All Quotes By Tag: Loss

“Kate lost a mother,” I said, “but I lost a nothing.”Kate doesn’t feel that way,” Jack assured me.But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn’t a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kindness.”He wiped my cheeks, saying Ssshh. I buried my face in his shoulder.True kindness is stabilizing,” I went on. “When you feel it and when you express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. Like all there is to achieve. It’s life, demystified. A place out of self, a network of simple pleasures, not a waltz, but like whirls within a waltz.”You’re the one now,” Jack said definitively. “That’s why you met her. She had something she had to pass on.” (p. 95)”

“Surprised by joy- impatient as the WindI turned to share the transport– Oh! with whomBut thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,That spot which no vicissitude can find?Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind–But how could I forget thee? Through what power,Even for the least division of an hour,Have I been so beguiled as to be blindTo my most grievous loss? — That thought’s returnWas the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;That neither present time, nor years unbornCould to my sight that heavenly face restore.”

“The effects of loss are acute, and unique to each individual. Not everyone mourns in the same way, but everyone mourns.”

“Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history.”

“That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we’re old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we’ll lose everyone we love. We’re never the same. But somehow we’re all right. We go on.”

“Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this–the absorption of another, the carrying of it–was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.”

“A flower bloomed already wilting. Beginning its life with an early ending.”

“When he left us, he stole all the words.”

“He would find his Susie,inside his young son. Give that love to the living.”

“If I could find one wordthat would shudder the airlike that frightened sob,that wordless prayerof my newly-born,who drew one breath,and with unopened eyessank back into death;If I could break the world’s cold heartwith that cry,then this grief would liftand I could die.”

“Initially they waited with hope, but as each hour passed, hope slipped away like the wind, the wind that as a small boy Ethan had once tried to capture with his tiny fingers.”

“The capacity to love does not die when the lover dies.”

“Later, you told me what your mother had said. How your father, the farmer, rose up slowly. You told me how your mother wailed on the other end of the phone, grieving her loss and complaining about the basketball of a goitre perched on her shoulder. She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze.”

“Do not dwell on your loss. Look forward with bright new hopes.”

“I count everything loss, to gain anything under the power of grace in Jesus Christ.”