All Quotes By Tag: Loss

“More than nakedness,for there is no cover to take.The fire in your eyesis ringed with water; wide and cool.We are far from the brutal place,but you do not think so.You take my hand and disappear like you were never there, except that I am now somewhere else.”

“You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you’re the house where people come and go as they please, because you’re simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn’t let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You’re still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn’t have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert.”

“Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.”

“I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?”Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard, “Yes, I’m afraid of spiders.””Were you always?””What are you, a psychiatrist?”Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine’s eyes on him, appraising his line of questioning.”Is it possible that the trauma of losing your best friend as a child and the trauma of losing your wife as an adult and the trauma of seeing Laine’s husband take his life in front of you just recently…” Pritam shrugged and raised his palms, “You see where I’m going?”Nicholas looked at Laine. She watched back. Her gray eyes missed nothing.”Sure,” agreed Nicholas, standing. “And my sister’s nuts, too, and we both like imagining that little white dogs are big nasty spiders because our daddy died and we never got enough cuddles.””Your father died?” asked Laine. “When?””Who cares?”Pritam sighed. “You must see this from our point of – “”I’d love to!” snapped Nicholas. “I’d love to see it from your point of view, because mine is not that much fun! It’s insane! It’s insane that I see dead people, Pritam! It’s insane that this,” he flicked out the sardonyx necklace,”stopped me from kidnapping a little girl!””That’s what you believe,” Pritam said carefully.”That’s what I fucking believe!” Nicholas stabbed his finger through the air at the dead bird talisman lying slack on the coffee table.”

“…always-the sharp,plaintive edgeon the rimof the spoonof my giving.(lines 8-13 of the poem ‘Confessions’)”

“These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be frank, the only reason anyone knows anything about him at all.”

“As she cried, I could feel growing there, as had once before, a presence between us: the tiny perfect form of Sherry nestled between her parents’ bodies. Our bodies were shaped by her absence, by the almost unbearable weight of her loss.”

“His name was Theo.”

“For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.”

“Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World If the gods bring to youa strange and frightening creature,accept the giftas if it were one you had chosen. Say the accustomed prayers,oil the hooves well,caress the small ears with praise. Have the new halter of woven silverembedded with jewels.Spare no expense, pay what is asked,when a gift arrives from the sea.Treat it as you yourselfwould be treated, brought speechless and nakedinto the court of a king.And when the request finally comes,do not hesitate even an instant—-stroke the white throat,the heavy trembling dewlapsyou’d come to believe were yours,and plunge in the knife.Not oncedid you enter the pasturewithout pause,without yourself trembling,that you came to love it, that was the gift.Let the envious gods take back what they can.”

“I’m trying to decide what’s worse. Someone being gone, but still out there, or someone being gone forever, dead. I think someone being gone, but still out there, might be worse. Then there’s always the chance, the hoping, the wondering if things might change. If maybe one day he’ll come back. There’s also the wondering about what his new life is like. The life without you. Is he happier? And if he is, you’re left being sad, wondering what it would be like if you were happy with him. But when someone is dead, he’s dead. He’s not coming back. There is no second chance. Death is a period at the end of a sentence. Someone gone, but still out there, is an ellipsis…or a question to be answered.”

“Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.”

“Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back — to be sucked back — into it?”

“Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys.”

“We wrote our names in the sandYou crossed mine out: I can’t getback to the way I was.”