c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
To escape the throngs, we decided to see the new Neil Degrasse Tyson planetarium show, Dark Universe. It costs more than two movie tickets and is less than thirty minutes long, but still I want to go back and see it again, preferably as soon as possible. It was more visually stunning than any Hollywood special effect I’d ever seen, making our smallness as individuals both staggering and - strangely - rather comforting. Only five percent of the universe consists of ordinary matter, Neil tells us. That includes all matter - you, and me, and the body of Michael Brown, and Mork’s rainbow suspenders, and the letters I wrote all summer, and the air conditioner I put out on the curb on Christmas Day because I was tired of looking at it and being reminded of the person who had installed it, and my sad dying computer that sounds like a swarm of bees when it gets too hot, and the fields of Point Reyes, and this year’s blossoms which are dust now, and the drafts of my book, and Israeli tanks, and the untaxed cigarettes that Eric Garner sold, and my father’s ill-fitting leg brace that did not accomplish what he’d hoped for in terms of restoring mobility, and the Denver airport, and haunting sperm whales that sleep vertically, and the water they sleep in, and Mars and Jupiter and all of the stars we see and all of the ones we don’t. That’s all regular matter, just five percent. A quarter is “dark matter,” which is invisible and detectable only by gravitational pull, and a whopping 70 percent of the universe is made up of “dark energy,” described as a cosmic antigravity, as yet totally unknowable. It’s basically all mystery out there - all of it, with just this one sliver of knowable, livable, finite light and life. And did I mention the effects were really cool? After seeing something like that it’s hard to stay mad at anyone, even yourself.
— Summer Brennan
Unfortunately, as anyone who has lived through a tragedy knows, life does, rather infuriatingly, go on.
— G. Norman Lippert, James Potter and the Morrigan Web
Uncoupling is a dramatic life event, whose importance is reflected in the eagerness of people to discuss their relationships even years later. Indeed, in attempting to put the story in chronological order, there was no one who was not visited again by sorrow and loss in the telling of it, regardless of the passage of time.
— Diane Vaughan
It’s important to have a buddy like that. Somebody who’ll stop you from doing that really stupid thing you were gonna do just because you couldn’t think of anything better. -- unidentified soldier, eulogizing his dead buddy
— Henry V. O'Neil, Orphan Brigade
And there was time enough--or so it seemed--for all the cherries atop all the ice-cream sundaes in all the world to fall from their frozen perches, as the heat of a treasure chest summer melted them away. Down and down into the cups of what it would all become, trusting on the ingredients, and how much love had been used to unite them.
— Tag Cavello, Double Dutch and Other Stories
Everything that falls upon the eye is an apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves & brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away...so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable...Why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe had made notable?...It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost.
— Marilynn Robinson in Housekeeping
As the sky faded to night, her anger dissipated—but not in a healing way, just dulled, like forged iron sizzling in a cold pail of water.
— Katherine McIntyre, Poisoned Apple
Within and within. Dreaming. How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts.
— Peter Heller
How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?
— Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question
Sometimes falling apart is the bravest act of all
— Sarah Hackley, Women Will Save the World
Missing Alina was worse than a terminal illness. At least when you were terminal you knew the pain was going to end eventually. But there was no light at the end of my tunnel. Grief was going to devour me, day into night, night into day, and although I might feel like I was dying from it, might even wish I was, I never would. I was going to have to walk around with a hole in my heart forever. I was going to hurt for my sister until the day I died. If you don't know what I mean or you think I'm being melodramatic, then you've never really loved anyone.
— Karen Marie Moning, Darkfever
Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the measured rites that must be fulfilled after a death? Because it is as though the one who is left steps for a time upon a stage and each second swells to an unlimited amount of time and he id watched by many eyes? Because there is a function he must carry out? Or perhaps, when there is love, the widowed must stay for the resurrection of the beloved - so that the one who has gone is not really dead, but grows and is created for a second time in the soul of the living? Why?
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
There’s 6.5 billion people curled up like fists protesting death, but every breath we take has to be given back; a nine year old boy taught me that.
— Shane L. Koyczan
I know this: there is no sense to grief. There is no pattern or shape or texture, and there are no books or stories which can lessen the pain at losing a person you have loved, and will always love. There are no rules, with loss.
— Susan  Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea
Since we all know for a fact that we're all going to die, why don't we all treat each other like we could lose each other at any minute?
— Catherine Ryan Hyde, Jumpstart the World
It was a tragic end to a heroic life.
— Chris Kyle
Goodbye," she told him, running her hand across his broad back one last time. "I love you. And I'll never, ever stop missing you.
— Kate Lattey, Dare to Dream
We can’t even remotely fathom that whatever is ending for us is always more than an ending.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.
— Anne Roiphe
Though there is much we still want, there is much we already have, and that means we have much to lose as well. It’s that potential loss that can keep us bound so tightly that we never reach our biggest dreams, because the biggest dreams require the most risk.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
Whatever you have lost there are more of, just not yours.
— Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories
I said out loud, "Damn you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing but to love you and hate you, and that's gonna kill me, and you know it is."Then I turned round, went back to the cellar room, and picked up the sewing.Don't think she wasn't in every stitch I worked. She was in the wind and the rain and the creaking from the rocker. She sat on the wall with the birds and stared at me. When darkness fell, she fell with it.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings
There is a realm in which miracles are possible and do take place. The door to this realm is the belief in all possibilities and YOU are the key.
— Vivian Amis, The Essentials of Life
Rob; you could have been someone I wanted to be with. But you’re not; you never spoke to Niall, not really. You joked and you danced, but how often did you really talk? You never even told him you loved him until it was already too late. What was he to you? A friend? A lover? Or was he just some set piece in Rob Sardan’s great story? Is that what everyone is to you? Can’t we have our own story?
— Joel Cornah, The Sea-Stone Sword
Whatever might be taken from me need not leave me with a deficit in its wake.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Standing on the edge with my patients — abiding with them — means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could.
— Christine Montross, Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
With the ambitions, to seize the opportunity to win is your big loss.
— Auliq Ice
You are always going to love him," she said. " You're stuck with that.
— Leslie Connor, The Things You Kiss Goodbye
Chance, you've gone past something you couldn't afford to go past; your time, your youth, you've passed it. It's all you had and you've had it.
— Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth
I want you to forget what i told you earlier, I... I couldn’t love someone like you. I hate you. I thought it the second i saw you in the park. You were just poison! Drinking beer in the morning, quoting some stupid Tanka to me! You listening to other people talking all day just so you never have to reveal a thing about yourself! You knew who I was, I was just a kid! What were you thinking what’s wrong with you?! If I’d know who you were I wouldn’t have told you a thing about me or my dreams. You don’t think I can do it! You don’t think I’ll ever amount to anything! What is that why you didn’t say anything to me? You thought maybe you'd humor the little kid? Indulge his fantasies for a little while! Just string him along? Just say it I’ll never measure up to my dreams! You knew from the beginning you could have just admitted it! But you played along. So tell me god damn it! Tell me that little kids should run along to school! Tell me that you hate me! Say it! Come on listener say something for a change! You loser! Its because you act like that. You never say what's important! You act like it's none of your business! You've been living your whole life alone!
— Makoto Shinkai
I ached with loss that I’d never allowed myself to feel. As if I was leaving something important behind. And that something was me.
— A. Lynn, Itsy's Ugly
In the support group, the counselor had said: When you lose a loved one, you feel as if you're inside a confined space. Everyone else will seem to be careening along outside of this space. In time, you will become aware of an opening you are going to have to step through. It might be the touch of a new lover, a new job, a move--but you'll know. You will step through.
— Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More
If you love your dad, it’s tough when he dies. If you don’t like your dad, it’s tough when he dies. Because you lose that guy. Whatever you didn’t get, you miss. And what you did get, you miss.
— Jimmy Iovine
Leaving yourself behind is the worst loss a person can know.
— A. Lynn, Itsy's Ugly
I could no longer desire physically without feeling a need for her, without suffering from her absence.
— Marcel Proust, The Captive & The Fugitive
My mom was there to answer the unanswerable, to make sense of the fault in our life - and we got through that somehow; we came out on the other side. Now I'm 0 for 2 and I don't get any more pitches to swing at.
— Daisy Whitney, When You Were Here
No, I am not all right, I want to say. Have you been to my house? Have you seen how empty it is?
— Daisy Whitney, When You Were Here
Because, George thought as she sat there with her eyes closed back before Christmas in Mrs Rock's self-consciously comfortable chair in the counselling office, how can it be that there's an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert? How can that advert exist and her mother not exist in the world?She didn't say it out loud, though, because there wasn't a point.It isn't about saying.It is about the hole which will form in the roof through which the cold will intensify and after which the structure of the house will begin to shift, like it ought, and through which George will be able to lie every night in bed watching the black sky.
— Ali Smith, How to Be Both
Oh sweetheart, do you really think if youseal it up, that the pain's gonna go away?
— Alice Sebold
Heartache, guilt, loss, grief, these things, too, are monsters.
— Chelsey Philpot
What I understand now about survival is that something in you dies. You don't become a survivor intact. Survival's cost is always loss.
— J Dylan Yates
Nothing is really lost in the World
—  everything is preserved.
Like that first kiss we will never have. Like the last kiss we will always have.
— Dimitri Zaik, Ink Bleeder
You get all these friends when just when you don't need friends anymore.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of him almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy days and joyful times; often they were terrible dreams of abandonment, loss and sorrow. She didn't know which was worse: every morning she woke afresh to the knowledge that he was gone and he would never come back. It would never be all right again.
— Maeve Binchy
Lost. The therapist made it sound as if the person could be found. As if death wasn’t final and irrevocable.
— Lurlene McDaniel, The End of Forever
I love hard and still haven’t a clue what it feels like…
— Alexandra Elle
You are always going to love him, she said " You're stuck with that.
— Leslie Connor
I think the purest of souls, those with the most fragile of hearts, must be meant for a short life. They can't be tethered or held in your palm.Just like a sparrow, they light on your porch. Their song might be brief, but how greedy would we be to ask for more? No, you cannot keep a sparrow. You can only hope that as they fly away, they take a little bit of you with them.
— Emm Cole, The Short Life of Sparrows
Someone is going to tell you to get use to this. That feeling of being scared and sad. They're going to say it'll be better when you learn to ignore it. Don't listen to them. Hold on to it, remember it... Don't let yourself forget it. It's too easy to lose.-Carl Grimes
— Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Issue #125
Sound an alarm! Advertising, not deals, builds brands.
— David Ogilvy, The Unpublished David Ogilvy
I have been loved," she said, "by something strange, and it has forgotten me.
— Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
This tune goes manly.Come, go we to the King. Our power is ready;Our lack is nothing but our leave. MacbethIs ripe for shaking, and the powers abovePut on their instruments. Receive what cheer you may.The night is long that never finds th
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Can you remember another time when your chest felt like this?”My fingers splayed across my aching chest as I carefully pondered herquestion. Then I nodded vigorously as I remembered. Tears streamed down my cheeks unchecked as I whispered hoarsely, “Yes, I do remember.After my husband died, it hurt like this. My chest felt full and heavy, and I thought then, Oh, this is what it feels like to have your heart break.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
Loss is a knife, constantly cutting, but over time the blade dulls, and the cuts aren't as sharp. It's always there in the drawer, but you realize it doesn't cut as deeply anymore.
— Shane Barr, Reset
In the midst of the darkness of loss, I found light. Admittedly, in those first weeks, it might have been but a single small spark I sensed deep inside of me, but that spark guided me in the twisted, dark journey of grief. As I stumbled over the roots of hopelessness and despair, that light grew to illuminate my path, a path I sometimes felt very alone on. At some point in the journey I’d turned around, and there was God.That is grace.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
You who have never “been there” in the throes of grief, have no idea what is going on inside the head of the grieving spouse: the scatteredthoughts, the constant worry that we will forget something or someone in our fog-induced state, that strange feeling of not quite “being all there” when out in social situations, the pall that covers everything, like a cloak of sadness that never lifts.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
Sarah, though, was still sometimes ruled by stark pain, lost to everything else. Grief slipped away, only to attack from behind. It changed shape endlessly. It lacerated her, numbed her, stalked her, startled her, caught her by the throat. It deceived her eye with glimpses of Charles, her ear with the sound of his voice. She would turn and turn, expecting him, and find him gone. Again. Each time Sarah escaped her sorrow, forgetful amid other things, she lost him anew the instant she remembered he was gone.
— Kate Maloy, Every Last Cuckoo
She remembers blood.A fine mist which goes deep into her lungs, over her skin and through the air. She remembers a desert at dusk. The sky indigo blue and the fire bright, so bright that she can see everything. Near the fire, in the night, all she knows is chaos wrapped in crimson. All is death and nightmare with a single solitary dancer who smiles cruelly as he moves. He is power and darkness. He is man and beast, silver coin eyes and that face, those claws and the agony of loss. Time stretches wide; seconds like vast eons swallow up her world. Vince is dead, his mother, his brother and her small son ripped apart and gushing as he/it moves. She is screaming, a howl of agony beyond words, primal and wordless. Still he moves, faster than air, faster than she could ever be. Blood drips from her face as she grunts, running with her lungs on fire and her last remaining hope wrapped in her arms.
— Amanda M. Lyons, Wendy Won't Go
don’t tell me not to drink. not to smoke. not to grieve. if i speak of these things it’s because i have to— but i am not speaking to you.
— Julio Alexi Genao, Collected
Some say that Love, at sight of human ties, Spreads his light wings and in a moment flies.
— Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles, Manon Lescaut
From loss breeds new beginnings
— Bernadette Marie, Vivian
Don’t you believe that Jacob can be healed?” some persisted, pressuringElizabeth to believe—just believe—and Jacob would be healed. Theunderlying message was that Elizabeth’s faith was not strong enough to save her son. I remembered then the same kind of statements David and I had heard when he was undergoing cancer treatment, when several well-intentioned people informed David that all he had to do to rid his body of cancer was to believe he was healed. I’d resented the implications then, and I resented them for my daughter now. People die. Goodpeople like David die too young, and innocent little children die, and thestrongest faith in the world cannot keep anyone on this earth forever. Ifonly the same Christians professing their faith in healing could clearlysee the flip side of that faith, that earth was not where we ultimately belonged.If Jacob died, he would be going Home.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
Tonight I attend my thirty-fifth high school reunion with some trepidation.I have not seen most of these former classmates for thirty-some years. I am not the same young girl they knew in high school. What they cannot know, what I am just realizing myself, is that I am not even the same person I was two years ago.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
You have no idea how well you are doing,” John complimented mejust a few minutes after he mentioned the Christmas card. What did that mean: That I was doing well? That I’d come to a family gathering? That I’d remembered to bring food? That I was dressed, and my hair combed? That I was wearing shoes? I wasn’t sure, but maybe just making an appearance at a family event meant I was handling things well.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
We myopically stare at the gaping hole left in our lives and see nothing but the hole, not realizing a hole is defined by everything around it that is not a hole.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
That evening I sat across from Jeremy Bulloch and Jacob at the dinner table. I watched as Jeremy, who seemed to speak Jacob’s silent language fluently, drummed his fingers up and down on the edge of the table, as if playing a piano. A delighted Jacob mimicked the actor’s actions. My throat filled with tears. I met Ben’s eyes across the table, where he sat straight with pride next to his son. He was enjoying the show just as much as I was. Jacob was in his element, interacting with an actor from his favorite movie. The other men at the table were part of the set: Mike, the owner of the comic book store, who had made the entire thing possible, and the Mandalorin Mercs, new friends of the little boy who hadbecome one of their own, a comrade in distress.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
I often wondered after David’s death: Had they known something then? Did their very souls recognize each other? Did Jacob, closer to God than anyone else I knew, somehow sense this was the last time he would see his grandpa? Hadthere been a message to the little boy in David’s long-held gaze? Did these two people—the six-year-old boy and the sixty-year-old man— realize something the rest of us didn’t?
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
The whole encounter was surreal. No one had mentioned cancer. I hadn’t requested special treatment for Jacob. Yet he’d just nabbed a private meeting with an actor from his favorite movie. I would later ask Mike, the comic book store owner, what had prompted him to invite Jacob to the supper and a private meeting with Mr. Bulloch.“It was Jeremy at the door. He recognized something in Jacob. Jeremyis a cancer survivor.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
It's always the same with lost people; you start out looking for them, and you end up losing yourself.
— Grant Morrison, Doom Patrol, Vol. 3: Down Paradise Way
It's been six months since she died. But Ove still inspects the whole house twice a day to feel the radiators and check that she hasn't sneakily turned up the heating.
— Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
Death is never easy when you know the people doing the dying.
— Oliver North, Counterfeit Lies
What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
— Helen Keller
I believe there is no heaven or hell. There are no devils or angels. No afterlife or salvation. My soul won't be incarnated or lost in the oblivion. One day, I will just stop existing... and that's it!
— Bhavya Kaushik
She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought – that as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.
— Anne Rice, The Witching Hour
Utterly, irrevocably, lost
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we're given.
— Álvaro de Campos
On the seventh day of the Seventh-month, in the Palace of Long Life,We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight worldThat we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one,And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree."Earth endures, heaven endures; some time both shall end,While this unending sorrow goes on and on for ever.
— Bai Juyi
Somehow, grief had seemed easier to bear when the skies were dark and a cold wind kept cats and prey inside their nests.
— Erin Hunter, Bramblestar's Storm
...because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
... he wasn't crying for the woman who had died. He was crying for the woman she had been.
— Sharon Sala, Going Once
I am very familiar with the sound of loss.
— Amy L. Boukair, Indigo
I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn't believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn't mention – as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name.
— Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories
The breeze around them seemed to drop – dead – like a door to the best things had just closed.
— Carla H. Krueger, Sleeping with the Sun
Though loss did not pass from one person to another liker a baton; it just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And, she thought, scratching the coarseness of the horse's mane, it did not leave once lodged, did it, simply changed form and asked repeatedly for attention and care, as each year revealed a new knot to cry out and consider - smaller, sure, but never gone.
— Aimee Bender, The Color Master: Stories
My mind couldn't fit itself around the shape of his absence.
— Lia Mills, Fallen
...and be emptied of gravity and surrounding by the rouge wave of an emotion she could not name.
— Carol Cassella, Gemini
He couldn’t count them all. Nobody taught him how to count past ten. Such losses were beyond his comprehension.
— J.U. Scribe, Before the Legend
Memories of that which we have lost are curious things - weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had and I have no longer
— Alexander McCall Smith
From loss breeds new life
— Bernadette Marie, Penelope
At morn we buried Melanippus; as the sun set the maiden Basilo died by her own hand, as she could not endure to lay her brother on the pyre and live; and the house beheld a two-fold woe, and all Cyrene bowed her head, to see the home of happy children made desolate.
— allimachus and Lycophron CXLII
In the kitchen, her family nibbled Helen’s lemon squares. Melanie urged brownies on the nurses. “Take these,” she told Lorraine. “We can’t eat them all, but Helen won’t stop baking.”“Sweetheart,” Lorraine said, “everybody mourns in her own way.”Helen mourned her sister deeply. She arrived each day with shopping bags. Her cake was tender with sliced apples, but her almond cookies crumbled at the touch. Her pecan bars were awful, sticky-sweet and hard enough to break your teeth. They remained untouched in the dining room, because Helen never threw good food away.
— Allegra Goodman, Apple Cake
Grief can destroy you—or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. “And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.
— Dean Koontz, Odd Hours
Olga was nice, Olga was nice and loving, Olga loved him, he repeated to himself with a growing sadness as he also realised that nothing would ever happen between them again, life sometimes offers you a chance he thought, but when you are too cowardly or too indecisive to seize it life takes the cards away; there is a moment for doing things and entering a possible happiness, and this moment lasts a few days, a few weeks or even a few months, but it only happens once and one time only, and if you want to return to it later it's quite simply impossible. There's no more place for enthusiasm, belief and faith, and there remains just gentle resignation, a sad and reciprocal pity, the useless but correct sensation that something could have happened, that you just simply showed yourself unworthy of this gift you had been offered.
— Michel Houellebecq, La Carte et le territoire
We have all suffered losses and pain, but no loss is greater than a life lost holding-on to a painful past.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
For darkness terrifies. It swallows you, warps you, nullifies you. Who alive can possibly profess confidence in darkness? In the dark, you can't see.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
We keep moving. And as we do, the things around us, well, they disappear.
— Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
Sacrifice by its strictest definition takes something precious in exchange for the appeasement of a higher power. And abiding devotion to a cause that cannot be satisfied with a simple promise. Because an oath no matter how solemn asks nothing in return. While true sacrifice demands unspeakable loss.
— Emily Thorne
And I wished I could believe him. I wished with all that I had. And when you're eleven, you're on the cusp between still believing wishing worked if you wanted something hard enough and understanding the world is teeth and sharp edges. I wished. I did. I promise you with all that I have that I did. But I knew the teeth. The sharp edges. And they were bigger than wishing. I was only eleven, but I was the product of my upbringing too. Maybe that's why I was able to be the one to leave. Maybe I'd been looking for a reason and latched on to the first one that came, no matter how hard it was. If there's one thing I've learned in my life, it's that it's easier to leave someone before they leave you. Because eventually, everyone leaves. It's inevitable.
— T.J. Klune, The Art of Breathing
Tell a child, that he will soon be homeless; he will slowly detach from the world. Tell that same child that he is now homeless, he will abandon all foundations. Tell the child he has a home again, he may return to Earth from his travels, but he will never want to see this world again.
— Justin K. McFarlane Beau
Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
From loss breeds new opportunity
— Bernadette Marie, Amelia
I wish to go down under the waters—the cool, crystalline waters that I knew, where allthat is, here, existing, isis only to be lost within the susurrationsand the rumours of water and the evening starwe wait for...
— John Daniel Thieme, paulinskill hours and other poems
There is something about loss and pain that opens the doors of wisdom in your heart, doors that would have remained locked for a whole lifetime.
— Lyrical Treasure
It had been so long since she had felt anything.
— Montgomery Mahaffey, Ella Bandita and the Wanderer
I have loved and lost many a time, but along the way I have found myself.
— Lyrical Treasure
The fullness of life's balancing grace will demand the symmetry of recompense for all your loss and pain.
— Bryant McGill
...And her tears turned into blood, because what she was losing was thicker than water.
— Anonymous
Allow yourself some happiness, so that I can be a part of it.
— Montgomery Mahaffey, Ella Bandita and the Wanderer
Be Creative, consume time, don't let the time consumes you..
— AribaZafar
We don't know predestined ways,or what future might behold,someone leaves,someone remains,and new things replace the old.We don't know a thing for sure,what's today,is there tomorrow?Yet,somehow we still endure,through those moments filled with sorrow.Can we really be mistaken,trying just the best we can?something's given and some taken,never knowing how nor when.We don't know that much,it's true,life's a mystery divine,a day came,when i lost you,treasured guiding star of mine.
— Aleksandra Ninkovic
Anna drove with the window rolled down, breathing in the essence of autumn: an exhalation of a forest readying itself for sleep, a smell so redolent with nostalgia a pleasant ache warmed her bones and she was nagged with the sense of a loss she could not remember.
— Nevada Barr, Hunting Season
I didn't have enough other people in my life to cover the loss of this many people at once. I didn't have spare aunties or cousins or grandparents. I didn't have backup. I didn't have insurance to cover a loss like this.
— Liane Moriarty, The Hypnotist's Love Story
So, how can I try to be someone I didn't really even know?
— Gume Laurel III, Kingdom of Abel - Bathed in Shadow
The fearful have lost faith while the fearless allow faith to lead the way.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Sometimes when we are drowning in our own loss we lash out--anger is momentarily easier to cope with.
— Anne Perry, No Graves As Yet
Sometimes the pain is a startling breach that hobbles your entire soul
—  dreadful losses that rupture your perceived reality. Pain so visceral and unrelenting that even death itself can begin to look like a welcomed and kind benefactor.
To better handle grief, become the passenger, not the driver.
— Todd Stocker, REFINED: Turning Pain into Purpose
There is more than one way to lose your life; quickly through violence, or fettered-away and wasted around dreadful, toxic people.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
And she wept as well for the others lost in the Dark War, and she wept for her mother and the loss she had endured, and she wept for Emma and the Blackthorns, remembering how they had fought back tears when she had told them that she had seen Mark in the tunnels of Faerie, and how he belonged to the Hunt now, and she wept for Simon and the hole in her heart where he had been, and the she would miss him every day until she died, and she wept for herself and the changes that had been wrought in her, because sometimes even change for the better felt like a little death.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
Some thoughts should never be conceived. Some questions should never be asked, because they have no answer, and the questions themselves serve only to haunt with grinding guilt and second guessing.
— Bobby Adair, Dead Fire
The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be buried an arm's length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother's prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother's portrait made, he should have had his made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother's nose, he hadn't been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he'd believed that plummet was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arms' reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents' house his portrait hangs within arm's reach of his older brother's, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.
— Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Friends disappear or they are powerless. This is what misfortune meansan acid test of friendship.I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
— Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides
Why talk about something you can't do anything about?
— John Knowles, A Separate Peace
Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.
— John Fowles, The Magus
All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.
— Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
I listen to the rain talk to the leaves. She tells a story of love and leaving (isn’t that always the story? Isn’t that always the punchline?) She tells it softly like someone who has recently lost something that cannot be replaced. She closes her eyes and remembers. The leaves quietly wait. They love in silence. They understand in the dark. And I too begin to understand. We are all part pouring rain, part fallen leaves. We are all part of the world, and we all have a story.
— Emm Roy, The First Step
All the great words, it seemed to Connie were cancelled, for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now and dying from day to day.
— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
If you accept that pets can love us as much as we do them, then the logic is clear and cannot be denied. If you believe that there is a heaven for people, then they must be there, waiting for us, when we cross over. Heaven is love, and pets always share that with us.
— Wallace Sife, The Loss of a Pet: A Guide to Coping with the Grieving Process When a Pet Dies
None of us will truly have freedom until we know what it means to lose everything" - Laney
— Bailey Vincent, The Details of How We Lived
HE didn't realize she was his everything until he gave her up for everything else.
— Alexandria Heather
After your visits, I twisted my blinds shut every night. I locked out the stars and I never saw lightning again. Each night, I simply turned out the lights and went to bed.
— Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
I always welcomed the comforting cloak of night except for the times when I lost something in it.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Some aching beauty comes with huge loss, although maybe not right away, when it would be helpful. Life is a very powerful force, despite the constant discouragement. So if you are a person with connections to life, a few tendrils eventually break through the sidewalk of loss, and you notice them, maybe space out studying them for a few moments, or maybe they tickle you into movement and response, if only because you have to scratch your nose.
— Anne Lamott
The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.
— Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams
A lifetime, one might say, of loss, but we here recognize something much different, more nuanced, more full of shadows. A lifetime of hope. And anyone who's done both - hoped and lost - knows that in many ways, hoping is worse....As I grew into early adulthood and observed a larger pattern of hope and loss and hope and loss and hope and loss, and the concurrent resilience thereof, I came to a begrudging conclusion: neither of these things - hope and loss - can exist without the other, and yet at every turn it is necessary to believe that at some point one will ultimately conquer. And that will be our legacy.
— David Giffels, The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt
On the morning of what should have been Amelia Ashley's birthday, the river valley that had once housed High Bridge changed for Joshua Mayhew. For the first time in many years, it seemed beautiful to him. For the first time in many years, it was beautiful.
— Tara Hudson, Elegy
I sit here with you now with one sure answer. Love is the most potent bond, the most elaborate trap, the most irresistible object, and the most lethal weapon. I am everything with it, and nothing without it.
— Suenammi Richards, Sandra's Social
Life luscious wet life bereft of death, loss of empty shell minus absent of nothing exploding star cell amoeba sweet algae oxygen, hydrogen flowering in the vacuum ofspace and magnetic motion.
— H. Raven Rose, Liquid Me: Poetry and Prose
Eli was right. The measure of success isn't what you gain. It's what you pay to get it.
— Elmer Seward, Dreams of the Sleepless
To the world, it doesn’t matter that much. Until you remember that it means the world to the patient. One exact world, bright and full of sounds, per person. That is what is lost.
— James Maskalyk, Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-torn Village
Somehow the thought she might be next wasn't nearly as terrifying as the realization he was gone.
— Marcha A. Fox, A Psilent Place Below
Holding a loved one is something the soul remembers.
— G.B. Lindsey, Secrets of Neverwood
The leaves of the trees will stroke your cheeks, The wind will blow through your chest and cleanse your soul, The magical sounds of the earth, animals and the elements will hug your ears, The positive vibrations of the earth will fall asleep next to your heart and the breathtaking beauty of the earth will ease your mind. If you allow it, the earth, in itself, will heal you.
— Julia McCann
I knew a girl, once, immortal like me-""And she was with someone mortal?" said Alec. "What happened?""He died," Magnus said. There was a finality to the way he said it that spoke of a deeper grief than words could paint.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
You will never accept gratitude as a solution to your problems, until you have reached the last stage of grief--acceptance.
— Shannon L. Alder
Wanna know what a bullet feels like, Warren? A real one? It’s not like in the comics…I think you need to. Feel it…It’s not going to make a neat little hole. First - it’ll obliterate your internal organs. Your lung will collapse, feels like drowning…When it finally hits your spine, it’ll blow your central nervous system-…I’m talking. The pain will be unbearable, but you won’t be able to move… A bullet usually travels faster than this, of course. But the dying? It seems like it takes forever. Something, isn’t it? One tiny piece of metal destroys everything. It ripped her insides out… It took her light away. From me. From the world… And now the one person who should be here is gone - and a waste like you gets to live. A tiny piece of metal. Can you feel it now?
— Joss Whedon
Someone experiencing the stages of grief is rarely aware of how his behavior might appear to others. Grief often produces a “zoom lens effect,” in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.
— Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening
i want the moon tattooed on my wristsmy grandmother keeps asking me to pray, i don’t have the heart to tell her that mypoems are the only God i have left in memy mother keeps leaving without saying goodbyei wish she’d let me cut my hair in the 7th grade,maybe i’d know how to deal with loss by nowi told myself i’d stop kissing boys who didn’t know my namei said, i’d stop picking at my bones like broken decorations,i’d quit with the smoking and the drunken poems, and when i said things like “my bones are heavy” i would only mean itas a good thingheavy bones can’t be broken,you can’t break heavy bones
— irynka
Warm summer sun,  shine brightly here, Warm Southern wind,  blow softly here, Green sod above,  lie light, lie light, Good night, dear heart;  good night, good night.
— Mark Twain
Sometimes you have to let things go. Sometimes you have to stop caring for a minute.
— Trina Etmanskie, The Maid Games: Betrayed
A few cold words on yonder stone, A corpse as cold as they can be -­ Vain words, and mouldering dust, alone -­ Can this be all that's left of thee? O, no! thy spirit lingers still Where'er thy sunny smile was seen: There's less of darkness, less of chill On earth, than if thou hadst not been.Thou breathest in my bosom yet, And dwellest in my beating heart; And, while I cannot quite forget, Thou, darling, canst not quite depart.
— Anne Brontë
Since you've been gone, Piper, I've become as bad with the sighing as Mom. Sometimes it's the part of a sob that I jsut can't hold back. Sometimes the sigh's more like blowing out birthday candles to make a wish. And sometimes I do it hoping that it'll make you appear—even for just one instant—to laugh at me and tell me to stop.
— Kate Karyus Quinn, (Don't You) Forget About Me
The vivid memory of the woods had blossomed into a visceral longing for the Ridge, so immediate that I felt the ghost of my vanished house rise around me, a cold mountain wind thrumming past its walls, and thought that, if I reached down, I could feel Adso's soft gray fur under my fingers. I swallowed, hard.
— Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart's Blood
Severed and gone, so many years! And art thou still so dear to me, That throbbing heart and burning tears Can witness how I cling to thee?
— Anne Brontë