c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Here, falling in love can be an event, a proclamation without acknowledging that everyone you love could die an awful death, that loving someone is an acceptance of impending loss.
— Julianna Baggott, Burn
You don't get to chose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
After a dazed moment, Specialist Kit Murphy put his arms loosely around her, and Josie Schaeffer clung to him, knowing this man was not her husband, that her husband was never coming back, but for now she was as close to him as she could get and she would not let him go.
— Siobhan Fallon, You Know When the Men Are Gone
A person can’t possibly live without the one person that gave them life.
— Trina Etmanskie, The Maid Games: Betrayed
More than anything, Natalie wanted to move to the bed, take Sophie's hand, sit beside her.Lay her head against her shoulder. But she didn't dare. Or maybe just couldn't. Fear. Friendship. Desire. Regret. Remorse. Longing. Hunger. Terror. It was getting so hard to tell the difference between any of those things. If she'd ever been able to. If anyone really could.
— Glen Hirshberg, Motherless Child
I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. But until we are old ladies--a cypress age, a Sawtooth age--I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.
— Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn't have to pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I'd lived and seen and known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings
Maybe is wasn't love so much as a fear of losing everything I'd accomplished. I was afraid to let go.
— Dee Williams
I am overachieving at aimlessness, I am a type-A, alpha-girl lollygagger, the leader of a gang of heartbroken kids, running wild across this lonely strip of amusements, each of us smarting from the betrayals of a loved one.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
When you are at a loss of words then go with your feelings. If you feel nothing you must rely on your thinking. If your thinking is not clear then lean on the spirit. With Spirit you cannot go wrong!
— James             Brown
The scene sucker-punched Max. He never saw it coming. It encapsulated in one poignant instant the tragic beauty of his family history.
— Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening
Having a dream, living that dream, losing that dream, dreaming again and then having that dream come true again is one of the greatest feelings ever because I`m stronger.
— Aaron Carter
As a kid I heard the word malignancy as "Malig-Nancy" like an evil woman's name, no matter how many times Kiwi and the Chief and Dr. Gautman himself corrected me. Our mother had mistaken her first symptoms for a pregnancy, and so I still pictured the Malig-Nancy as a baby, a tiny, eyeless fist of a sister, killing her.
— Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
Everything changed...even the things we didn't want to.
— Ashley Jeffery, The Otherside
Life has a way of filling up one's time with many different things to do. So much so that you turn a blind eye to the things that really matter.
— Innocent Mwatsikesimbe, Grandfather
No. I don´t think it does go away. I know it won´t for me. I will keep busy. I will distract myself. I will eventually have days when I don´t have to remind myself to breathe. I know Nasrin will exist, maybe even be happy, and I will be okay. I ´ll bury my love, but it will never really go away.
— Sara Farizan, If You Could Be Mine
We hold on so tightly, because we’re terrified of loss. We hold on till our hands bleed. And in that self-shattering persistence, we fail to see the answer: Just let go.
— Yasmin Mogahed
My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,but what I reject is more numerous,denser, more demanding than before.A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable loss.
— Wisława Szymborska, Poems New and Collected
You shine brighter than the sun""But even the sun goes away every night""But it is hte sun's absence that makes us feel its power. We know the loss, the beauty and the life that the moon can't replace. That is why we hang on to each day we are given.
— Karina Halle, Love, in English
Sometimes words just arent enough. Sometimes it's easier to magically lose yourself in the memories long past, the ones you so selfishly took for granted. And sadly sometimes that's the only way to keep those people in your life- recapturing their glorious light before they fade. And inevitably their memory along with them.
— Kendal Rob
If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so it can hold evermore wonders. -Andrew Harvey
— Rob Brezsny, Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings
I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms, them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
If you don't know a name, you can't be hurt when they go. I have no friends anymore, all are lost.
— Patricia Hamill, Fearless
The mint from your breath, the milk from your breast, the best of your mind, now in its worst state of condition. From the womb to the tomb, as a mild flower, you break your petals upon blossom, and seize death openly. Leaving your fragrance to spin and dance, one last time before being blown away.
— Anthony Liccione
Losing something or someone you love hurts. I don’t understand, fully, why having to say goodbye wounds us so deeply but I do know that loss is part of God’s plan. On this side of heaven nothing is permanent. He gives and takes away. What we do in between that time of His giving and His taking is where you’ll find His blessings. Be thankful for the gift that was given…no matter how short. Be thankful.
— Jason Versey, A Walk with Prudence
No mark survives this place: you too will yieldto unmemory.
— Mathew Henderson, The Lease
For death is the only certain thing in life,and despite this cliché being an absolute truth, with only the timing varying from one person to another, we never seem to be prepared for it. It is regarded as an end, as final and as negative, not as the metamorphosis it might be– the release of a spirit from physical to energy form, not unlike a caterpillar turning into a butterfly and experiencing new found freedom from the limitation of eternal crawling in search of sustenance.
— Daniela I. Norris, On Dragonfly Wings: A Skeptic's Journey to Mediumship
When we are faced with circumstances, He gives us the Power to endure! When we are faced with loss, He grants us the Poise to hold on. When we come across failure, He installs back in us the Potential to rise up again. When we meet death, He gave us the Pleasure to be carried up into the Lovely coasts of eternity!
— Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes
You lost your innocence when you grew up, all right, everyone knew that, but did you have to lose your hope, as well?
— Stephen King
The truth is that any figure of Africans imported into the Americas which is narrowly based on the surviving records is bound to be low, because there were so many people at the time who had a vested interest in smuggling slaves (and withholding data. Nevertheless, if the low figure of ten million was accepted as basis for evaluating the impact of slaving on Africa as a whole, the conclusions that could legitimately be drawn would confound those who attempt to make light of the experience of the rape of Africans from 1445 to 1870. Pg. 96
— Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
It is a defeat of the spirit to learn one's arrogance causes such loss and pain. Pride invites you to soar to heights and the footing, tentative. farther, then, is the fall.
— R.A. Salvatore, Starless Night
We don't lose people, they just slip down like sand through the loop holes we have in ourselves.
— Himanshu Chhabra
...losing a friend is like losing a language, and I miss the one we spoke together.
— Megan Crane, Everything I Needed to Know about Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume
No more running, no more half living, starving or fear. You have it better than me now, I think.
— Patricia Hamill, Fearless
What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I can’t penetrate.…people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The problem is, whatever I say about the present feels false-nothing contains it all, or catches the depth of things, or their terrible one-dimensionality.What am I living on? Someone said the other day, “that old irrepressible-impossible- hope.” And I thought no, this doesn’t feel like hope. But maybe that’s what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to get better?Hope has to do with continuing, that’s all…I can imagine now, where I couldn’t before, this long erosion of faith, this steady drawing from one’s strength, until what’s left is tenuous, transparent.
— Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
Loss is merely a tool for evaluation, organization, determination and actualization towards being the best you that you can possibly be.
— Jennifer Sodini
On any basic figure of the Africans landed alive in the Americas, one would have to make several extensions- starting with a calculation to cover mortality in transshipment. The Atlantic crossing, or “Middle Passage,” as it was called by European slavers, was notorious for the number of deaths incurred, averaging in the vicinity of 15-20 per cent. There were also numerous deaths in Africa between time of capture and time of embarkation, especially in cases where captives had to travel hundreds of miles to the coast. Most important of all (given that warfare was the principal means of obtaining captives) it is necessary to make some estimate of the number of people killed and injured so as to extract the millions who were taken alive and sound. The resultant figure would be many times the millions landed alive outside of Africa, and it is that figure which represents the number of Africans directly removed from the population and labor force of Africa because of the establishment of slave production by Europeans. Pg. 96
— Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
As their figures recede, it strikes Filsan as ironic that they had delayed fleeing so they could take as many of their possessions as possible, but now those very possessions prevent their flight.
— Nadifa Mohamed, The Orchard of Lost Souls
For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past:For everything under the sun there is a time.This is the season of your awkward harvesting,When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a placeYou had forgotten you knew from the inside out;And a time when that bitter tree was plantedThat has grown always invisibly beside youAnd whose branches your awakened handsNow long to disentangle from your heart.You are coming to see how your looking often darkenedWhen you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,How deep down your eyes were always owned by somethingThat faced them through a dark fester of thornsConverting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;You could only see what touched you as already torn.Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.And your memory is ready to show you everything,Having waited all these years for you to return and know.Only you know where the casket of pain is interred. You will have to scrape through all the layers of coveringAnd according to your readiness, everything will open. May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guideWho can accompany you through the fear and griefUntil your heart has wept its way to your true self.As your tears fall over that wounded place,May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.May your forgiveness still the hunger of the woundSo that for the first time you can walk away from that place, Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.
— John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
I don’t care about losing people who don’t wanna be in my life anymore. I’ve lost people who meant the world to me and I’m still doing just fine.
— Karl May
It's what happens. You love, then you lose, then you die. Even if you survive, you die.
— J.J. Abrams, S.
I think it was C.S. Lewis that asked, 'Do not most people simply drift away?'. I've always been a reader and for the longest time that stuck with me because I was at war with it. How can people 'simply' drift away?
— Benjamin Brindise, I Was a Lid
The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled.
— Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being
Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.	In both states, the imagination's entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center: there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure.
— Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real.
— Ann Brashares, The Here and Now
The air felt different in my lungs. The world no longer looked the same. You change and then you change again. You become a dog, a bird, a plant that always leans to the left. Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food in the night it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn't. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say "I'm sorry" to, "I didn't mean it" to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.It was only remembering the good times that kept you from taking the knife from the kitchen drawer and, holding it so, tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how your best moments in the world had been spent--holding it so, roll onto the blade, slowly so that it slid like love between your ribs and into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you regretting.
— Joseph Hansen, Fadeout
The last time she had seen him in the flesh, all the vital force of his life stripped away, his sharpened face had confronted her with such a fearful fixed finality of sightless indifference that she had been frozen in mortal terror, engulfed by abysmal despair. After all the years of unfailing support, his huge, inhuman, deaf, blind inaccessibility was horrifying. He had not kept his promise. He had abandoned her, left her to suffer alone.
— Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories
Sometimes things just slip past you, into your hands and out through your fingers. In my half-in/half-out state I began to wonder if that could happen to people, too.
— Benjamin Brindise, I Was a Lid
Everything we come across becomes a part of us. It doesn't matter how small or insignificant it is…or how devastating. One story here, one story there, that’s what I see when I look back at my life. An accumulation of everything I went through.
— Bhaskaryya Deka, The Unwanted Shadow
When Doris had died so long ago, it was weeks before Mary could think clearly and remember what she was supposed to do the next minute and then the minute after that. Even though Doris had shown Mary how to get rid of the chiggers that burrowed under the skin or how to add potatoes to bread to make it heavy so it would fill a stomach faster, she had never explained how she had survived the death of a husband and the loss of a child. Parents never told their real secrets. They never let you know how they lived in the spaces between working and cooking and running after children and counting dollars.
— Marisa Silver, Mary Coin
I felt like an integral part of my being had just been ripped out of me, only to have it replaced with something that did not belong.
— Theresa  Smith, Somebody I Used to Know
I no longer believe there's any such thing as losing a woman. A man loses himself as women slip into the future.
— Josh Wagner, Smashing Laptops: A Nomad's Romance
There is no loss bigger than losing your manuscript, not even love.
— Himanshu Chhabra
One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Gone. and it was completely. Everyone I'd every known, every place I'd ever been. My Mother. My father. Rebecca. Out of site. Out of mind.
— Robert J. Sawyer, Mindscan
When the heart is heavy, the hands crave work
— Courtney Angela Brkic, The First Rule of Swimming
You lose a child and you do understand each other's grief at first, but if you get out of step with each other, it's all over. Suddenly each of you is alone.
— Alison Bruce, Cambridge Blue
Your laugh is of the sardonic kind.
— Caius Sempronius Gracchus
Baby, don't build a monument for me of your sadness. You wouldn't have wasted your tears when I was alive. Why make an ocean of them now when it's over? The future you dreamed is a dream. Dream something else.
— stephanie   roberts, As We Are
I don’t know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling- or does it live in me?- at the same time as I’m sorrowing. The possibility of consolation, of joy even, does not dispel the sorrow. Sorrow is the cathedral, the immense architecture; in its interior there’s room for almost everything; for desire, for flashes of happiness, for making plans for the future…
— Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
We human beings don't realize how great God is. He has given us an extraordinary brain and a sensitive loving heart. He has blessed us with two lips to talk and express our feelings, two eyes which see a world of colours and beauty, two feet which walk on the road of life, two hands to work for us, and two ears to hear the words of love. As I found with my ear, no one knows how much power they have in their each and every organ until they lose one.
— Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.
— M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans
HELLO, my name is your potential. But you can call me impossible. I am the missed opportunities. I am the expectations you will never fulfil. I am always taunting you, regardless of how hard you try, how hard you hope.
— Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall
The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.
— Roman Payne, The Wanderess
It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it
— Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
You can love someone so much… But you can never love someone as much as you miss them.
— John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
Power is a fickle mistress, easy to seduce, but even easier to lose. That's how it works. One moment she is your closest confidant, whispering the secrets of the universe into your ear; the next, she is your vilest oppressor—and once her ears close to your plights you are well and truly screwed.
— Nenia Campbell, Bleeds My Desire
There are certain shocks which, if sufficiently strong, seem to have power to destroy the balance of life. Such a shock would seem to overthrow all the intricate, vital, slowly developed mechanism of mind, to plunge the victim into a chaotic half-world of confusion and loss. This is what had happened to Anna.
— Anna Kavan, Let Me Alone
Christmas is such a time of struggle anyway, crammed with busy and hurry and the expectation that you will be joyful, no matter what. Then, if you’re like me, when you just sit quietly, just be, and let yourself feel what you feel, the guilt creeps in. Because you’re alive and the world is big, and you should be feeling some freakin’ Christmas spirit.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
A day doesn't go by when I don't look at them, she said. I can't have them up on the kitchen refrigerator or in a frame in the bedroom--I just can't do it, I just can't run into them casually when I'm supposed to be doing something else--but I also can't last a day without seeing them. Visiting with them when I am alone in the house.
— Chris Bohjalian, The Buffalo Soldier
Every game has rules. Obey the rules, win the game; disobey the rule, lose it! The game of life has loser and winners. Play fairly and win!
— Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes
There cannot be love without loss, just like there cannot be happiness without sadness, or light without dark.
— Markus Peterson
The God I serve is able to save us both. To give us the winning lottery ticket so all our money problems will go away. To mend our broken hearts. To bring us close to those we love. He is able. He is able. He is able.But even if He doesn’t, do not bow to bitterness. Do not fall down onto your broken pieces and let them cut you to ribbons. Even if He doesn’t do all that He is able to do, all that we wish He would do, He is good.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
You are still thinking like a child, talking about friendship and crap. You’ll regret it when you see one of them die in front of you.
— Charles   Lee, The Way To Dawn: Ascension Zero
You may cry out tears for misplacing your money, but you got to cry out blood if you have misplaced your dreams. Sadly, you may not even know the great deal of influence you loss when you misplace your dreams, so how will you cry for such a loss?
— Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes
It began with the Christmas tree lights. They were candy-bright, mouth-size. She wanted to feel the lightness of them on her tongue, the spark on her tastebuds. Without him life was so dark, and all the holiday debris only made it worse. She promised herself she wouldn't bite down.
— Kirsty Logan, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales
LamentFor JAmong the small graves a soft shaft of sunlight gently rainsOn a memory; etches, as a glittering finger,Golden corn field hair, ignites eyes sweet as the seas blue plains,Traces lips pink as Marys carnation tears and lingersThen is gone. Oh ancient sun above how shall I tellOf the hearts deep yearnings that the years can never quell?
— Alan James Roll, Milky Way Dreamer
The griefs that have been hardest for me were the ones I didn’t recognize as griefs, because they came in what were supposed to be the best times of my life. No one whispered in my ear that the best times, the ones that change our lives, are woven with the thread of loss.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
Countless times, I have imagined A. rising through the rivers of this land, to the surface of Florida to be found again, pulled into the air by new hands. The possibilities are endless, but most often I imagine him found by children. Above him, the sky shimmers and undulates blue through transparent springwater. Then four small brown hands break the surface and pull him into the air and into their excited and frightened vocabularies. The delicate bones of their arms and ribs absorb his voice, shattering their knowledge of what is possible.
— Rhonda Riley, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope
I didn't know yet that you can always find that perfect moment right before everything shatters.
— Laura Dave, The First Husband
This book is written in a barren period of loss with an attempt to move forward towards substance.
— Phindiwe Nkosi, Behind the Hospital
Nothing ever goes back on the vine.
— Steve Weddle, Country Hardball
Fear manifested itself as a physical presence that seemed to dominate the public sphere. Time almost stopped. Even without confirmation I could sense that something had gone terribly wrong.
— Phindiwe Nkosi, Behind the Hospital
People and birds were alike. Things happened that hurt them or made their lives harder. All the time. But losing someone or something important didn't mean the end of everything. It meant you had to find a new way to do things.
— Suzanne Goldsmith, Washashore
I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her—to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her—but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too—drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep—I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn’t actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I'd surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn't have imagined and wouldn't have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she'd been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason that sentence came fully formed into my head just then, temporarily blotting out the Fuck them prayer. I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
If you keep picking at that scab on your heart, it won't heal.
— Antonia Perdu
But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
This was how to help a family who has just lost their child. Wash the clothes, make soup. Don't ask them what they need, bring them what they need. Keep them warm. Listen to them rant, and cry, and tell their story over and over.
— Ann Hood, The Obituary Writer
Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
I work so hard for profits because my dreams are expensive.
— Amit Kalantri
And that's what makes you angry. What makes you hate. You don't want to believe that sometimes bad things happen just because they do.
— Elizabeth Scott, Heartbeat
Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June. There was a place where all the sun went glistening in your hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star. Where is the day that melted into one rich noise? Where the music of your flesh, the rhyme of your teeth, the dainty languor of your legs, your small firm arms, your slender fingers, to be bitten like an apple, and the little cherry-teats of your white breasts? And where are all the tiny wires of finespun maidenhair? Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this loveliness. You who were made for music, will hear music no more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost, ghost, come back from that marriage that we did not foresee, return not into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted wood, where we still life, strewn on the grass. Come up into the hills, O my young love: return. O lost, and by the wind grieved ghost, come back again.
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight.
— Stephen King, Bag of Bones
Only those willing to truly risk everything will gain everything. No person ever rose to greatness without the willingness to lose it all.
— Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing
There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
Passionate people are always ready to stand for their dreams even if no one stand with them. They vote and vote alone for their dreams but never loss their nomination for excellent leadership!
— Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes
What is dying?I am standing on the seashore.A ship sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.She is an object and I stand watching herTill at last she fades from the horizon,And someone at my side says, “She is gone!” Gone where?Gone from my sight, that is all;She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her,And just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her;And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “She is gone”,There are others who are watching her coming,And other voices take up a glad shout,“There she comes” – and that is dying.
— Charles Henry Brent, What Is Dying?
You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent.
— Harold Pinter, No Man's Land
All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.
— Jane Austen, Persuasion
You can go on losing after loss.
— Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream
According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it is the ego's survivability that is finally at issue. Why the ego? After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a "you" or a set of "yous" without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the boundaries of who I am. If I have a boundary at all, or if a boundary can be said to belong to me, it is only because I have become separated from others, and it is only on condition of this separation that I can relate to them at all. So the boundary is a function of the relation, a brokering of difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness. If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who "I" am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others. I may lose this "you" and any number of particular others, and I may well survive those losses. But that can happen only if I do not lose the possibility of any "you" at all. If I survive, it is only because my life is nothing without the life that exceeds me, that refers to some indexical you, without whom I cannot be.
— Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it...We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be 'healing.' A Certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to 'get through it,' rise to the occasion, exhibit the 'strength' that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.
— Joan Didion
Volatility in the up direction is not a problem-it's only downward volatility that offers discourse.
— Coreen T. Sol, Practically Investing: Smart Investment Techniques Your Neighbour Doesn't Know
- Losing is all that's left, I say.- Losing is all we've got left to lose, you sayThe impossibility of not telling, I cannot do otherwise, one can only tell otherwise, with always the same need to make sense of what you've lost, the need not to lose this feeling of losing, the need to feel yourself not losing this feeling that you are still losing the irreplaceable.
— Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream
Like Mom, Zoe thought–like Mom used to. And that’s where they differed, for Zoe wrote quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions. It’s not even good poetry, she thought. I don’t have talent, it’s her. I should be the one ill; she has so much to offer, so much life. “You’re a dark one,” her mother said sometimes with amused wonder. “You’re a mystery.
— Annette Curtis Klause, The Silver Kiss
Love left to languish will bear poisonous fruit.
— Sarah Winter
Ties to people on the other side of the storm could be severed. Love could bud, then wither and die without a bloom when the storm ended and reality bled back in.
— Sarah Winter
When life hands you the unthinkable you must find new ways to see.
— Nancy Sharp, Both Sides Now: A True Story of Love, Loss and Bold Living
His absence seemed a solid thing, a burden I must carry in addition to my grief... Yet I knew I would continue to live. Sometimes that knowledge seemed the worst part of my loss.
— Robin Hobb, Golden Fool
Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?
— Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
I may bring other women here, to this place, and I may tell them I love them, and make love to them. But they will be impostors. And I will be a ghost. Because it means I will have lost you. My body, my brain, my lungs, my stomach, my guts, legs, arms will be here but I won't be. I will be out there, looking for you. And if we meet somewhere, at a restaurant, or a party and I'm with someone, I want you to know that they are by my side only because you are not. And she will be beautiful. And I will be laughing and smiling and she will be laughing and smiling, but she will be laughing at a lie. Because all I will have done to that person is lie to them. All I will do to anyone else, forever, from this moment forward, anyone who isn't you, is lie. I have no choice.
— Jez Butterworth, The River
There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go. The problem, however, is that we tend to spend a great deal of energy in attempting to avoid the truth. We construct an image of ourselves that seeks to shield us from a confrontation with our ghosts. Hence we often encounter them only late at night, in the corridors of our dreams.
— Peter Rollins, The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction
This you have to understand. There's only one way to hurt a man who's lost everything. Give him back something broken.
— Stephen R. Donaldson, The Wounded Land
How many losses does it take to stop a heart,to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?
— Dorianne Laux, Smoke
These stories, I realized, were lost. Nobody was going to know that part of the city but as a place where a bomb went off. The bomb was going to become the story of this city. That's how we lose the city - that's how our knowledge of what the world is is taken away from us - when what we know is blasted into rubble and what is created in its place bears no resemblance to what there was and we are left strangers in a place we knew, in a place we ought to have known.
— Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here is too Great
Sometimes people leave us because staying becomes an impossibility. Because the world just gets too small. Or, sometimes, because there is just one boat, and too many hands. ...Because maybe, life can be a bit bigger than it exists today. And because, somewhere else, there may be another boat.
— Collier Lumpkin, Love, to Taste
I've come to realize that love is tragic, somewhere down the line it's inevitable. Fight for it.
— Ann Marie Frohoff
At the edge you will always remember me, at the edge you will last be remembered, where sanity and insanity come together, for the time, then separates. Like leaves on October trees, that color the world, but for a moment, then leave. At the edge, where life losses its edginess, and thoughts we will become one, someday. At the edge the sun drops, the ring falls, and senses of raindrops climb upwards to the gray sky.
— Anthony Liccione
A feeling of pleasure or solace can be so hard to find when you are in the depths of your grief. Sometimes it's the little things that help get you through the day. You may think your comforts sound ridiculous to others, but there is nothing ridiculous about finding one little thing to help you feel good in the midst of pain and sorrow!
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
I can never gain something without losing everything I had before.
— Nadia Scrieva, Fathoms of Forgiveness
There is nothing like feeling truly "awake" and aware of my life and what it means to me. So I look ahead and think, "There is still so much to be done, and I will continue to make the most of it.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
Mad – empty – crazy – lost – dying... I was all of these things and nothing as well, because even though I breathed and moved, I was not alive.
— Melanie Cusick-Jones, Outlanders
You weren't there.
— Hammond Innes, The Wreck Of The Mary Deare
I would still rather feel things and live life to the fullest rather than hide in a cave and attempt to protect myself from the uncertainties of the world.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
the heart aches through nights—the broken places of neglect
— John Geddes
You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.
— John Dufresne, Love Warps the Mind a Little
We never truly "get over" a loss, but we can move forward and evolve from it.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
Jealousy is a mortal emotion. One that means I feel I have something to lose--something that, if gone, will tear away a part of me.
— Jackson Pearce, As You Wish
I believe I gather strength from the generations of women who came before me - that together we all hold the suffering of the world.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
It is true that the grief journey is very lonely, but it is also up to you to decide just how lonely you will make it.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
It's my own deep-rooted feeling that our souls never truly die and that life continues in some way. I know I need to have patience as my beliefs continue to evolve with my personal growth. As I've looked around at the things I do have in my life, I've gradually started to trust in life again, little by little. I think, "How could all of these other amazing things come into my life if there was not something larger than me?
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
Delphine began to read with a mad attention when she wanted to talk to Clarisse. She saw that in her life there was a woman-shaped hole, a cutout that led to a mysterious place. Through it, her mother, then Eva, and now Clarisse had walked. If only she could plunge her arms through and drag them back.
— Louise Erdrich, The Master Butchers Singing Club
I used to feel afraid of the future, always assuming the worst. But now I've realized that my worst fears have already happened, and I've survived them! I've walked into the fire and made it out alive. Only the loss of a close loved one could have "woken me up" to reality in the same way.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
The truth is, we never know what life will bring us and we don't have as much control as we might think we have. But we CAN choose how we walk through life and how we spend our time.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
If you fear to know the cost, the value will definitely be lost. Focus your attentions on the product, not the price.
— Israelmore Ayivor
I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.
— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don't care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just... survive. Outlive me, please.
— Tracy Letts, August: Osage County
Nothing is really lost as long as you remember it
— Ally Condie, Matched
It is okay to release your feelings when you feel the waves coming. It's all part of the process of having to let go of your relationship with your loved one as you once knew it. And remember, letting go is not the same thing as forgetting!
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
The intense roller coaster of emotions will gradually lesson over time. But there is no timeframe for the grieving process, and it will not be rushed, no matter how fast you'd like to "get over it." The reality is that there is no getting over it; you can only walk through it.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
...this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
You have to do what feels right for you. Do not let anyone influence you otherwise. It is your mind, your heart, and your own internal wisdom that will lead you in the direction you need to go.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
I began to recognize that there was a part of me that was stronger than I ever could have imagined. I didn't know how I was still standing. I surprised myself. I was waking up to the fact that I was in charge of my own life and it was my choice whether to sink or float.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
I loved her in spite of myself. I loved her immeasurably.Infinitely. And I feared that love as much as I feared my own fury at theworld.
— Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin
Once you have walked down the grief path, what you have gained on your journey may turn into invaluable advice for someone else.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
I began to feel that nature itself was nurturing me, reminding me that life still offered beauty and calm, and that I was also made out of these elements.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
She loved beyond measure, When I was young I thought her cold. But in time I came to understand that she was too tender for the world she’d been born into,” I said. Sorrow gave Dalia an iron gift. Behind that hard shelter, sheloved boundlessly in the distance and privacy of her solitude, safe fromthe tragic rains of her fate.
— Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin
Mothering while grieving should involve being understanding and keeping a gentle attitude toward yourself as you work to balance your own needs and your child's. You become stronger by remaining aware of your own well-being, which in turn makes you a stronger person for your child or children.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope