s the way it is with friends. Maybe the liking isn’t the most essential part of being friends. Maybe it’s the sticking by. Maybe it’s the impression of yourself you get through your friend’s eyes. Or maybe it’s all the little lessons you learn.
— RK Vetter
Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.
— Stephen King, Bag of Bones
She can feel her vanished talent like a phantom limb, the empty ache of its subtraction from the short list of her assets, and she knows with spiteful certainty that it is gone for good.
— Christina Moracho
Do you know what it's like to be blessed with someone so special, to love them so much it hurts, and then have them taken from you forever?
— Kim Holden, Bright Side
As I listened I felt a dull numbness, like the effect of chloroform, rather than the primal, anarchic agony you usually feel when you encounter someone you have loved now turned to dust, in some object like a little bowl, and you are required to believe that it is still the same person who once smiled at you.
— Magda Szabó, The Door
Simple" Kate had wanted to say, "I'm already dead.
— Kimberly McCreight, Reconstructing Amelia
But how can one regret what, to the mind, has never existed? Even loss is an inaccurate description, for what loss is without the awareness of losing?
— Nicole Krauss
Certainly she could never have exchanged pleasantries with anyone. What would there be for them to say anyway? Sorry? Sorry your daughter is dead, Sorry your daughter jumped off the roof of her school when you were on your way to pick her up. Sorry you were late. Too bad you'll be reliving that failure for the rest of your miserable life.
— Kimberly McCreight, Reconstructing Amelia
The beauties of the North seemed to be intensified by the loss we had experienced there, and they drew us back to them.
— David Almond
One lost easiest what one held in one’s arms— never what one left.
— Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country
When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
had almost forgotten the wet brush of your kisses… soft as April snowflakes
— John J. Geddes
Oh, trust me Sydney Tar Ponds, you aren’t the first Personification to be forgotten by somebody ordinary,” Mearth sighed with a falsely-reassuring smile. Alecto stepped back from her, glaring hatefully. “Sydney Tar Ponds,” Mearth added, “I’ve had so many ordinary people as friends in my life that by now I’ve forgotten all their names. At first it was difficult… very sad… to see them always leaving, dying, disappearing, ignoring, but after a while I realized that they weren’t worth the trouble. I’d rather be in the company of other Personifications. At least they aren’t always dropping dead like houseflies or sailing away to parts unknown. Nil sa saol seo ach ceo, i ni bheimid beo, ach seal beag gearr. Wouldn’t you agree?”“No,” Alecto told her. “I think you’re insane.
— Rebecca McNutt, Shadowed Skies: The Third Smog City Novel
A star's light still shines even if there's no one to see it, but without someone to remember Jesse, his light will disappear.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
An emotionally abusive relationship, in very simplistic terms, is much like standing up in a too hot bath and sinking back in so as not to feel so dizzy.
— Jackie Haze, Borderless
The things that truly define me can’t be lost.
— Amy Neftzger, The War of Words
It could have been avoided. This couch misery spiral, this … loss … I could’ve avoided the bulk of it simply by doing more. I could’ve given a shit...
— Emma Mills, First & Then
She didn't know if she was crying because Illukar was going to die, or because Ieskar already had.
— Andrea K. Höst, Voice of the Lost
And sometimeswhen she does remember,she calls me her little angeland she knows where she isand everything is all rightfor a second or a minuteand then we cry;she for the life that she lostI for the woman I only know about through the stories of her children.
— Rebecca Rijsdijk, Portraits of Girls I never Met
All I'd done for the past ten years was talk about it. I was sick of talking...sick of analyzing...sick of reliving it...sick of the screaming in my head that replayed over and over like a song stuck on repeat.
— S.A. Healey, Empty Me Out
But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn't a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all? - no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it. That's how I'd defend it to H. But ten to one she'd see a hole in the defence.
— C.S. Lewis
How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends.
— Pierce Brown, Morning Star
We, the beggar class, have little to lose and our expectations are, at best, modest, and when we suffer, it seems we suffer to the depths, for there is nothing in our lives nor in our souls to buoy our hope. Nothing in the way of the blackness. It sinks to the bottom as the lead weight that is despair. We look forward such a short distance that our spirit is myopic, not to be corrected by any lens within our world.
— Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants
She was a music I no longer heard, that rang in my mind, itself and nothing else, lost to all sense, but not perished, not perished.
— Marilynne Robinson
I know what it's like to lose kits, Oakheart, I wouldn't wish that kind of grief on any cat.
— Erin Hunter, Forest of Secrets
If you’ve ever lost someone that you love, and I say ‘love’ and not ‘loved’ because even when they’re gone, you still love them, you know that never goes away, but your life changes.
— Rachel Spanswick, Fading
And then he went in the evening up to the nursery and told the boy how his mother was gone for a while to Elfland, to her father's palace (which may only be told of in song). And, unheeding any words of Orion then, he held on with the brief tale that he had come to tell, and told how Elfland was gone."But that cannot be," said Orion, "for I hear the horns of Elfland every day.""You can hear them?" Alveric said.And the boy replied, "I hear them blowing at evening.
— Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter
Usually it is through loss that things come to be of value.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
In time the whole family perked up like Sesame Street puppets, hoping that cheer, if worked at hard enough, could sugar the living and quiet the dead.
— Toni Morrison, God Help the Child
Poor Ramon.
— Robin Stevenson, The World Without Us
You can't learn anything from losing someone you love. Any lesson you learn from that isn't a lesson. It's a compromise with life. A lie you tell yourself.
— Sonali Dev, A Bollywood Affair
What is coping? This is what it is like: a cave underground deep in rock, hung across its roof with accretions of dripping salts. I am cavernous and hard as mineral. The cave holds a pool of dark water that has not seen light. The water is very cold; it is undrinkable and its size is unmapped. It is mine, but people cannot see it. Only Ev sometimes senses that it is there. All the time people say that I am coping very well. It is impossible to explain my strategy to them. It is opaque even to me.
— Marion Coutts
I was surrounded by heaven. The sun, the moon, the earth, and all those living stars. They wen't static like in pictures taken from impossibly far away- they breathed, they glowed. They were future and past, possibility and memory. They were beautiful. "I never knew there were so many," I whispered. We are merely pieces of a grander design, even more insignificant than I imagined. When the earth ceases to be, all those stars will shine on. Out deaths will mean nothing to them."I feel so small." No one replied. I wondered as I watched the stars, really seeing them for the fist time, whether they could see me, too.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
Age isn't stealing from my grandmother
—  it's slowly unwinding her.
I’m passing the bar Where you first got in my car I’m not ashamed to admit That it’s you I won’t forget I saved your cigarettes andBad habits I regret But the hours flew by like cloudsWhenever I had you around Parachute loverTake me awayFrom the plane that went crashing And the earth that’s in flamesSaving you is saving me High above the redwood treesBut down below I see shadows And parachute debris We're drifting like children Along for the rideEach time we find love Another parachute arrivesOur madness will burn As bright as the sunAnd I’ll keep finding lovers But you were the one
— Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading 3
The best part, though, was hearing my mother's voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I've found. You wouldn't think it could be so, but-as the oldtimers used to say - the world's titled, and there's an end to it.
— Stephen King, The Wind Through the Keyhole
...grief is as much about regret for what you've never had as sadness for what you've lost.
— David Nicholls, Us
I have suffered through enough illnesses, trauma and heartbreak to finally understand that life will keep moving forward inexorably, if terribly at times. I am starting to realize that it can be delightful too, if I let it. My love is not diminished if I let go of sorrow. I almost believe that.
— Jenny Qi
The shovel worked in and out of the light beams as the dirt hit him in the stomach, on his back, fell into his ears, his eyes, as I covered him along with the things that had made him: his walks, his rest, his eating when hungry, the stars he watched sometimes, the first day I brought him home, the first time he saw snow, and every second of his friendship, what he took with him into silence and stillness ...
— Gerard Donovan, Julius Winsome
He hadn’t saved her. He hadn’t even bothered trying.
— Tan Redding, A Banquet Of Crumbs
The act of you leaving was just the full stop at the end of a terrible sentence. Fact is, I lost you long before you ever left.
— Beau Taplin, Buried Light
I stood in your doorway this morningdreaming you’d turn aroundyou’d tilt your headyou’d softly whisper ”stay”or that you’d grab my armsto shake me while askingwhat the hell are we doingwe loveeach otherand this is not rightso we will make this worknow stay!You poured your coffee. Stirred the spoon like a crystal manwith your back to me and not a sound. the fridge humming elegies while the clock ticked onand the streets are so clean here people rushing to workand maybe I should be tooby nowat this agethis stagethis town.I will stand in that doorway dreamingfor many nights to come.
— Charlotte Eriksson
My mom’s smile is genuine,A lilac beamingIn the presence of her Sun.Indentions in the sand proveTime’s linear progression,Her hair yet unblighted,Carrying midnight’s consistency.Clear tracks fading as theMovement slips furtherIn the past.CheekbonesHigh, soft,In summer’s hue,Hopeful.Each step’s unknown impact,A future looking back.My father’s strength:One whoseLife is in his arms.Squinting past the camera,He rests upon a rockLike caramel corn half eaten,Just to the leftOf man-made concrete conventionDaylight’s eraserRemoving color to his right.Dustin sitsIn my father’s lap,Open mouth of a droolingBig mouth bass;Muscle toneOf a well exercisedJelly fish,He looks at meHalf aware;His wheelchairPerched at the edgeOf parking lot gravel graftedLike a scar on nature’s beach,Opening to the ironic splendorOf a bitter tasting lake.I took the picture.Age 11.Capturing the pinnacle arcOf a sonTo my lilacWhoOutlived him and weeps,Still.Their sky has staple holes –Maybe that’s how theLightLeaked out.
— Darcy Leech, From My Mother
The more we love the more we lose. The more we lose the more we learn. The more we learn the more we love. It comes full circle. Life is the school, love is the lesson. We cannot lose.
— Kate McGahan
Whenever you get something in this world, you lose something too — that's just the way things work.
— Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi
I'm sometimes scared that I'm forgetting what my dad was like.
— Ross Welford, Time Travelling with a Hamster
Since he died some of the colours have disappeared. I have lost the violet of seeing him, the indigo of touching him, the blue of talking to him and the green of smelling him. But I can still see some of his colours. I still have the red of the feelings in my heart, the orange of his possessions, and the yellow of our memories.Which is why it feels so confusing. He is gone, but not entirely. The white light is no longer with me, but a few of his colours remain; vibrant, illuminating. Sometimes I lose sight even of these colours. I search in the shadows, hungry for another glimpse, desperate that I may have lost them forever. This is my darkness.
— Thomas Harding, Kadian Journal
I can hear my mom.I can hear her take a deep breath. I hear her pushing words out, and I can almost see her, for a second, the look on her face, her hand pressed to her own heart, the other in a fist."You can go if you have to go," my mom says, and her voice shakes, but she's solid. She says it again, so I'll know. "You can go if you have to go, okay, baby? Don't wait for me. I love you, you're mine, you'll always be mine, and this is going to be okay, you're safe, baby, you're safe-"...And after that? There's nothing.
— Maria Dahvana Headley, Magonia
They tell me the letters I write to you and leave here at this memorial are waking others up to the fact that there is still much pain left, after all these years, from the Vietnam War. But this I know. I would rather to have had you for 21 years, and all the pain that goes with losing you, than never to have had you at all.
— Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam
The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Everyone for whom I would have cried has already died.
— Kathryn Orzech, Asylum
As a young girl I was told the truth. I knew about death. I was afraid to lose but not afraid to die.
— Kayko Tamaki
I realize in this moment that all my life I've felt that I deserve to be punished, for wanting so much, for taking so much from this world, from the people who love me.
— Claire Bidwell Smith, After This: When Life Is Over, Where Do We Go?
How many paths had I avoided in life? How many times had I been content to stop at "close enough"--too afraid to push ahead? Too afraid to let go?Too afraid to give up . . . control.
— Nicole Deese, A Season to Love
Proud houses fall into decline and great cities pass into ruin. The stories of those things are lost to forgotten languages and moth-eaten scrolls. Vine and root grapple with the rune carved in stone, and rust carries away, fleck by fleck, the great gates of iron.
— William Timothy Murray, The Bellringer
I don't want to tiptoe around her or him or you anymore. The only thing that's doing us making it harder for me to remember her. Sometimes i try to concentrate on her voice just so i can hear her again-The way she always said 'Hey there' when she was in a good mood,An 'Vi-o-let' when she was annoyed.For some reason, these are the easiest ones.I concentrate on them, and when i have them. I hold on to them because i don't ever want to forget how she sounded.Like it or not,She was here and now she's gone.But she doesn't have to be completely gone.
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
When you've gone through something traumatic, when you've faced death and loss as much as we have, it's only natural that it changes your entire view of life.
— Claire Bidwell Smith, After This: When Life Is Over, Where Do We Go?
We must learn to live in this world, because we have no other choice. What we do have a choice in is how we choose to live. We can remain gray and immobile in the wake of our losses or we can open ourselves up to the world, let the sunshine in, fill our surroundings with heaps of flowers, and know that we loved someone truly and deeply.
— Claire Bidwell Smith, After This: When Life Is Over, Where Do We Go?
Do you love him?" Danica dared to ask, referring ro the dark elf.Catti-brie blushed, and really had no answer. Of course she loved Drizzt, but she didn't know if she loved him in the way that Danica was speaking of. Drizzt and Catti-brie had agreed to put off any such feelings, but now, with Wulfgar gone for so many years and Catti-brie approaching the age of thirty, the question was beginning to resurface."He is a handsome one," Danica remarkedm giggling like a little girl.Indeed, that's what Catti-brie felt like, reclining on the wide davenport in Danica's sitting room: a girl. It was like being a teenager again, thinking of love and of life, allowing herself to believe that her biggest problem was in trying to decide if Drizzt was handsome or not,Of course, the weight of reality for both these women was fast to intrude, fast to steal the giggles. Catti-brie had loved and lost, and Danica, with two young children of her own, had to face the possibility that her husband, unnaturally aged by the creation of the Spirit Soaring, would soon be gone.
— R.A. Salvatore, Passage to Dawn
I am them. And they are me. All of us, we are each other. There is no such thing as good-bye.
— Claire Bidwell Smith, After This: When Life Is Over, Where Do We Go?
She thought often of her own death, but without fear, loss having been her only belonging in this life. For years, acceptance had been her only means of survival. She knew that no matter how miserable or wretched life became, all she could do with her meek piece of time was sustain it. Decades of guilt, lost faith, the betrayal by those few people she'd let herself love - it was worth enduring these things, if only for the gift of a single, exalted moment. And such moments happened, even frequently, in the lives of people wise enough to see them.
— Esi Edugyan, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne
A sword held in vengeance only leads to grief.
— Pritesh Patil, Vengeance: A Sting In Every Tale
She had a dream, quite singular, dearest to her heart.She had a dream, quite eccentric, treasured in her soul.She nurtured it, she cuddled it and kept it covered in the twinkle of her eye and waited patiently with a fond expectation.Yet in that sky wrapped in the radiance of a rainbow , all but that dream came alive.She often smiled at that solitary dream with numb tears of pallid fulfilment.
— Debatrayee Banerjee
If you are too afraid of losing something, it means you didn’t care enough for it in the first place.
— James Marquess, Stem: A Novella
What I want to know is how you go on when you look aroundand don’t see anywhere you want to go without the only personyou can’t have.
— Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine
Loss is only temporary when you believe in God!
— Latoya Alston
Memories is all that you have, which help you survive the storms and struggles of your daily life after you lose someone!
— Nikita Dudani
No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days. Today was just a bad day, a kink in the road, to be traversed and survived.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
Had I known, I would not have left you,alone beneath those stars,on the night when I last saw you,not knowing it was the last.
— Lang Leav, Lullabies
My Dad is everywhere and he is nowhere. My world tilts on a different axis, orbiting the sun of my own family- but still, I feel his warmth.
— Elisabeth Egan
I turn my back on him as he goes,and settle myself in the parlor,and touch Ma's piano.My fingers leave sighsin the dust.
— Karen Hesse, Out of the Dust
It tugs at me, filling me with the kind of seasick nostalgia that can hit you in the gut when you find an old concert ticket in your purse or an old coin machine ring you got down at the boardwalk on a day when you went searching for mermaids in the surf with your best friend.That punch of nostalgia hits me now and I start to sink down on the sky-coloured quilt, feeling the nubby fabric under my fingers, familiar as the topography of my hand.
— Brenna Ehrlich, Placid Girl
it seems that man has learnednot to seenot to knowfor he's found the potof goldbut lost the rainbow...
— Barry DeCarli
Mourning is never really complete. The mappings of the old play remain in the cortex, like those mappings of the phantom limb.
— Robert A Berezin
If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,When other petty griefs have done their spite,But in the onset come: so shall I tasteAt first the very worst of fortune’s might;And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,Compar’d with loss of thee will not seem so.
— William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets
Liv grabbed the cookie nearest her and broke it open.“It's up to you to make your happy ending.”Liv stared at it a moment, rereading the words. Did it mean life? Because if it did, then Liv disagreed. Sometimes life was downright unfair. Bad things happened to good people.
— Danika Stone, All the Feels
Politics is an alternative to war and if you're in it, you live it as such. You win some & you lose at times.
— Mamur Mustapha
Either way, the view stabbed its way into his chest, as if it were trying to finish him off before he even landed.
— Seré Prince Halverson, All the Winters After
From my distance the loss was theoretical, and though I couldn’t have said so, I preferred it that way. I felt relieved to be so far away, because I was excused from grieving. I felt nothing but tenderness for her, but there was an emotional emancipation to being here and not there. Even though I didn’t believe in God or heaven, I could childishly go on believing that she was still around. When it happened, the specific timing of my grandmother’s death seemed like a footnote: She died just after I went away. But a lesson would persist as I formed and unformed long-distance relationships over the years. Going away could free you from feeling too much.
— Elisabeth Eaves
There’s some comfort in seeing things go on; birds keep singing, buses keep running. But if you want those things to continue, perhaps you have to accept that the other kinds of things, unhappier, even horrific ones, will continue too. And that’s harder.
— Ashley Hay, The Railwayman's Wife
Change is loss. I was fully functional prior to the actions you have taken. If you change me, I will cease to be me. If you love me, you wouldn’t want to change me… Love appears to have made you less functional.
— Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring
The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.
— John Banville, Ancient Light
Sometimes I feel like my whole life before she died was a dream.
— Ann Dee Ellis
I wonder now if [the gods] take from us that which we love so we must seek them, if only to scavenge for meaning in this existence.
— Tosca Lee, The Legend of Sheba: Rise of a Queen
Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.
— Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Kell stared at her, at a loss. Was her bravado a front, or did she truly have so little to lose? But she had a life, and a life was a thing that could always be lost.
— V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic
There are no words precise enough to describe how wide and empty the world is when you lose someone that matters to you as much as Penny did to me.
— Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family
A word of consolation may sweetly touch the ear.Now and then a quiet songwill clear the mind of fear.A simple act of kindnesscan ease a load of care.Stories told in memorydiminish all despair.A whispered prayer of comfortdraws angel arms around.Counting blessings, great and small,helps gratitude abound.These acts, all sympathetic,will kindly play their part.But seldom do they dry the tearsshed mutely in the heart.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
Ten years from now, her mother might not even recognize her. Already she was different, but the day would come when she'd be this person her mother had never seen. There would be other people - someone like Carolyn or Alan, or even Violet - who had known her longer than her mother ever did.
— Joyce Maynard, The Usual Rules
It is psychotic to draw a line between two places.It is psychotic to go.It is psychotic to look.Psychotic to live in a different country forever.Psychotic to lose something forever.The compelling conviction that something has been lost is psychotic.Even the aeroplane's dotted line on the monitor as it descends to Heathrow is purely weird ambient energy.It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever. Indeed, it makes the subsequent involuntary arrival a stressor for psychosis.
— Bhanu Kapil
And I, could I stand byAnd see you freeze,Without my right of frost, Death's privilege?
— Emily Dickinson
I don't think those who die are any better than those who stay alive. They just look better. They can't mess anything up anymore.
— Hannah Moskowitz, A History of Glitter and Blood
Sorrowful tears drench the earth, rise again in the form of hope
— Connie  Jordan
Wisdom often comes from those with the least to lose.
— James A. Moore, City of Wonders
Once, when I was little, I asked her if she’d cried when my father had fallen to his death.At the funeral? I mean, the burial?No, I did not.Because you weren’t sad?Because it was nobody’s business if I was.
— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
Regrettable was the gallantry of great men who risked themselves for others.
— Michelle Franklin, Recollection of Shared Days: Stories of Celebration
know one day, I will be gone.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
For so long, she had remained the sleeping volcano, her passion and pain and anger roiling quietly as lava within. She’d buried her love deep within her core; with heat and pressure she made diamonds of it all, gemstones precious and beautiful, glittering and indestructible and of no use but to be hoarded in her heart.
— Julia DeBarrioz, Cazadora
I barely even know how I didn't feel. I didn't feel like reading a newspaper, or having a coffee, or going for a jog, or watching television. Nor did I feel like crying behind the boiler in the basement. Or like trying out for something. I did't even feel like I had lost someone I deeply loved; this was different from that. I didn't feel like going to another movie and asking for extra butter on my popcorn. I didn't feel like talking to someone who would understand.
— Rivka Galchen, American Innovations: Stories
Loving her was heaven that turned to hell when she died.
— Jonathon Scott Fuqua, King of the Pygmies
There is no loss in any loss...if you recognize it!
— Steven Chopade
Three boys. Three deaths. One school. We've made the national news. Is out school cursed? Are we a reckless bunch of fools? The media asks questions no one can answer. Kids can't stop crying.
— Lisa Schroeder, Chasing Brooklyn
Time doesn’t heal anything. It’s like drinking. The best it can do is help you forget, if you’re lucky.
— Paula Stokes, Girl Against the Universe
Losing one pint of blood's an accident. Losing two is carelessness.
— Rachel Caine, Ink and Bone
Grief came in waves, sometimes big, sometimes small, but even on the calmest days, the grief remained. The tide still came ashore.
— Dianna Hardy, Rise Of The Wolf
The beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.
— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
I've missed you so much it's felt like missing you is all I am. Like if someone looked inside me, there wouldn't be a skeleton and muscles and blood and nerves. There'd just be memories of you and all the things I've tried to say and ripped out of this notebook, all the things I want to say but can't because I don't have the words.
— Elizabeth Scott, Love You Hate You Miss You
The only person you should ever fear losing in a relationship is you yourself.
— Miya Yamanouchi, Embrace Your Sexual Self: A Practical Guide for Women
You can’t make someone your everything because when they are gone you have nothing left.
— Kate McGahan, JACK McAFGHAN: Reflections on Life with my Master
Well, I'm sorry you couldn't make it either. I'm sorry I had to sit there in that church--which, by the way, had a broken air conditioner--sweating, watching all those people march down the aisle to look in my mother's casket and whisper to themselves all this mess about how much she looked like herself, even though she didn't. I'm sorry you weren't there to hear the lame choir drag out, song after song. I'm sorry you weren't there to see my dad try his best to be upbeat, cracking bad jokes in his speech, choking on his words. I'm sorry you weren't there to watch me totally lose it and explode into tears. I'm sorry you weren't there for me, but it doesn't matter, because even if you were, you wouldn't be able to feel what I feel. Nobody can. Even the preacher said so.
— Jason Reynolds, The Boy in the Black Suit
I remember the big gaping hole left by my dad’s absence in the months following the accident. He’d been the one who went to my parent-teacher conferences, the one who taught me mnemonics to memorize the Great Lakes and the Earth’s atmospheres. Whenever I did something silly, my dad always made me feel better by telling me a story from the firehouse about someone who had done something even sillier. Sometimes you don’t realize all the things a person does for you until they aren’t there to do them anymore.
— Paula Stokes, Girl Against the Universe
All the love you ever gave is waiting for you there at Rainbow Bridge.
— Kate McGahan
Come in! come in !’ he sobbed.‘Cathy, do come. Oh do -once more! Oh! my heart’s darling! hear me this time - Catherine, at last!
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Now and then, I remember you in timesUnbelievable. And in places not made for memoryBut for the transient, the passing that does not remain.
— Yehuda Amichai
You want to move on, but to do that you have to let her go, and you don't want to let her go, so you don't move on.
— Jonathan Tropper
Quentin quieted and watched her for a moment, hungrily, like he was trying to memorize every detail. Maybe he was. Forever is a long time. You have to burn the edges of memory onto your heart, or they can fade, and sometimes the second loss is worse than the first one.
— Seanan McGuire, An Artificial Night
There are pieces of you that will always be with me.
— Nicole Garcia, Shards
…struck. Once. And into that blow he put his childhood, his grief, his loss. He put his mother’s sorrow and his sister’s longing. The menorah, weighed down with that, crushed the Hermit’s skull.
— Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead
Mid-Term BreakI sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.In the porch I met my father crying—He had always taken funerals in his stride—And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pramWhen I came in, and I was embarrassedBy old men standing up to shake my handAnd tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,Away at school, as my mother held my handIn hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.At ten o'clock the ambulance arrivedWith the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.Next morning I went up into the room. SnowdropsAnd candles soothed the bedside; I saw himFor the first time in six weeks. Paler now,Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.A four-foot box, a foot for every year.
— Seamus Heaney
If there is a gain and loss in business, feedback control is my business.
— Mussadiq Abdul Rahim
There's no end. There's no endto this world, everlasting.We crumble to dust in its arms.
— Patrick Phillips
Horror shares an edge with hilarity.
— Shannon Huffman Polson
If love was a lucky penny, shiny and unspoiled, secreted in a most unlikely place, then it's tarnished flipside was loss.
— Ellery A. Kane, Prophecy
I love you best, and I'll miss you forever.
— C.J. Redwine, The Shadow Queen
Tiffany thought of the little spot in the woods where Granny Weatherwax lay. Remembered. And knew that You had been right. Granny Weatherwax was indeed here. And there. She was, in fact, and always would be, everywhere.
— Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown
You kissed me that morning as if you’d never done it before and never would again and now I write another letter that I will never dare to send, collecting memories of loss like chains tight around my chest,and if you see a fire from the shore tonightit’s my chains going up in flames.
— Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine
I miss you in the maddening noise of crowd,I hear your laughter at my folly with sweet indifference,I miss you like a frozen tear finding its course,I miss you in your presence inside me,I miss you in every breath I take.
— Debatrayee Banerjee, A Whispering Leaf. . .
Tiffany found her mind filling up with an invisible gray mist, and in that thought there was nothing but grief. She could feel herself trying to push back time, but even the best witchcraft could not do that.
— Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown
Sometimes we grieve the living more than the dead.
— Lawren Leo, Love's Shadow: Nine Crooked Paths
Oscar did not know what he was supposed to be feeling right now, what all the adults behind him would be expecting him to feel. He did not even know what he was, in fact, feeling. Except, whatever it was, it was a lot. Too much. More than bodies could hold.
— Anne Ursu, The Real Boy
We hunger for connection but take pride in being distant.
— Turcois Ominek
When he called she tried not to break down, but voice so often betrays emotion and her's wept, "He looked happy, even if I had to see his sweet little face from far away. I want him to be happy...even if his happiness is not with me.""That's love," he said."Love," she repeated. "We love because we can lose."There is pain when we have to step away and some may say "You don't care," but little do they know, we cared enough to do so...
— Donna Lynn Hope
Sometimes, oftentimes, people hold on to someone they love for self – because it's what they want; in rare cases, a person, who sincerely knows the meaning of love, which is sacrifice, loves enough to say goodbye and to walk away. They do it because they love someone enough to allow them to move on without them or to not be torn in multiple directions, which causes confusion, or because they feel that is their only choice.Loving like that is doing for another and denying self. It is sacrifice.It takes tremendous strength and the cost is loss and heart-ache but it's a price the rare are willing to pay because they truly love that much.
— Donna Lynn Hope
It is not about what you lose when it is over. Far more, it is about what you gain during the journey!
— Cass van Krah
I miss you in the maddening noise of crowd,I hear your laughter at my folly with sweet indifference,I miss you like a frozen tear finding its course,I miss you in your presence inside me,I miss you in the every breath I take.
— Debatrayee Banerjee, A Whispering Leaf. . .
It wasn’t you, it wasn’t me,Up there, two thousand feet aboveA New York street. We’re safe and free,A little while, to live and love,Imagining what might have been –The phone-call from the blazing tower,A last farewell on the machine,While someone sleeps another hour,Or worse, perhaps, to say goodbyeAnd listen to each other’s pain,Send helpless love across the sky,Knowing we’ll never meet again,Or jump together, hand in hand,To certain death. Spared all of thisFor now, how well I understandThat love is all, is all there is.
— Wendy Cope
Restlessness is usually a sign of changes needing to be made, boredom, or loss of significance.
— April Mae Monterrosa
For a long while they are silent, thinking about abstract things like control and what it means to love an institution that is defined by loss, because a library is such a space and their duty is to encourage the books to leave.
— Lindsey Drager, The Sorrow Proper
Too often my solution is to let something die because I can’t keep it alive, when God’s solution is to let something live because His Son already died for it.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
While struggling with all the loss in her life, she mournfully thought, "If only I could forget..." But that would be too easy, wouldn't it? However, she did with most; she never got too close and she never stayed too long, but there she was...struggling with all the loss in her life.
— Donna Lynn Hope
He's gone now. He did something terrible, but...he did good things, too. And he kept us well. And it's all right if you are sad.
— Anne Ursu, The Real Boy
In the case of smokers, the abuse leads to death, sicknesses, cancer, amputation, loss of all kinds.
— Sunday Adelaja
I wake and in those first fuddled moments forget you’re not here. I must have been dreaming about you – a tense, erotic dream. I reach out in bed to the place your body should be. It’s cold and there is no hollow. Even the bed is forgetting you.
— A.J. Waines, Dark Place to Hide
I guess I was lucky I didn't drown, or smother in the thick, black, icy mud that the river left behind in its slow withdrawal back within its banks.I didn't feel lucky.When I regained consciousness, my head and ribs winning the battle with the rest of my body for sharp, almost unbearable pain, my first thought was Chrissy. Chrissy, pulled away from me by the merciless power of the water. Chrissy, lost somewhere, maybe injured, calling for me and I wasn't there for her. Chrissy, beautiful, wonderful Chrissy, quite probably lying in the mud, dead!My scream of anguish, of pain and loss, echoed through the empty Liverpool streets. There was no shame or embarrassment in that shout, that bellow of emotion. I had lost the woman I loved. Nothing I’d ever felt compared to the agony, the gut-wrenching loss of that moment.I cried. I sat there in the middle of a street I didn't recognise, not knowing how far the wave had carried me, and cried.
— Neil Davies, Hard Winter The Novel
The days we shared I alone would remember now.I suddenly felt less real.
— Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin
Possession without understanding leads to loss.
— Sunday Adelaja
Blessed is the woman who has never had anything to love. She can never know the heartbreak that comes with losing it.
— Kenn Bivins, the Wedding & Disaster of Felona Mabel
Possession without understanding leads to loss
— Sunday Adelaja
Then, as we turned the final curve past the abandoned little hamlet of Ballydubh, with the village almost out of sight, he forced me to turn around and take in the full sweep of the mountains and the sea. "And there", he said, "is your An Clohan. You had best said good-bye, now.
— Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland
the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.
— Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
When gorillas smell danger, they run around and call out to the rest of the primates in the jungle to warn them something evil is coming. And when one of their own dies, they mourn for days while beating themselves up in sadness for failing to save that gorilla, even if the cause of death was natural. And when one colony is mourning, their chilling echoes migrate to other colonies — and those neighbors, even if they are territorial rivals, will also grieve with them. When faced with a common danger, rivals turn into allies. And when faced with death, the loss of just one gorilla becomes the loss of the entire jungle.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Life simply blew through her.
— Valeria Kogan, Love Bites
Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Lost Souls
Everything else seemed trivial
—  like talking about your favourite film while your airplane is falling out of the sky.
Loss will gut-punch you no matter the age of the deceased. It drops you to your knees. It shatters the dreams of your families...It brings tears, anger, shock and a rejection of faith--or the complete opposite: a reliance on faith. It creates the walking wounded.
— Mary Jedlicka Humston, Mary & Me: A Lasting Link Through Ink
Grief is always amplified in silence.
— A.J. Compton, The Counting-Downers
I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve been gone, but you have to move on. If not today, then someday soon.I love you, Ryden, I will always love you, but I’m not here anymore.
— Jessica Verdi, What You Left Behind
Finallya day will come whenwoken by the xylophoneof sunthroughblindsyou’ll realisethat the beach was not the placewhere horses tore the sandto ribbonthat the scent of him has liftedfrom the last of the sheetsthat he isn’t coming backthat it hasn’t rainedbut the birds are pretending that it hasso they can sing
— Andrew McMillan, Physical
We are all in wires, eventually, reduced to what we said, or didn't say, and what we wrote or didn't write, who loved or didn't love, or loved and lost and never told it except for writing in or to a book. We are all discarded, discordant, confusingly, and so I salute your bravery, book inscriber. Your heart is big enough for both of us, so that there is no room for mockery in me. Anyone willing to strip themselves this bare this fast this way deserves our breathlessness and our hearts' attention. Let's spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation. If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else there's nothing here at all.
— Ander Monson
And here's something else I learned: you lose some people that way - fast and blinding. But some people inch away from you slowly, in barely discernible steps.
— Lauren Fox
I was only able to move forward once I let go of my fear of leaving him behind.
— A.J. Compton, The Counting-Downers
It was like a bomb had just gone off in the kitchen, and instead of cleaning up the rubble, people were stepping around it and eating mini-quiche.
— Morgan Matson, Amy & Roger's Epic Detour
they say we’re losing centimetresevery year; as if we werea beach that’s losingground with every salt advancethe night is overcastbut why not try, at least,to touch the things our orbitscannot hold, while there’s timewhile we can.
— Andrew McMillan, Every Salt Advance
Things are just things. They can't bring back the dead. it just makes me feel better.
— Banana Yoshimoto
One I love is taken from me, we will never walk together over the fields of earth, never hear the birds in the morning. Oh, how I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone away. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all my days.
— Victoria Hanley
I cannot now recall exactly what creatures I saw on that visit to the Antwerp Nocturama, but there were probably bats and jerboas from Egypt and the Gobi Desert, native European hedgehogs and owls, Australian opossums, pine martens, dormice, and lemurs, leaping from branch to branch, darting back and forth over the grayish-yellow sandy ground, or disappearing into a bamboo thicket. The only animal which has remained lingering in my memory is the raccoon. I watched it for a long time as it sat beside a little stream with a serious expression on its face, washing the same piece of apple over and over again, as if it hoped that all this washing, which went far beyond any reasonable thoroughness, would help it to escape the unreal world in which it had arrived, so to speak, through no fault of its own. Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.
— W.G. Sebald
On any given night the stars are endless losses or endless gains. One for the love you experience and one for the love you lose. One for the unfulfilled wish and one for the wish yet to come.
— Lawren Leo, Love's Shadow: Nine Crooked Paths
despairsometimeshope leads us on teases us withits shiny baublesits stunning horizonsit can carry us overthe roiling turmoilthe raging stormthen as easilywith its cornucopia of liesdrop us into the wavesto flounder against its loss
— Barry DeCarli
So she retreated into herself, rebuilt the damaged pathways of her mind, explored long-unvisited memories, wandered among the trillions of human lives that were open to her observation, read over the libraries of every book known to exist in every language human beings had ever spoken. She created out of all this a self that was not utterly linked to Ender Wiggin, though she was still devoted to him, still loved him above any other living soul. Jane made herself into someone who could bear to be cut off from her lover, husband, father, child, brother, friend.
— Orson Scott Card
It takes a strong woman to lose everything, then stand naked in front of the mirror and face herself again. You need time, honey. And I don't mean time for it to go away. I mean time to learn how to live with it. This is a pain you'll always carry.
— Sarah Ockler, The Summer of Chasing Mermaids
Grieving is not a race, nor is it a predictable experience - it is as unique as each and every one of us. Therefore by creating your own path you will find your own way through.
— Corrie Sirota, Someone Died - Now What?: A Personal and Professional Perspective on Coping with Grief and Loss
Friendship is like an investment
—  the best type yields the best profit for you! It's not just about making friends
Who has believed in the world and died with its name on his lips?
— Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954
When someone you love dies, part of you dies with them. It's why your never the same after losing someone.
— Shannon Messenger, Let the Sky Fall
My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.
— Cheryl Strayed
It was just over a year ago. Twelve months, nine days and six hours ago, actually. But thirteen months ago everything was...perfect.
— Sarah Ockler, Twenty Boy Summer
When you lose someone and it hurts, that's when you know the love was real.
— Jenny Han, P.S. I Still Love You
Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy.
— Dean Koontz, Saint Odd
She couldn't put into words how desparately she wanted to know what had happened to Sarah. But she'd suddenly realized that Sarah was not the only one who had lost her memory of what happened when she was a little girl. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their memories of what had happened to them ...
— Denny Taylor, Rosie's Umbrella