c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Start by pulling him out of the fire andhoping that he will forget the smell.He was supposed to be an angel but they took himfrom that light and turned him into something hungry,something that forgets what his hands are for when theyaren’t shaking.He will lose so much, and you will watch it all happenbecause you had him first, and you would let the worldbreak its own neck if it means keeping him.Start by wiping the blood off of his chin andpretending to understand.Repeat to yourself“I won’t leave you, I won’t leave you”until you fall asleep and dream of the placewhere nothing is red.When is a monster not a monster?Oh, when you love it.Oh, when you used to sing it to sleep.Here are your upturned hands.Give them to him and watch how he prayslike he is learning his first words.Start by pulling him out of another fire,and putting him back together with the piecesyou find on the floor.There is so much to forgive, but you do notknow how to forget.When is a monster not a monster?Oh, when you are the reason it has become so mangled.Here is your humble offering,obliterated and broken in the mouthof this abandoned church.He has come back to stop the worldfrom turning itself inside out, and you love him, you do,so you won’t let him.Tell him that you will never know any better.
— Caitlyn Siehl
Later, when his father left him, the boy cried over his pet, until eventually his father sent a servant to take the body of the bird away and bury it. The boy never cried again, and he never forgot what he'd learned: that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants of shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet and walk.
— Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
— Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story
He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Will. For a moment her heart hesitated. She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem's violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess
Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget.
— Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds
Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut...
— Sanhita Baruah
I want to be two people at once. One runs away.
— Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?
— Amy Reed, Clean
There are a million ways to lose someone you love.
— Tammara Webber, Good For You
It's time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost. 
— Lev Grossman, The Magicians
I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it.And now I will have to be that person forever.
— Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life
The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious.
— Francine Prose, Goldengrove
I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer
Well, if you live long enough, you lose a lot. Just as long as you don't throw them away. Whatever you loose, you'll find again, but what you throw away you never get back.-Oibore (Enishi's dad) to Yahiko and Misao
— Nobuhiro Watsuki
Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.
— Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
I look at you and my heart pounds, when for years, I don't think it beat at all. You fill the cracks and crevices, take away the emptiness. And when you're not by my side, the loss is unimaginable.
— Kelly Moran, Exposure
I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can’t believe I’m here without her.”- on losing her best friend
— Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad about My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
When Summer lies upon the world, and in a noon of gold, Beneath the roof of sleeping leaves the dreams of trees unfold;When woodland halls are green and cool, and wind is in the West, Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is best!
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
Don't let's ask for the moon! We have the stars!
— Olive Higgins Prouty, Now, Voyager
For anyone who feels lost in their own way, going back to who you are and what you love or moving forward to whoever you are meant to be or meant to love, is the purpose of being lost. We lose ourselves, so we can find out who we truly are. And when by fate we do, we discover the best version of ourselves.
— Joanne Crisner, Brightest
One by one, drops fell from her eyes like they were on an assembly line - gather, fall, slide...gather, fall, slide...each one commemorating something she had lost. Hope. Faith. Confidence. Pride. Security. Trust. Independence. Joy. Beauty. Freedom. Innocence.
— Lisi Harrison, Monster High
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer
We've all lost something along the way.
— Po Bronson, "Why Do I Love These People?": Understanding, Surviving, and Creating Your Own Family
This time, there are no tears. This time, there is only emptiness and I feel it set in the straight line of my mouth. I am not strong enough for this. I want an earthquake, a hurricane, anything - even a devil, the one with the cloven hoof - Mrs. Leed's unfortunate 13th child - to rush out and stomp on me, break me into little pieces and hurl me to the stars, let me go back with those people I love. Please.
— Kathleen DeMarco, Cranberry Queen
For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the word 'never'. And it's really awful. You say the word a hundred times a day but you don't really know what you're saying until you're faced with a real 'never again'.
— Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censerSwung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor."Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee--Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!"Quothe the Raven, "Nevermore.
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven
On the beach, Roran stood alone, watching them go. Then he threw back his head and uttered a long, aching cry, and the night echoed with the sound of his loss.
— Christopher Paolini, Inheritance
For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.
— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
I know what it felt . . . like when I . . . thought you were dead, and-" A small gasp for breath, and her eyes locked on his. "And I wouldn't do that to you." Her bosom fell and her eyes closed.It was a long moment before he could speak."Thank ye, Sassenach," he whispered, and held her small, cold hand between his own and watched her breathe until the moon rose.
— Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart's Blood
How is it possible that a boyfriend ceases to exist from one day to another?
— Gayle Forman, Where She Went
This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?
— Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
the reverse side of love is unbearable loss.
— Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin
Bella: How could I live with myself when it’s my fault? None of you should be risking yourselves for me –Jasper: Bella, Bella, stop. You’re worrying all the wrong things, Bella. Trust me on this – none of us are in jeopardy… Our family is strong. Our only fear is losing you.Bella: But why should you –Alice: It’s been almost a century that Edward’s been alone. Now he’s found you. You can’t see the changes that we see, we who have been with him for so long. Do you think any of us want to look into his eyes for the next hundred years if he loses you?
— Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
...loss is essential, loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life. Mind you, I'm not complaining. Thanks to some inexplicable universal guiding force, it is always the worthless things we lose - slough off, like a moulting snake. Losing and losing again, is the very basis of the process, til all we are left with is the bare essence of human existence...
— Rohinton Mistry
Though I knew in my mind that others had felt such loss, this loss was mine, and I felt that no one would ever understand it, and to try to explain the lonliness and pain I felt would be futile.
— Linda Hawley, Dreams Unleashed
Tears stung her eyes. She sank her knees next to the sleeping bench and gently raked strands of golden hair from him forehead."Don't you die. don't you dare. I forbid it." As if Han Alister had ever listened to anything she said.
— Cinda Williams Chima, The Gray Wolf Throne
I'm concerned about a better world. I'm concerned about justice; I'm concerned about brotherhood; I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
The way you argued with me, you would have thought that we were debating the existence of God or whether or not we should move in together. These kinds of fights can never be won – even if you’re the victor, you’ve hurt the other person, and there has to be some loss associated with that.
— David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary
The numbness of his loss had passed, and the pain would hit me out of nowhere, doubling me over, racking my body with sobs. Where are you? I would cry out in my mind. Where have you gone? Of course, there was never any answer.
— Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
April 11, 2004Does anyone know where I can find a copy of the rules of thought, feeling, and behavior in these circumstances? It seems like there should be a rule book somewhere that lays out everything exactly the way one should respond to a loss like this. I'd surely like to know if I'm doing it right. Am I whining enough or too much? Am I unseemly in my occasional moments of lightheartedness? At what date and I supposed to turn off the emotion and jump back on the treadmill of normalcy? Is there a specific number of days or decades that must pass before I can do something I enjoy without feeling I've betrayed my dearest love? And when, oh when, am I ever really going to believe this has happened? Next time you're in a bookstore, as if there's a rule book.11:54 p.m.Jim
— Jim Beaver, Life's That Way
Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.
— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are
Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving--Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.
— John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Anyone? On Snow's visit before the Victory Tour, he challenged me to erase any doubts of my love for Peeta. "Convince me," Snow said. It seems, under that hot pink sky with Peeta's life in limbo, I finally did. And In doing so, I gave him the weapon he needed to break me.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
When it comes to love and loss, acceptance is never easy. We can't make someone see all we have to give, make them love us, or make them change. All we can do is move on and stop wasting time.
— April Mae Monterrosa
Losing one glove is certainly painful,but nothing compared to the pain,of losing one, throwing away the other,and finding the first one again.
— Piet Hein
In the middle of this journey, we lose a bit of ourselves. We do not know where we are or where we’re headed. We look for directions, seek for guidance, and if we’re lucky, we find it without too much time lost. And if we’re truly lucky, we gain our whole selves back, with an ounce of wisdom on top.
— Joanne Crisner
You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Sweet for a little even to fear, and sweet,	O love, to lay down fear at love’s fair feet;	Shall not some fiery memory of his breath	Lie sweet on lips that touch the lips of death?	Yet leave me not; yet, if thou wilt, be free;Love me no more, but love my love of thee.	Love where thou wilt, and live thy life; and I,	One thing I can, and one love cannot—die.	Pass from me; yet thine arms, thine eyes, thine hair,	Feed my desire and deaden my despair.Yet once more ere time change us, ere my cheek	Whiten, ere hope be dumb or sorrow speak,	Yet once more ere thou hate me, one full kiss;	Keep other hours for others, save me this.	Yea, and I will not (if it please thee) weep,Lest thou be sad; I will but sigh, and sleep.	Sweet, does death hurt? thou canst not do me wrong:	I shall not lack thee, as I loved thee, long.	Hast thou not given me above all that live	Joy, and a little sorrow shalt not give?What even though fairer fingers of strange girls	Pass nestling through thy beautiful boy’s curls	As mine did, or those curled lithe lips of thine	Meet theirs as these, all theirs come after mine;	And though I were not, though I be not, best,I have loved and love thee more than all the rest.	O love, O lover, loose or hold me fast,	I had thee first, whoever have thee last;	Fairer or not, what need I know, what care?	To thy fair bud my blossom once seemed fair.Why am I fair at all before thee, why	At all desired? seeing thou art fair, not I.	I shall be glad of thee, O fairest head,	Alive, alone, without thee, with thee, dead;	I shall remember while the light lives yet,And in the night-time I shall not forget.	Though (as thou wilt) thou leave me ere life leave,	I will not, for thy love I will not, grieve;	Not as they use who love not more than I,	Who love not as I love thee though I die;And though thy lips, once mine, be oftener prest	To many another brow and balmier breast,	And sweeter arms, or sweeter to thy mind,	Lull thee or lure, more fond thou wilt not find.
— Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads
We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world--the company of those who have known suffering.
— Helen Keller, We Bereaved
He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle.
— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha: An Indian Tale
All of us lost something. Some of us lost everything.
— Cassandra Clare, The Lost Herondale
There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone.
— Norah Vincent
Everyone who lives long enough to love deeply will experience great losses. Don't let fear of loss, or the losses themselves, take away your ability to enjoy the wonderful life that is yours.
— Barbara "Cutie" Cooper, Fall in Love for Life: Inspiration from a 73-Year Marriage
My insides feel like they are crumbling like a towering JENGA game. I lose.
— Steph Campbell, Grounding Quinn
If you love someone, they leave you. But if you don't love someone, they leave you, too. So your choice isn't between loving and losing but only between loving and not loving.
— Steve Rasnic Tem
The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, "—three," and years later, "Three," she will say, "—four.
— Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories
I have loved and lost in so many different ways. And I have died endless deaths… So when I ask myself, the question today, who am I? My answer is…I do not know.
— Patti Roberts, Progeny of Innocence
If he even survives." She shivered, and Amon put his arm around her, drawing her into his steady warmth."It's that bad?"Raisa nodded. "He looked...he looked awful, Amon. Willo doesn't know if he'll...She's worried about him. My mother died, and I never got to tell her that I loved her, that I finally understood - just a little anyway. If Han dies too, I don't know what I'll do.
— Cinda Williams Chima, The Gray Wolf Throne
When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He DID things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.
— Ray Bradbury
Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually wracked with pain. 
— Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
I sit with my knees pulled in tight and my arms wrapped around my shins. I can no longer feel my feet, as if blood refuses to spread so far from my heart.
— Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth
At times, we are the bridge that allows another to re-enter the world after a loss. Don't mistake it for more or its beauty may be lost.
— Danielle Pierre
...recognizing that there is more heartbreak in continuous disappointment than a void...
— Emily Giffin, Heart of the Matter
How easy it was to lose everything you had always thought you'd have forever.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones
It's not the endings that will haunt youBut the space where they should lie,The things that simply fadedWithout one final wave goodbye.
— Erin Hanson
What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.
— Vikram Seth, An Equal Music
In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss.
— Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission. When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition. It will always mean leaving something behind,...The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain.
— David Richo, How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration
Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in. Bonsai trees twist in miniature. I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
You’ve been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you.
— Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man
My life's an open book. Some of the pages are a little ripped, but it's open.
— Tim LaHaye
I don't think it is as much a human foible as it is a human curse that we cannot understand the beauty of a thing until it is gone.
— Richard Paul Evans, Miles to Go
It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It's the mathematical logic of being alive. If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness--cry and then walk--but what really breaks us cleanest are the losses that happen out of order.
— Aimee Bender, An Invisible Sign of My Own
All men are more concerned to recover what they lose than to acquire what they lack.
— Aesop, Aesop's Fables
It takes a year, nephew... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone.
— Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
What is first seen as a loss is now seen as a gain. For he finds solitude, not in far off, quite places; he creates it out of himself, spreads it around him, wherever he may be, because he loves it and slowly he ripens in this tranquility. For the inner process is beginning to unfold, stillness is extraordinarily important.
— Janwillem van de Wetering
What did I do to make Mommy leave?”“You didn’t do anything. This isn’t your fault.”“Then why?” she’d wailed.“I don’t know,” her daddy had said, and he looked so sad.“It isn’t fair!”“No, it isn’t, baby. Not by a mile. The world’s only as fair as you can make it. Takes a lot of fight. A lot of fight. But if you stay in here, in your own little cave, that’s one less fighter on the side of fair.
— Libba Bray, Beauty Queens
Holding the knife with the blade against my palm, it became so clear how my life would only contain shadows now. Shadows of things gone; not just the people themselves but everything connected to them. Was this my future? Every moment, every tiny thing I saw and did and touched, weighted by loss. Every space in this house andmy town and the world in general, empty in a way that could never be filled.
— Jennifer Castle, The Beginning of After
The persons on whom I have bestowed my dearest love lie deep in their graves; but, although the happiness and delight of my life lie buried there too, I have not made a coffin of my heart, and sealed it up for ever on my best affections. Deep affliction has only made them stronger; it ought, I think, for it should refine our nature.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Aside from myself, there was no sign of me.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
It was inevitable, of course, but somehow it didn't seem right to Alex that they would never remember the sound of Carly's laughter, or know how deeply she'd once loved them.
— Nicholas Sparks, Safe Haven
Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free. So often sleep brought dreams of him.
— Bernard Taylor, The Godsend
I thought maybe we mourned not only for the dead but also for the living. We felt their absence before we knew for sure they were gone.
— Vaddey Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan
The search for Jesus is about reconciling loss and tragedy to God and us.
— W. Scott Lineberry
He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.
— Jodi Picoult, Salem Falls
Because I feel no anger toward my mother. Only loss, and loss is a feeling you can’t fight your way out of as easily.
— Ally Condie, Crossed
Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose," began the man. "You included. And we are professionals at finding out that very thing. Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity. This is something we can pinpoint. Only when it is gone do people realize it even existed.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
Winning may not be everything, but losing has little to recommend it.
— Dianne Feinstein, Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate
I lost someone very close to me and afterward I believed I could have saved him had I been a better friend to him. But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them.
— Dave Eggers, What Is the What
Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
We can only lose what we have first claimed.
— Richard Paul Evans, Miles to Go
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee Save Me, save only Me?All which I took from thee I did but take, Not for thy harms.But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms. All which thy child's mistakeFancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home; Rise, clasp My hand, and come!
— Francis G. Thompson, The Hound of Heaven
You can't lose someone who was never there in the first place.
— Non Pratt, Trouble
Whatever the response to loss and tragedy, the experience seems to boil down to one journey--searching for Jesus.
— W. Scott Lineberry
Dogs are always good and full of selfless love. They are undiluted vessels of joy who never, ever deserve anything bad that happens to them.
— Steven Rowley
She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.
— Jean Rhys
Love may precede respect but it cannot survive the loss of it.
— Joe L. Wheeler
I didn't mean I'd seen everything, John Grady said.I know you didn't.I just meant I'd seen some things I'd as soon not of.I know it. There's hard lessons in this world. What's the hardest? I dont know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back. Yessir.
— Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.'Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up.Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die.
— M. John Harrison, Signs Of Life
The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.
— Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
Loss leaves us empty- but learn not to close your heart and mind to grief. Allow life to replinish you. When sorrow comes it seems impossible- but new
— Pam Brown
But tonight I finally made the connection that change always strolled hand in hand with loss, with upheaval, and that I would always feel it keenly because in the end, I did not live under the same sky as most other people. (p179)
— Meera Syal, Anita and Me
The lost glove is happy.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
— Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir
Ready or not, here I comeI'm so tired of this dumb game of hide and seekOlly olly oxen freeShow yourself, you're scaring meCome out, come out, where ever you areYou've taken this thing way too far
— Sonya Sones, Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy
Don't love anything that can be taken away.
— Ron Rash, Serena
Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. His heart leaped up and although he didn't know it then, it was how he would remember her most clearly forever after- lovely Susan, the girl in the window. So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.
— Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
Laine slowly rolled out of bed. The queen size was one of the few new things in the house. But now, even the new bed felt tainted. It was an inner-spring monument to lies, a petri dish of mendacity she had shared with her faithless husband, and shared now with creeping dreams that flew from the light but left harsh scratches and diseased black feathers. Laine promised herself that, as soon as, she could, she would rid herself of this house, this bed, her clothes, her jewelry - everything but the flesh she lived in. She would scrub herself clean and flee to start a new life whose first and only commandment would be: Never let thyself be lied to again.
— Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path
That's what it's all about–knowing what you have to lose, but risking the loss anyway.
— Julie Reece Deaver, Say Goodnight, Gracie
I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.
— Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves
His thumb went back and forth over the satin, as if he were rubbing her hip as he had when they’d been together, and he moved his leg over so that it was on top of the skirting.It wasn’t the same, though. There was no body underneath, and the fabric smelled like lemons, not her skin. And he was, after all, alone in this room that was not theirs.“God, I miss you,” he said in a voice that cracked. “Every night. Every day…
— J.R. Ward, Lover Reborn
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
— Alain de Botton
If he closed his eyes he could dwell in the circuit of air that had once held her, he could hold his breath and be inside her again, within the close and burning borders of her- she stood here, washed her hair in this sink, wrote upon this wall, ate roasted chicken at this table. There was no place he could enter where she had not also been, her echoes hanging in the air like pages hung to dry. No place that did not suppurate in her absence, which was not ringed with the light of her old selves, like film burned with a cigarette.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
I prithee send me back my heart,Since I cannot have thine;For if from yours you will not part,Why, then, shouldst thou have mine?Yet now I think on't, let it lie,To find it were in vain;For thou hast a thief in either eyeWould steal it back again.Why should two hearts in one breast lie,And yet not lodge together?O Love! where is thy sympathy,If thus our breasts thou sever?But love is such a mystery,I cannot find it out;For when I think I'm best resolved,I then am in most doubt.Then farewell care, and farewell woe;I will no longer pine;For I'll believe I have her heart,As much as she hath mine.
— John Suckling, The Poems of Sir John Suckling
So lately, been wonderingWho will be there to take my placeWhen I'm gone, you'll need love To light the shadows on your face.
— The Calling
I think a person permeates a spot, and a lost presence makes the environment timeless to me, keeps an area alive. It pulsates because of that.
— Andrew Wyeth
I dont know what happens to country.
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Sometimes the opposite of loss is loss.
— Penelope Scambly Schott, Six Lips
Watching them, Harmony felt too shaken to take a step. Eddie and Sheba were young; but she herself had become old. Even if she wasn’t particularly old if you just counted years, the fact was years were no way to count. Happenings were the way to count, the big happening that separated her from youth or even middle age was the death of her daughter, Pepper. That death made her realize that life, once you got around to producing children, was no longer about being pretty or having boyfriends or making money – it was about protecting children; getting them raised to the point where they could try life as adults. It didn’t have to be just children that come out of your body, either. It could be anyone young who needed something you had to give. Some grown men were children; some grown women, too. Harmony knew that she had spent a good part of her life, taking care of just such men. But now that she felt old she didn’t think she wanted to spend much more of her energy protecting men who had had a good chance to grow up, but had blown it. If she never had another boyfriend – something she had been worrying about, on the plane – it might be a little dull in some areas, like sexual areas, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.  What would be the end of the world would be to let some little girl like Sheba get in the car with a bad man who would make a U-turn across the street and kill her right there in front of the pay phones, where pimps and crack dealers were making their calls.
— Larry McMurtry, The Late Child
Even after she was gone, he passed her place each day: something white in a high window - not a face,but the white belly of a pigeon beating its wingsagainst the pane in the boarded-up house.
— Zoë Brigley, The Secret
I am afraid of losing what I have already valued.
— Rosie Thomas, Iris & Ruby
Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Life went on, despite all the dying.
— Oliver Pötzsch, The Hangman's Daughter
What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?
— Erich Segal, Love Story
Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word "loser" follows you, bird-dogs you, sniffs you out of whatever fields you hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true.
— Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir
You never fully appreciate what you had until you don’t have it anymore
— Glenn Beck
There are times when our victories have a cost that we did not foresee, when winning brings us loss.
— Susanna Kearsley, The Firebird
The house is eerily quiet. All this time I thought silence would be a welcome reprieve, but it's less comforting than I imagined. The house feels so much bigger and colder than it ever has.
— Hannah Harrington, Saving June
My life is now divided into two periods: With June and After June. I can't wrap my mind around the idea of it.
— Hannah Harrington, Saving June
A small profit it better than a big loss
— Ron Rash, Serena
Losing your faith in a world where God is all around you is a precarious business. When God shows his face on a daily basis to your friends and neighbors, it is, on some level, impossible to stop believing in Him. Instead i felt that God chose to exclude me from His world. Since i was the only one to lose faith, to stop hearing Christ's voice, i thought perhaps it was my fault that Roy had left us. I thought i was being punished for some unknown sin. I had learned early in my Catholic career that one could sin silently in one's heart. One could even sin without ever discovering what one had done or why it was wrong. What had i done, i asked myself, to make God disappear and take Roy with Him.
— Alison Smith
The coach who goes home and doesn't think about the game he just lost is bound to repeat his mistakes.
— Keith Cooper
Why do we as humans always tend to remember the worse things about people? We may know someone for many years, know them as vibrant and healthy, yet when they fall ill and pass away, we can only picture them at their sickest, as though they were born and lived their whole lives wearing a death mask.
— K. Martin Beckner, A Million Doorways
And in an apartment on the other side of town, everyone wakes up with a start when the hound in the first-floor flat, without any warning, starts howling. Louder and more heartrendingly than anything they have ever heard coming out of the primal depths of any animal. As if it is singing with the sorrow and yearning of an eternity of ten thousand fairy tales. It howls for hours, all through the night, until dawn. And when the morning light seeps into the hospital room, Elsa wakes up in Granny's arms. But Granny is still in Miamas.
— Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.
— Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye
..there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
— José Saramago, The Double
Farewell to thee! but not farewellTo all my fondest thoughts of thee:Within my heart they still shall dwell
— And they shall cheer and comfort me.
The ritual of our daily lives permeate our very bodies.
— Banana Yoshimoto, Hardboiled & Hard Luck
I’m still pretty sick about what I’ve lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I’m not the best sleeper.
— Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked
Sunlight’s warmth on my face awoke me in the morning. I didn’t remember falling asleep or how I came to be in my own bed. But I did recall nightmares. Awful nightmares featuring Gwen.I turned my head to stare out an open window where the sun shone in full splendor, bleaching a clear sky enough to tell it was going to be a beautiful spring day. The air smelled of rain from overnight showers, mixed with a strong floral scent. A large lilac bush outside was responsible for the perfume. I breathed in the clean and fragrant air. My eyelids fluttered, blinking at a stunning reflection of daylight off the glass. The blue beyond gave an exquisite glow to my room. All of it was an invitation to bask in a new day—an invitation I declined because none of that mattered to me. The world might as well come to a dark and ugly end. I saw no reason for beauty or life to go on so long as Gwen was lost. Rolling over in bed, I felt the vice grips wrench at my heart again as I cried myself back to sleep.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
Niggard prefers mistake rather than loss.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
The reason for leaving sometimes is to return. Simply to return.
— Yrsa Daley-Ward
Anything you can acquire is only another thing you'll lose
— Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
My chips are all cashed out. There's nothing to lose. Or maybe I've already lost it and found it, and whatever else there might be to lose...
— Gayle Forman, Where She Went
The two brothers who sought to get their only family back, to feel her warmth, one lost his last family member and the other could never feel warmth again.The one who wanted her baby back lost chance of having one again,And the one who had a vision to see his country change became blind.
— Hiromu Arakawa
I've lost someone, too; someone I loved. I know how you feel."- Does it get easier?"Yes. But you'll never be the same again.
— Richelle Mead, Blood Promise
The fairest things have fleetest end,Their scent survives their close:But the rose's scent is bitternessTo her who loved the rose.
— Francis Thompson, Complete Poetical Works of Francis Thompson
I stopped in St. Bernadette's Cemetery one of my favorite places... The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns. In the quiet space below, is laid out an aisle similar to those in any library. The gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those whose names have been blotted from the pages of life; who have been forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here.
— Dean Koontz, Fear Nothing
His departure gave Catherine the first experimental conviction that a loss may be sometimes a gain.
— Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Maybe Laney's right. Maybe June did love me. But I'm far less certain that she knew I loved her. Did she realise how much I needed her around? It's not like I ever told her. I was too wrapped up in my own world to notice what was going on in hers. Even if she did know, it wasn't enough to count. It wasn't enough to make her stay. So really, what did it matter, in th
— Hannah Harrington, Saving June
I have seen enough, too, to know that it is not always the youngest and best who are spared to those that love them; but this should give us comfort rather than sorrow, for Heaven is just, and such things teach us impressively that there is a far brighter world than this, and that the passage to it is speedy.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this was the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Marika was beckoning from the other side.
— Heather O'Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals
All four of us were young and undaunted and our smiles were so strong that it made me smile even then on the couch, with a kind of loss.
— Markus Zusak, Underdog
Laine taped the last box shut. That was it, then: All of Gavin's belongings put away; some for charity, some for the dump, some to be saved for a happier 'one day' that Laine felt, right now, was as distant as the stars.
— Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path
She always used to suspect that the price for happiness, the price for enjoying the company of a person you loved, was the steadily increasing risk of losing them, and at times, when she considered the possibility that she might lose Isabel or Clancy or, in the early days, Todd, Bernice didn't think she could stand it, didn't think she could go on living in a universe whose laws forced her to submit to such a terrible fear. Now she sees what a small price it is to pay, what staggering joy she received in return. You should be willing to pay that price for as little as a few days or hours with a person you love, she thinks, rubbing her fingers across a patch of linoleum the years have worn down to a cloudy smear.
— Stephen Lovely, Irreplaceable
I look for my sister but it's hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can't tell the living from the dead. It's all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere.
— Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
If I could just have him until the day was over. Just a few more hours. But he was gone. I clasped my hand tightly over my mouth and felt a trembling that started deep inside move out to make all of me shake. I had a mighty impulse, it truly was mighty, to rise to my feet and howl. To overturn the chair and nightstand, to rip at my clothes, to bring down the very walls around us. But of course I did not do that. I pulled an elemental sense of outrage back inside and smoothed it down. I forced something far too big into something far too small, and this made for a surprising and unreasonable weight, as mercury does. I noticed sounds coming from my throat, little unladylike grunts. I saw that everything I’d ever imagined about what it would feel like when was pale. Was wrong. Was the shadow and not the mountain. And then, “It’s all right,” I said, quickly. “It’s all right.” To whom? I wondered later.
— Elizabeth Berg
How do you go to your own house when something has gone bad on the inside, when it doesn't seem like your place to live anymore, when you almost cannot recall living there although it was the place you mostly ate and slept for all your grown-up life? Try to remember two or three things about living there. Try to remember cooking one meal.
— William Kittredge
There is nothing I can give to the lost, except this: I have a responsibility I need to fathom. I have a sorrow I cannot weigh.
— Michelle Dicinoski, Electricity for Beginners
He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely. Nevertheless.
— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
An ElegyA thousand times must we deploreThe lost will never come to life again;Even as flowing water runs away,Returning nevermore.Lady Kanin
— Reiko Chiba, Hiroshige's Tokaido in Prints and Poetry