Healing After Loss Quotes

May the pathways that have taken you along the road to loss, guide you along the road to healing. ~ Eleesha

May you find the strength and resolve today, to allow a deeper sense of healing to begin. ~ Eleesha

Loss brings pain. Yes. But pain triggers memory. And memory is a kind of new birth, within each of us. And it is that new birth after long pain, that resurrection - in memory - that, to our surprise, perhaps, comforts us. ~ Sue Miller

This is what I've found about life, as I've gotten older: you start to lose people, Angela. It's not that there is ever a shortage of people - oh, heavens no. It is merely that - as the years pass - there comes to be a shortage of your people. The ones you loved. The ones who knew the people that you both loved. The ones who know your whole history. Those people start to be plucked away by death, and they are awfully hard to replace after they go. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now.
This is not uncommon after loss of love -

blue and black and red blasting the crater open.
I am interested in anger. ~ Anne Carson

When I first came round in the medical center after my accident, the first face I saw was Ayrton's, with tears in his eyes. I had never seen that with Ayrton before. I just had the impression that he felt as if my accident was like one of his own. He helped me a lot with my career and I can't find the words to describe his loss. ~ Rubens Barrichello

Long-term trauma for women who have survived armed conflict is a haunting reminder that health issues and depression can follow decades after the end of war, but women who hope for healing can and do move forward. ~ Zainab Salbi

For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender ~ Donna J. Haraway

He chuckled low in his throat as he slowly eased away, leaving he momentarily confused and bereft, her body keenly aware of the abrupt loss of pleasure.
His eyes gleamed like gold coins. "You taste every bit as sweet as you look, my dear." He skimmed the back of one finger over her cheek. "Maybe this bargain we're making won't be such a bad one after all. ~ Tracy Anne Warren

After you have loss in your life and after you experience something like losing your parents, the greatest gift of that was it prepared me for [anything]. Nothing else is as scary, and certainly stand-up comedy is not as scary as sitting there with your mom and having to have last conversations and things like that. It's heavy stuff, but it's enlightening because it makes me think I shouldn't be afraid of sharing ideas and thoughts with people. It's the yin and the yang of life. ~ Dane Cook

I think we brothers realised his loss more and more as we grew older. We actually grew closer after his death. ~ Raj Kapoor

I sometimes think the recovery community is a picture of what the church should look like. I've experienced the Spirit of God hovering in those recovery rooms as a palpable presence, bringing healing to those who struggle and who submit to their higher power. It's my belief that Jesus, my Higher Power, hears those prayers, whether or not they know his name. His favorite people were, after all, the most broken among us - the outcasts, the misfits, the sick, and, yes, the addicts. ~ Barbara Cofer Stoefen

Should it happen, that your partner leaves you for someone else with more money. To where later you strike it richer than the person they left you for, and the ex finds out, after losing all and regretting. It was a blessing that it ended. Though money wasn't sufficient then, mostly they were rich with your love, now suffering being broke in both. ~ Anthony Liccione

The hole where my heart had finally grown back after the loss of my parents was returning because of the very person who had filled the void ~ Cassandra Giovanni

God the horror of watching yourself from the outside as everything you know about yourself gets stripped away and demolished. Not just the loss of power over your body, but power over your mind. Rape in the deepest, most hellish sense of the word. But wait, there's a spark. Inside that hollowed out woman there's a place they can't touch. There's more to me than I thought there was. Something that no one and nothing can take away from me. They can't break me. I won't cease. I'm strong, and I am never going to go away until I've gotten what I came for. I might have been lost for awhile but I was never gone. WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU? With an explosive inhalation I snap upright in bed, and my eyes fly open like coming alive after being dead and interred in a coffin. I AM Mac and I am BACK! ~ Karen Marie Moning

Most epiphanies happen after great loss or tragedy. The soul is equipped to deal with dynamic events because of its elastic quality. Energy is mutable, it can change its presence, but not its tone. ~ S.L. Northey

After a lifetime of losing and gaining weight, I get it. No matter how you slice it, weight loss comes down to the simple formula of calories in, calories out. ~ Valerie Bertinelli

Yes, genuine pain and loss coexisted with the deliverance, but it did not have the last word. Its power to hurt him was weakened because he could see the bigger things God was doing in, for, and through him. You can probably find similar events in your life. Hard things persisted, there was no apparent deliverance, but, with closer inspection, you notice a deliverance that went much deeper. And these are eleventh-hour deliverances on this side of death and eternity. Imagine if you gradually developed the spiritual skill to see beyond the immediate moment and catch a glimpse of the glories to come. The basic outline is clear: if you have thrown your lot in with Jesus, everything he has is yours, even the kingdom itself. It would be impossible to ask for more. Those who imitate Abraham's faith are always pushing the last minute farther out until it comes even after physical death. Such a person is fearless. A ~ Edward T. Welch

In many ways, large profits are even more insidious than large losses in terms of emotional destabilization. I think it's important not to be emotionally attached to large profits. I've certainly made some of my worst trades after long periods of winning. When you're on a big winning streak, there's a temptation to think that you're doing something special, which will allow you to continue to propel yourself upward. You start to think that you can afford to make shoddy decisions. You can imagine what happens next. As a general rule, losses make you strong and profits make you weak. ~ William Eckhardt

Yousef gave up his kingdom to be with her, and Madeleine, well her father disowned her, too," Sophia continued. "But they didn't care. They went to America together and lived happily ever after. Until Hitler invaded Poland and started World War Two. Madeleine lost her husband and both of her sons in the war." She sighed dramatically. "I used to wonder, what if, when she stood in this room, at the very moment that she fell in love with Prince Yousef, what if she had the power to know what was to come? All that heartache and loss ... would she have taken that same path anyway? ~ Suzanne Brockmann

There is dignity after the storm. ~ Catherine Jane Fisher

After Love"

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
The having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end. ~ Jack Gilbert

It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too. ~ Kate Atkinson

His theory is that life is loss,' said Myrna after a moment. 'Loss of parents, loss of loves, loss of jobs. So we have to find a higher meaning in our lives than these things and people. Otherwise we'll lose ourselves. ~ Louise Penny

Who told you that?" I say. "Davy Prentiss?"
He blinks. "What?"
"What do you mean what?" My voice is harder now. "Your new best friend. The man who shot me, Todd, and who you ride to work with laughing every morning."
He clenches his hands into fists.
"You've been spying on me?" he says. "Three months I don't see you, three months I don't hear nothing from you and you been spying? Is that what yer doing in your spare time when yer not blowing people up?"
"Yeah," I yell, my voice getting louder to match his. "Three months of defending you to people who'd only be too happy to call you enemy, Todd. Three months of wondering why the hell you're working so hard for the Mayor and how he knew to go right for the ocean the day after we spoke." He winces, but I keep going, thrusting out my arm and pulling up on the sleeve. "Three months wondering why you put these on women!"
His face changes in an instant. He actually calls out as if he felt the pain himself. He puts a hand to his mouth to stifle it but his Noise is suddenly washed with blackness. He moves his fingertips of his other hand within reach of the band, hovering over my skin, over the band that'll never be removed unless I lose my arm. The skin is still red, and band 1391 still trobs, despite the healing of three mistresses.
"Oh, no," he says. "Oh, no."
The side door opens and the man who let me in leans out. "Everything all right out there, Lieutenant?"
"Lieutenant?" I say.
~ Patrick Ness

I think it's interesting, from a creative point of view, to have witnessed the loss of consciousness on a national level and on a cultural level - Bush had 91 percent support in the polls after 9/11. We wanted to kick some ass! ~ Aleksandar Hemon

It was "Boom Boom" Dupont who had ripped Kit out of the Humvee after the IED went off, the IED that turned the entire undercarriage of his truck into a fiery wall that consumed the five men inside. ~ Siobhan Fallon

He had not been sleeping well over Christmas. Actually, he hadn't been doing anything well over Christmas – eating, sleeping, exercising, talking, looking after himself, laughing, crying… No, he hadn't really been crying despite all the pain he felt. It was just tearing him up inside, quietly. It was like his insides were being ripped up by an angered tiger. ~ Pamela Harju

Grief is love's alter ego, after all, yin to its yang, the necessary other; like night, grief has its own dark beauty. How may we know light without knowledge of dark? How may we know love without sorrow? "The disorientation following such loss can be terrible, I know" Wendell Berry wrote me on learning of Larry's death. "But grief gives the full measure of love, and it is somehow reassuring to learn, even by suffering, how large, and powerful love is. ~ Fenton Johnson

Because this, as it turned out, was her destiny. Not to be the powerful sorceress her people had been waiting for, not to be the ruthless killer the assassins needed. Her destiny was to save one person at a time, change things one tiny step after another.
It still hurt, a tinge of loss. Her life wouldn't be grand, or dramatic, or momentous. There would be no great choices to make, no moments when everything would change. It would make a dull story if she was ever called upon to tell it.
It hurt, yes. But it was also something of a relief. ~ Leah Cypess

The quickest way for anyone to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west, chasing after the setting sun, but to head east, plunging into the darkness until one comes to the sunrise. ~ Gerald L. Sittser

Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade.

"She was dying," Rosa Sorak said. "It was breaking our hearts."

Fejzic, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eastern edge of Goražde, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers.

"On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door," said Rosa Sorak. "It was Fadil Fejzic in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk he came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia."

The Soraks eventually left and took over a house that once belonged to a Muslim family in the Serbian-held town of Kopaci. Two miles to the east. They could no longer communicate with Fejzic.

The couple said they grieved daily for their sons. They missed their home. They said they could never forgive those who took Zoran from them. But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Sebs t ~ Chris Hedges

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first ... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. ~ Ron Rash

After the loss of my sister - my darkest time - I tried to think of the beauty she'd brought to this world and the lives she had touched and the love she had left behind. ~ Susanna Kearsley

(After the losses) I decided I had to break through. I had to set a goal. My goal that I set was to never be pinned. ~ Kyle Maynard

Axsem would say nothing more to any of them. No sooner had Fallon released him than he fled deep into the trees, staff in hand, with Hailos following after. Through the morning air, they heard the wail of his mourning. The scarred heart of the general was torn wide open by having to recall even one abbreviated story from his past. He needed time to coddle his mangled heart and push away the torturous memories. ~ S.R. Ford

What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it. The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning. ~ Carl Jung

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy. ~ Voltaire

Even after months of healing, it doesn't take much to make me bleed ~ Stephanie Oakes

After self-nurturance, listening to the whispers of our hearts is probably the hardest task we've ever attempted. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach

Life after love was possible. I was proof. Loss taught you about yourself, burrowed in the dark parts of your soul and ate you from the inside out. ~ Hailey Edwards