c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Remembering that only a few years ago men, women, and even children, were imprisoned, tortured and burned, for having expressed in an exceedingly mild and gentle way, the ideas entertained by me, I congratulate myself that calumny is now the pulpit's last resort. The old instruments of torture are kept only to gratify curiosity; the chains are rusting away, and the demolition of time has allowed even the dungeons of the Inquisition to be visited by light. The church, impotent and malicious, regrets, not the abuse, but the loss of her power, and seeks to hold by falsehood what she gained by cruelty and force, by fire and fear. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven. Such a religion is necessarily uncompromising, unreasoning, aggressive and insolent. Christianity has held all other creeds and forms in infinite contempt, divided the world into enemies and friends, and verified the awful declaration of its founder—a declaration that wet with blood the sword he came to bring, and made the horizon of a thousand years lurid with the fagots' flames.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
Each loss brings growth with it, and learning to handle new experiences and taking charge of your needs is part of the transformative process.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
Live for your country, die to yourself; live for yourself, die to your country.
— Anthony Liccione
Everything assumes a different intensity when you are feeling the pain of loss. Be prepared. A minor annoyance that you might once have managed with a shrug now becomes a nuclear crisis! You are no doubt going to do things perfectly imperfectly. That is part of our path as humans. Forget about striving for perfection while dealing with grief! If you beat yourself up every time you forget something, have a breakdown, or don't do something correctly then you're going to end up very black and blue. I guarantee you won't want to look in the mirror! So be kinder and more patient with yourself.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
Remember to view yourself and your humanness with a kind heart.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
Learning to live again wholeheartedly includes letting love flow freely in and out of your heart.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
Journeying through grief is one of the most "normal human" experiences you can have. Nevertheless, all too frequently the heartbroken seem to feel alienated by society. Unfortunately in our culture, we are taught to hold our feelings in. If someone asks us, "How are you doing today?" the expected answer is, "I'm okay." But what if you aren't okay? You obviously don't want to go into a monologue of why you're not okay, but sometimes you feel as if you're going to explode if you can't "tell off" that well-meaning person for even daring to ask you such a thing in the first place!
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
They throw rice at a new marriage, then give him beans in a divorcement.
— Anthony Liccione
In the first year of my grief, there were times when I felt like hiding my personal story of loss and other times when I wanted to wear a sign on my body that read "Be nice to me, I'm grieving," or "Don't tick me off; I've already got the world on my shoulders," or maybe even "BEWARE - don't upset the widow!" I needed a variety of signs that I could switch out depending on my daily mood.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
It was a haunting tune, unresigned, a cry of heartache for all in the world that fell apart. As ash rose black against the brilliant sky, Fire's fiddle cried out for the dead, and for the living who stay behind and say goodbye.
— Kristin Cashore
Some of the choices you make might not always turn out to be the best ones, but at least you are learning as you go.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
It is important to recognize when you have been detached from life for too long. The fact is you are still alive, and I can only imagine that your loved one would want you to go on living. I highly doubt they would have said to you, "When or if I die before you, I want you to spend the rest of your life sitting on a couch staring at the wall. Please fulfill this important task for me.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick's Path from Loss to Hope
John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
— Isaac Asimov
She did not like seeing her loved ones like this, bent over with sorrow; everything in her wanted to cry out, to thrash and scream at the sight of it. But she knew that great grief came from great love, and that their grief was an honor to her. And she did love them so very much.
— Anne Ursu, The Shadow Thieves
You should love something while you have it, love it fully and without reservation, even if you know you'll lost it someday. We lose everything. If you're trying to avoid loss, there's no point in taking another breath, or letting your heart beat one more time. It all ends. That's all life is. Breathing in, breathing out. The space between two breaths.
— Leah Reader
It reminds me that no embrace will ever feel the same again, because no one will ever be like her again, because she's gone. She's gone, and crying feels so useless, so stupid, but it's all I can do.
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
I confessed to Tobias, soon after that, that I had lost my entire family.And he assured me that he was my family now. -Tris Prior
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
There's no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.
— Johnny Cash, Cash
You don't have to tell me everything right away, but I have to tell you everything right away? Can't you see how stupid that is?
— Veronica Roth, Insurgent
Sad, slow music in the small hours of the morning isn't just sad and slow music. It's a narration. And through the myriad of morning dew, we are the twinkling stars that fade with the rising sun.
— Dave Matthes, Sleepeth Not, the Bastard
If you haven't already, you will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart.
— Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Do you think that God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn’t God understand that I just want to be with him?
— Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
The only way past the pain is through it. Pain, grief, anger, misery...they don't go away--they just increase and compound and get worse. You have to live through them, acknowledge them. You have to give your pain its due.
— Jasinda Wilder, Falling into Us
Don't cry. She wouldn't like it. When I missed my father, I used to cry. Mama taught me when I cry, he is sad and will cry, too. I don't want my daddy sad. I'm sure you don't want your daughter sad, too.
— Cristiane Serruya, Trust: A New Beginning
What I would give right now, to feel nothing.
— Makiia Lucier, A Death-Struck Year
If you want to find money, focus on people. If you want to lose people, focus on money.
— Rob Liano
I wasn't offering her pity," Mrs. Caswell said impatiently. "Tragedies don't interest me, tragedies and heartbreaks are all alike, what matters is how a person meets them, how they survive them. Given the inevitability of losses and disappointments in life, that's where the challenge is and the uniqueness. I was offering her sympathy.
— Dorothy Gilman, Incident at Badamya
But these clouds won’t leaveWalk awayBarely breathingAs I’m lying on the floorTake my heartAs you’re leavingI don’t need it anymore
— Mayday Parade
I always thought of grief as a blow that took everything out of you. And it is like that. But it stays, past that first hard hit. It stays and blows its breath into you.  It's always there, reminding you of what you've lost. What's gone.
— Elizabeth Scott, Heartbeat
The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks ago. Each day, some further evidence of a task half finished, a scheme incomplete. He found a novel, with her place marked.And this is it.
— Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
To lose the only creature in all his world who ever had manifested love and affection for him was the greatest tragedy he had ever known.
— Edgar Rice Burroughs
Because it isn’t a loss; just a little piece of their haven had broken off. People can patch things; it still may hurt, but that’s life.
— Mandi Lynn, Essence
At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms. But then we never did. Oh, for the countless things one fails to do!
— W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doorsMany a frozen night, and merrilyAnswered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:"At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush," said he,"I slept." None knew which bush. Above the town,Beyond `The Drover', a hundred spot the downIn Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleepsMore sound in France -that, too, he secret keeps.
— Edward Thomas
Look up, greet sparks of fire with salted eyes,For he’s a burning atmospheric sigh:One blaze of liquid flame on midnight sky,Soft orbital decay, and last goodbye.
— Alan James Roll, Milky Way Dreamer
Though his death would not fill me with any sense of sadness, I would probably feel the loss. Even enemies are part of one.
— Jasper Fforde, The Woman Who Died a Lot
I have no definable history before I was abandoned and taken in by the orphanage in Hong Kong. I truly am a blank sheet. I have been disconnected from my ancestors. I don't know who they are, where they came from or whether any of their line still exists. The ancestral umbilical cord that would have connected me to my past and linked me to my future, was permanently severed. It cannot be reattached
— Lucy Chau Lai-Tuen
I loved and lost and survived.
— Rae Carson, The Girl of Fire and Thorns
Death never pierces the heart so much as when it takes someone we love
—  cleaving the heart they held with their passing.
Compromise, communicate, and never go to bed angry - the three pieces of advice gifted and regifted to all newlyweds.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
Sometimes when I wake up, I forget that she's gone and then I remember and my heart drops like it does when you miss a step or trip over a kerb.
— Annabel Pitcher, My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece
We named the bar The Bar. "People will think we're ironic instead of creatively bankrupt," my sister reasoned.Yes, we thought we were being clever New Yorkers - that the name was a joke no one else would really get, like we did. Not meta-get ... But our first customer, a gray-haired woman in bifocals and a pink jogging suit, said, "I like the name. Like in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Audrey Hepburn's cat was named Cat.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
Shine in any season of your life!Head on with confidence in your life’s pilgrim!In deep faith, countless hope and unconditional love blessed by the Almighty.Newness of each rising day, bringing forth colourful sunsets.Enkindle your soul once more with courage, joy and love,flowing in a river of awakening & sharing:with a heart who once knew that hurt, pain, loss…means to SHINE!
— Angelica Hopes, Rhythm of a Heart, Music of a Soul
Grief is a good thing. It's the way we get through the transitions of life.
— Rick Warren
I am, after all, an adult, a grown man, a useful human being, even though I lost the career that made me all these things. I won't make that mistake again.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
People talk of sorrow as if it is soft, a thing of water and tears. But true sorrow is not soft. True sorrow is a thing of fire, and rock. It burns your heart, crushes your soul under the weight of mountains. It destroys, and even if you keep breathing, keep going, you die. The person you were moments ago dies... Gone. Everything solid, everything real, is gone. It doesn't come back. The world is forever fractured, so that you walk on the crust of an earth where you can always feel the heat under you, the press of lava, that is so hot it can burn flesh, melt bone, and the very air is poisonous. To survive, you swallow the heat. To keep from falling through and dying for real, you swallow all that hate. You push it down inside you, into that fresh grave that is all that is left of what you thought the world would be.
— Laurell K. Hamilton, Blood Noir
Be glad that once you did experience that magic. It's part of who you are now, and you're richer for it.
— mary esselman
Ownership breeds slavery: with every single thing that you acquire, comes a new worry of not losing that thing.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
Be careful how close you get to someone... It just ends up hurting more than not having no one to love to begin with.
— Andrew Galasetti, These Colors Don't Run
I don't want to be the person who gasps in fear whenever she hears the sound of a doorbell or a phone. I just want to lose myself in these hills, in the river winding west to the city of bridges.
— Mira Bartok, The Memory Palace
Don't mire up in self despair of your losses, learn from them and move on to other good things in life. Don't stop allowing the sunshine in because of the fear that winter will come and engulf the warmth. Hold it close to you to help you through those cold winter days.
— Belinda Taylor on "Loss"
in these shitty plastic days ...
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
God doesn’t take things away to be cruel. He takes things away to make room for other things. He takes things away to lighten us. He takes things away so we can fly.
— Pat Summitt, Sum It Up: 1,098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective
I watch and listen, helpless to help. There is no point in saying ‘This, too, shall pass.’ For a time, we do not even want it to pass. We hold on to grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal.
— Ahdaf Soueif
And maybe one winter it will get too cold and I’ll forget about the summers we once shared. My family portrait mightfold in too, producing the same horrific effect as Jeremy’s: that I, all along, had another sibling who eclipsed and became me—a prosperous sibling, an imposturous sibling, who outgrew a sense of time and place in which the three of us were everything to one another. Then only my blood in the sea could unfold and lead me back out of the origami.
— Nicholaus Patnaude, First Aide Medicine
I could only nod as emotions rolled in like a destructive storm. This was it. It was over. My incredible time with this beautiful talented man was up. I had to clench my teeth and swallow hard to mask the loss that threatened to overcome my calm exterior. I was holding on for dear life then he said two words with pure tranquility.
— Nicole Castro, A Precise Moment
It is wonderful, awesome and merrywise to see satan lose the battle to us in fear and panic and shame! Our victory is in Christ Jesus!
— Israelmore Ayivor
Dare I tell them that since I came here to danceI have been giving pieces of my body awayTo ridiculous diets,To repeated injuries,To Remington?And that maybeI thinkWith each bit of my bodyI lose a little piece of my soul
— Stasia Ward Kehoe, Audition
He who acquired all his wealth by *being at the right place at the right time* is hypocritical by being angry for losing all his wealth because of his *being at the wrong place at the wrong time.*
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Ain’t nothing worse to a mama than losing her baby—
— Andrew Galasetti, These Colors Don't Run
I learned long ago that loss is not only probable but inevitable. I know what it means to lose everything, to let go of one life and find another. And now I feel, with a strange, deep certainty, that it must be my lot in life to be taught that lesson over and over again.
— Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train
She had never understood either of the men she had loved and so she had lost them both. Now, she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Being unheard is the ground floor of giving up, and giving up is the ground floor of doing yourself in. It’s not so much, what’s the point? It’s more like, what’s the difference?
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
But you don't know what it was like. It was just the two of us that afternoon, and then . . . and then it was just me.
— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home
She let him go once. Every day demands that she release him over and over again.
— Julianna Baggott, Fuse
...our loves ones truly are ever-present. We may bury their bodies or scatter their ashes, but their spirits are boundless and do not accompany them to the grave. The terms 'letting go' and 'closure' are just empty words. They mean nothing to someone who has suffered through the death of a loved one. Instead of insisting on figuratively burying our dead, why not keep them close to us? Love doesn't die when we do.
— April Slaughter, Reaching Beyond the Veil
But she's still afraid that the more she misses him--his face, his skin, the way he looked at her--and the more hope she has that she'll see him again, the more she has to lose.
— Julianna Baggott, Fuse
There are no words for so much loss, not right after it happens.
— Brian Francis Slattery, Lost Everything
How do you do it?""Do what?""All of it. You know. Go to class and practice. Make it through the day. Act like ... like none if it mattered."Jason swore beneath his breath and pulled the car over. Then he reached across the seat and brushed his thumb over her cheek; until then, she hadn't been aware she was crying. "Trix," he sighed, "it mattered.
— Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle
When you lose a friend or a lover, those who remain in your life gain (more of your attention).
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The pain of your loss will return. Less, but still considerable. I know you've worked hard to release it, but it can still take hold of you. I will help you sing away the fury, but I will not bear it for you.
— Alex Bledsoe, Wisp of a Thing
He wanted it to be just right; he didn’t want to make the mistake of trying to tell her he loved her, and having the words come out confused or ending up saying something completely different. He changed into a fresh suit, checked his hair and took a few deep breaths to calm himself, before returning to Amelia’s chambers…only to find her gone. A sigh of frustration escaped him. It was so typical. He told her there was a surprise for her, she was excited, and he was about to confess that he loved her…of course it was only natural for her to ruin it by running off. It was so typically Amelia.
— Elaine  White, Novel Hearts
Anger is the only antidote strong enough to counter grief.
— Rauwolfia
Nora had been training herself not to think too much about her kids. Not because she wanted to forget them - not at all - but because she wanted to remember them more accurately. For the same reason, she tried not to look too often at old photographs or videos...After a while, these scraps hardened into a kind of official narrative that crowded out thousands of equally valid memories, shunting the losers to some cluttered basement storage area in her brain.
— Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers
He had never cared if his victims lived or died once he was through with them. But not her. He couldn’t allow her to die. The moment he felt that small flutter of her heart, ready to give way to his hunger, he had stopped and gazed down at her for long moments.
— Elaine  White, Novel Hearts
Loss is a part of life, that doesn't make it easy... that makes it inevitable...
— Marcus Harrison Green, A Year Without April
Loosers want it but only through the easy way. If action taking were like reading a story book, loosers would only love to open the picture pages
— Israelmore Ayivor
It was only that night, dreaming forbidden dreams of Laurence and the clear attraction he had already displayed towards her, that the dream was disturbed. She woke to pain, her eyes and mouth flashing open in a wordless scream as two strong fangs pierced her neck. A body lay across hers, warm and strong as she felt the life being sucked out of her. The moment he knew she was awake, Laurence had pulled back from feeding and smiled at her with a bloody grin. ‘You are mine now, Shiloh. You may never leave this house until the day I die.’ He had warned her, planting a tormenting kiss on her lips before resuming his feed.
— Elaine  White, Novel Hearts
With Angela, everything about Damian died. His hopes, his dreams, his emotions. From that day on, Trey watched with regret, and a silent prayer to his sister, who he hoped looked down upon them. He wished that Damian would rediscover his humanity. He wished that she had died happy. And he hoped that one day, Damian would learn to live again.
— Elaine  White, Novel Hearts
She knew nothing of the massacre that went on around her, but when she released the wail of a broken hearted mother, one man heard her. The one who took her son's life.
— Elizabeth Bourgeret, Captive Heart
Free is he who is reputable for not being fearful of losing his reputation.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For a full two hours, he stood at that door, a cloud of uncertainty ruling his mind. Damian felt like his heart was about to burst. Could she love him? Was it really true?
— Elaine  White, Novel Hearts
Shiloh had become far too used to it; for all that she paid him no mind, the moment his sharp fangs pierced the skin on the inside of her thigh, her head lolled back against the seat and she closed her eyes. The feeling was still delectable even now.
— Elaine  White, Novel Hearts
With a snarling face, fangs and blood red eyes, she had lunged at him and secured her mouth to his throat before he had even had time enough to scream. It had been the most terrifying moment of his life. Only two thoughts had occupied his mind; surviving to see Angela again, and the sensation of hearing his own heart beat fade away. Amelia had fed from him for what felt like hours, but that he knew couldn’t have been very long, as Angela never came to see what had become of him. He lay in the dirt, with Amelia hunched over his limp body, with the sound of his own, failing breath in his ears and the bloodthirsty sound of someone sucking out his blood.
— Elaine  White, Novel Hearts
So many things are lost in the dark. A slight misstep and we lose our footing. A quick hand in a pocket and we lose our money. A coat hanger in a womb and we lose a fetus. A swift puncture and we lose a life.
— Pat   Henshaw, The Vampire's Food Chain
There was nothing to see in the room, but his brain pulled multiple vivid memories to the forefront of his mind. Entering the house as husband and wife, with Angela holding onto his arm. The night his father died in the downstairs bedroom while he was helpless to do anything but watch from the window; an outsider. Long years of being Angela’s Peter Pan before that boy had ever existed, flitting in and out of her window, and her life. Watching the woman he loved grow old and live a life without him by night, then babysitting her killer by day. It was impossible for him to see Amelia as anything else in those early days. The days before he loved her.
— Elaine  White, Novel Hearts
As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory.
— Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
One month flies by when you're falling love with the woman you're using for sex. Two is an eternity when the woman you love leaves you.
— Christina Lauren, Beautiful Bastard
Watch people when they win, and you will learn something. But watch them when they lose, and you will learn even more.
— Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, Bound Feet & Western Dress
That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
You're absolved," I tell him.He brings his eyes back up to mine. There's no fucking way he knows what that word means. That's a word I dream someone will say to me.So I put it in his language. "You're free.
— Hannah Moskowitz, Teeth
It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.
— Jodi Picoult, The Tenth Circle
I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
The fear of losing someone you love can turn people inside out.
— Shannon Wiersbitzky, The Summer of Hammers and Angels
What is so sweet as to awake from a troubled dream and behold a beloved face smiling upon you? I love to believe that such shall be our awakening from earth to heaven. My faith never wavers that each dear friend I have “lost” is a new link between this world and the happier land beyond the morn. My soul is for the moment bowed down with grief when I cease to feel the touch of their hands or hear a tender word from them; but the light of faith never fades from the sky, and I take heart again, glad they are free. I cannot understand why anyone should fear death…Suppose there are a million chances against that one that my loved ones who have gone on are alive. What of it? I will take that one chance and risk mistake, rather than let any doubts sadden their souls, and find out afterward. Since there is that one chance of immortality, I will endeavor not to cast a shadow on the joy of the departed…Certainly it is one of our sweetest experiences that when we are touched by some noble affection or pure joy, we remember the dead most tenderly, and feel more powerfully drawn to them.
— Helen Keller, The Open Door
Winter arrived with December, and the world continued to suffer the loss of the Internet and most forms of communication. Supply chains were disrupted. The only mass form of personal communication was the letter, and postal workers were having their worst year ever, as they were actually meeded. Food was becoming scarcer and more expensive, as was fuel for vehicles and heating. Major cities experienced riots on a regular basis, spurred on by religious fervor and want. Civilization was on the brink of collapse.
— Mark A. Rayner, The Fridgularity
She was brave from excess of grief
— Edith Hamilton
If there were no life beyond this earth-life, some people I have known would gain immortality by the nobility of our memory of them. With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution of happiness, strength, and understanding to my being remains to sustain me in an altered world.
— Helen Keller, The Open Door
There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy
— Hisham Matar, Anatomy of a Disappearance
As a species, tragedy dwells within us all. We push it to the back of our thoughts, but it is never so far gone that it cannot return, crashing and writhing into our souls: a rogue wave overturning a boat on a calm day. Tragedy is never more than a breath away. We hide from its certainty and go about our lives as though time can be wasted. Somewhere deep inside ourselves we know that we tell ourselves lies. We know that someday everything we love will be gone.
— Logan Kain, The Dead Will Rise First
they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
It's amazing to me; when your mind is fixed on one thing, you forget everything. You forget to eat and drink and care. The only thing I could never forget was him.
— Mercy Cortez
Max, for some people there are no victories, just alternate forms of losing.
— David Niven
How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.
— Jodi Picoult, The Pact
There was always a big party on the night before anyone left for the States. They called it an American wake, because the whole community stayed up to keep the emigrants company through their last night on the island, just as they would have bidden farewell to a soul beginning the long journey towards eternity. There was almost no chance that anyone present would ever see the departed again
— Cole Moreton, Hungry for Home
I miss you with the very edge of my skin.It winces in absence, a giant muscle contracting.
— Valentina Cano
Not many people understood the inherent pain of a career in heroics. Your body aches from the demands of day-to-day protection. Your mind whirs with the things you did wrong, the ways you could’ve done better, the scores of citizens you didn’t save. And when you lose someone you love, when their blood forms a puddle beneath your cheek while you watch… Your name, Watcher, becomes the cruelest agony of all.
— Shirin Dubbin, To the Fifth Power
...I’m tired of everyone looking at me with pity in their eyes. I’m tired of feeling like my heart is being ripped out of my chest every damned day. I’m tired of waking up in the morning, and then remembering...
— A.B. Shepherd, Lifeboat
When a freedom is taken away from you, I suppose, you recognize it as a privilege, not a right.
— Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
Anything said is gone as soon as it leaves my lips. Things written down at least have a chance to leave a soft echo of what had been.
— Chris Dietzel, The Man Who Watched The World End
Treat gain and loss the same.' Don't be Intimidated. Don't make a Big Deal of anything - just accept things as they come to you.
— Benjamin Hoff, The Te of Piglet
But that's what love is, isn't it? When it hurts you more to see someone suffer than it does to take the pain away?
— Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
But it turns out Joy is a house built from the same bricks as Sorrow. Pleasure is a poem, and it uses the same words as Pain.
— Julio Alexi Genao, Taking the Long Way Home
Innocence could be lost more than once after all.
— Selena Kitt, Confession
I don’t know what makes people start wanting each other any more than I know what makes it stop all of a sudden. I just know that when you lose it once, you’ll never take it for granted again
— Sue Merrell, Great News Town
No. Not a death wish. Just very little left to lose.
— Stacey Kade, The Rules
Love for the beauty of the soul. I shall love you always. When the flower of life has gone, ever I shall find you. When all is lost and winter comes, I shall be your spring time. And memory fades and wilts then, I shall always find you.... I shall always find you....
— Laurel A. Rockefeller, The Ghosts of the Past
The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life.Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law: that we are given only one conscience, too.A life laid down cannot be reclaimed, nor can a ruined conscience.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
There is the staircase,there is the sun.There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam,your subterfuge,your ordinary mirage.You stand red-handed.You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grassWhat are you supposed to dowith all this loss?In the daylight we knowwhat's gone is gone,but at night it's different.Nothing gets finished,not dying, not mourning;the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunkslurching sideways through the doorswe open to them in sleep;these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,even those we have loved the most,especially those we have loved the most,returning from where we shoved themaway too quickly:from under the ground, from under the water,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go.
— Margaret Atwood
I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there is a terrible emptiness. All at once I find myself in the quarter where I once resided. I recall the life I used to live: meeting friends in the evening, reciting poetry, making love, spending sleepless nights pining for beautiful women and writing verses on their long tresses which held me captive. That was life! What is there left of it? Nothing.
— Khushwant Singh, Delhi
You don't just get over it. And it doesn't make any difference if you're supposedly a grown-up. It never goes away.
— Sophie Kinsella
He was out to get back everything he'd lost
—  there was no end to his loss
I am so sorry for you, Leslie.' She said it like she really meant it. But not like she was completely surprised. 'And for him. Because he's lost you now.' This last part undid me. Despite her cruel criticism of me over the years, from where she sat, I was anyone and everyone's prize.
— Leslie Morgan Steiner, Crazy Love
If love would die along with death, this life wouldn't be so hard.
— Andrew Vachss
One of the things that helps use cope with loss is the fact that while memories may remian, the emotions associated with them will fade like old photographs. At the same time, there is a masochistic desire to retain those feelings spurred on by the dread of losing the power they hold. Sometimes I can't think of anything more awful than simply being human.
— James  Pratt
I would do almost anything for him to kiss me; his possessive lips and eager tongue invading my mouth, even the thought sent tingles up my numb spine and lifeless body
— Mercy Cortez, Never Ever After: Angel
It was a lesson she was still learning. When she had first started nursing, she had taken every death personally, like she was losing her father all over again. Every patient lost under her care was a little piece of death she would carry around with her until the end of her own life. But the alternative seemed so unfeeling. Tina and the other nurses could crack jokes and banter back and forth about contestants on American Idol before the body of a deceased patient was even cold. It was a coping mechanism, she knew, but not necessarily one she thought she would ever adopt. There had to be something in between. Olive had been called a bleeding heart before, but her heart no longer had the same plasticity and tenderness—it was scarred and worn beyond repair
— Andrea Lochen, The Repeat Year
...when the pain subsides the grief remains.
— Jonathan Brett Kennedy, Mad World
Maxwell Arbus was the reason Saul lost an eye?" "Yes," Millie answers stiffly. "But that was a long time ago. Saul has moved on. So have I." Whatever checks I'd held on my emotions shatter. "Moved on?!" Whirling around, I storm at Millie, waving my arms like a maniacal marionette. "I don't care if it was so long ago we could only get with a TARDIS! There is no moving on because it's happening right now!
— Andrea Cremer, Invisibility
EnragedI throw myself to the ground and I scream,my best friend is gone, this world is so mean.I cry as I pound my fists on his grass,I’m very upset that our time went so fast.My heart beats faster than ever before,my tears unstoppable, I'm hurt to the core.There are no words people can say,that will ease my excruciating pain.I don’t understand why you had to go.You leaving me, we just didn’t know.I’ll make it somehow, I’ll start anew.But, there is no way I can replace you.I struggle to make it through each day,and retain my sanity in this foggy haze.The sadness and pain that I display,is because God decided to take you away.
— Michele Lena Lucy, Messages From The Heart: Love & Loss
I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think—no, you will realize—that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.
— Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems
I did not think you would be angry, Jem burst out, and it was like ice cracking across a frozen waterfall, freeing a torrent. We were engaged, Tessa. A proposal-an offer of marriage-is a promise. A promise to love and care for someone always. I did not mean to break mine to you. But it was that or die. I wanted to wait, to be married to you and live wit you for years, but that wasn't possible. I was dying too fast. I would have given it up-all of it up-to be married to you for a day. A day that would never have come. You are a reminder-a reminder of everything I am losing. The life I will not have.
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess
I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you.
— Kellie Elmore, Jagged Little Pieces
You mean to tell me you're mourning the loss of someone who never existed?
— Taylor Nadeau, The Death of Edwin Hubble
There are all sorts of losses people suffer - from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.
— Jodi Picoult
Perhaps, this is what love has always been, whether it is for a woman of for a cause -- the readiness to give and not ask for anything in return, the unquestioning willingness to lose everything, even if that loss is as something as precious as life itself.
— F. Sionil José, Three Filipino Women
It is vain to think that any weariness, however caused, any burden, however slight, may be got rid of otherwise than by bowing the neck to the yoke of the Father's will. There can be no other rest for heart and soul than He has created. From every burden, from every anxiety, from all dread of shame or loss, even loss of love itself, that yoke will set us free.
— George MacDonald, Hope of the Gospel
I have cried over myself a hundred times this summer, she thought, I have wept over my big feet and my skinny legs and my nose, I have even cried over my stupid shoes, and now when I have true sadness there are no tears left.
— Betsy Byars, The Summer of the Swans
I'm so in love with you I can't stand up.
— Kim Addonizio
The sudden loss of her father was like living with a wound that would never heal, yet her memories of him were fading more and more every day.
— Frank Beddor, Seeing Redd
His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.
— Colm Tóibín, The Master
A relationship between two people is made up, for the most part, of invisible things: memories, shared experiences, hopes and fears. When one person disappears, the other is left alone, as if holding a string with no kite. Memories can do a lot to sustain you, but the invisible stuff of the relationship is lost, even as unresolved issues remain: arguments never settled, kind words never uttered, things left un-said. They become like a splinter beneath the skin-unseen, but painful nevertheless. Until they're exposed, coping with the loss is impossible.
— David Dosa, Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat
You can, for just a moment, fuse grief like a bone, but the memory of the ability to bend lingers inside, like an itch running in the blood, just beneath the skin: relief is always only temporary. Grief, we understood, would now hijack a part of our day for the rest of our lives, sneaking in, making the world momentarily stop, every day, forever.
— Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World
Now he understood. After a while, pain simply stopped. It was as though your mind was able to create a firewall beyond which it would not let you venture. You had to have a break from your anguish, or you'd go crazy. It was the psychological equivalent to fainting when physical pain became overbearing.
— Elizabeth Berg, Say When
For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and other essays
How can you ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom
— Jodi Picoult, The Storyteller
You are everything I have in this world Gracie
— Marisa Oldham, The Falling of Love
And finallythe glass that contains and spills this stuff continuallywhile the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathersup empties, gives back the drinker's own face. Who knows what it looks like;who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger towardthe bathroom, some man or woman or even lostangel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether,the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human?
— Kim Addonizio
When I missed the physical body of my partner, I meditated on its parts, tossed by the waves, torn, dispersed, and deteriorated. When memories of our lives together became acute and intense, I breathed. I breathed through each wave of yearning, of regret, of guilt, of what-could-have-been. Every time I asked him, “Where are you?” A quiet voice immediately responded, “I am here. I have never left you.” I did not only lose a partner. I lost my childhood all over again. I lost my soul mate. I lost the accepting father and the gentle mother that he was to me. I lost the dream of a “normal life,” which I had tried so hard to achieve. Now I had to face my own mind.
— Dang Nghiem, Healing: A Woman's Journey from Doctor to Nun
Institutions have processes favoring efficiency over loss, and process over people.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
We're all bits that the war didn't take, Flinty thought, gazing at the stranger's back. But those left behind had a right to know more about the beast who'd chewed their lives and spat the remnants out.
— Jackie French, The Girl from Snowy River
...People are not one-dimensional. People do not live on one plane...
— R. Elizabeth Carpenter, First Kiss: The Widow Darcy Journals, Book 1
Paco, we are all so much more than our faults, aren’t we?
— R. Elizabeth Carpenter, First Kiss: The Widow Darcy Journals, Book 1
Tucked inside the moments of this great sadness - this feeling of being punctured, scrambling and stricken - were also moments of the brightest, most swollen and logic shattering happiness I've ever experienced. One moment would be a wall of happiness so tall it could not be scaled; the next felt like falling into a pit of sadness that had no bottom. I realized you could not have one without the other, that this great capacity to love and be happy can be experienced only with this great risk of having happiness taken from you - to tremble, always, on the edge of loss.
— Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World
Take solace in that, regardless of the fact that the love you had in your mind was lost, it was fairer than any, and you can take that with you forever.
— Taylor Nadeau, The Death of Edwin Hubble
I remember his eyes. They are just like mine. Every time I look in the mirror I see him. I try not to look at my self too much.
— Ida Løkås, Det fine som flyter forbi
There will always be a part of you that misses her. You'll see something that reminds you of her and want to tell her about it, only to realize she's not there anymore. Then you'll feel her loss all over again. (Ravyn) You're not helping me, Ravyn. (Jack)I know, buddy. But you will eventually make peace with yourself, and that's the most important thing. Eventually, you'll even be able to smile again when you think about her. (Ravyn)
— Sherrilyn Kenyon, Dark Side of the Moon
There's solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her.
— Jim Crace, Harvest
And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn't have to make you darker
—  it can make you deeper.
Do not grieve so much for a husband lost that it wastes away your life.
— Euripides, Medea
Pain is pain...Just because one person's problem is less traumatic than another's doesn't mean they're required to hurt less.
— J.A. Redmerski
I didn't mean to scare you. I'm not suicidal if that's what's freaking you out. I'm not fucked up in the head. I'm not deranged. I'm not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm just a brother who loved his sister more than life itself, so I get a little intense when I think about her.
— Colleen Hoover, Hopeless
I ultimately decided to hold my tongue and settle instead for the comfort of ignorance. Not knowing the truth, I retained hope, and that hope I held like a smooth warm stone against my heart.
— Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Princess Ben
Our house was littered with books- in the kitchen, under the beds, stuck between the couch pillows--far too many for her the ever finish. I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldn't die; she'd have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of. "I've got to get to the bottom of this one," she'd say, as if a book were no different from a pond or a lake. I thought she'd go on reading forever but it didn't work out that way.
— Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen
It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.
— Jean Baudrillard, America
He smiled his shy smile at her as he went into the yard. Anne took the memory of it with her when she went to her room that night and sat for a long while at her open window, thinking of the past and dreaming of the future. Outside the Snow Queen was mistily white in the moonshine; the frogs were singing in the marsh beyond Orchard Slope. Anne always remembered the silvery, peaceful beauty and fragrant calm of that night. It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Some losses never heal you just learn to carry the burden and shed a tear every now and then
— Tina Gayle