Loss And Bereavement Quotes

I've been through cancer, divorce, loss and bereavement, but they are things most humans go through. ~ Olivia Newton-John

Allah has names of Beauty: the Compassionate, the Merciful, the Gentle, and many others. But He also has Names of Rigour: the Overwhelming, the Just, the Avenger. The world in which we live exists as the interaction and the manifestation of all of the divine attributes. Hence it is a place of ease and of hardship, of joy and of sorrow. It has to be this way: a world in which there was only ease could not be a place in which we can discover ourselves to be true human beings. It is only by experiencing hardship, and loss, and bereavement, and disease, that we rise above our egos, and show that we can live for others, and for principles, rather than only for ourselves. ~ Abdal Hakim Murad

Now I'm back, it's a bit strange. When I left I was younger than Ben, now I'm older than he'll ever be. ~ Susan Leona Fisher

When you go,
if you go,
And I should want to die,
there's nothing I'd be saved by
more than the time
you fell asleep in my arms
in a trust so gentle
I let the darkening room
drink up the evening, till
rest, or the new rain
lightly roused you awake.
I asked if you heard the rain in your dream
and half dreaming still you only said, I love you. ~ Edwin Morgan

Do you know what it's like to be blessed with someone so special, to love them so much it hurts, and then have them taken from you forever? ~ Kim Holden

The argument that coming into existence is always a harm can be summarized as follows: Both good and bad things happen only to those who exist. However, there is a crucial asymmetry between the good and the bad things. The absence of bad things, such as pain, is good even if there is nobody to enjoy that good, whereas the absence of good things, such as pleasure, is bad only if there is somebody who is deprived of these good things. The implication of this is that the avoidance of the bad by never existing is a real advantage over existence, whereas the loss of certain goods by not existing is not a real disadvantage over never existing. ~ David Benatar

We're nothing if we're not loved. When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing in life, really. And I think we are all striving for it in different ways. I also believe very, very strongly that everybody is the hero/heroine of his/her own life. I try to make my characters kind of ordinary, somebody that anybody could be. Because we've all had loves, perhaps love and loss, people can relate to my characters ~ Maeve Binchy

Heaven is not a place constructed above the clouds, but the places inhabited by the breath of those one loves; remove the breath and all the miracles fell to delicate meaningless fragments like a house, a love letter, burning to ash. ~ Melina Sempill Watts

The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc. ~ Henry Miller

He wondered what his heart would look like if he could pluck it from his chest and inspect it. ~ David Estes

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and woman to fill our day;
But when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers & Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Removed from its more restrictive sense, masturbation has become an expression for everything that has proved, for lack of human contact, to be void of meaning. We have communication problems, suffer from egocentrism and narcissism, are frustrated by information glut and loss of environment; we stagnate despite the rising GNP. ~ Gunter Grass

Female status in Pre-Seizure culture was predicated on appetite control. But a woman in control of her desire did not function economically, and so loops were inserted into culture to accelerate female bonding in acts of over-consumption that defied restraint. These loops gave permission for loss of control. He loved the paradoxes of Pre-Seizure culture: on the one hand, building up an iconicity of self-control around images of thinness and athletic discipline, and on the other, unpicking that self-control to create necessary doubt and need. It must have been maddening to live through. ~ Matthew De Abaitua

Tennis is like, it gives you a lot of chances, but if you don't take those chances, it takes a lot of chances away from you. It's just the scoring pattern. We cannot dwell over a loss or a win for very long. We have no time to celebrate; we have no time to dwell; we have to move on. Wake up the next day and try and win the match. ~ Sania Mirza

Then perhaps there is a third kind of loss
the loss that comes when you notice the limits of your knowledge of God, when you feel bereft of guidance, when you feel the loss of God's saving power or of God's grace. This feeling of loss is really a way of noting, and mourning, God's hiddenness. This is the loss you name when you ask why God does not answer your prayers. It is the loss entailed when you realize that Jesus is more mysterious and more inscrutible than you had at first understood. ~ Lauren F. Winner

Bulls and bears aren't responsible for as many stock losses as bumsteers. ~ Richard Miller

As to this half-baked pother about my always feeling inferior in the presence of college graduates, that fear is groundless too. I am not nonplussed in the presence of anybody, and I am seldom at a loss with anyone I am interested in. ~ Everett Ruess

And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be 'well,' or 'normal,' when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.
You have this: You are thin. ~ Marya Hornbacher

From Orient Point

The art of living isn't hard to muster:
Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.
When someone makes you promises, don't trust her

unless they're in the here and now, and just her
willing largesse free-handed to a friend.
The art of living isn't hard to muster:

groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;
take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end.
When someone makes you promises, don't trust her

to know she can afford what they will cost her
to keep until they're kept. Till then, pretend
the art of living isn't hard to muster.

Cooking, eating and drinking are a cluster
of pleasures. Next time, don't go round the bend
when someone makes you promises. Don't trust her

past where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust her
words to mean more to you than she'd intend.
The art of living isn't hard to muster.

You never had her, so you haven't lost her
like spare house keys. Whatever she opens,
when someone makes you promises, don't. Trust your
art; go on living: that's not hard to muster. ~ Marilyn Hacker

If you love someone and they vanish, you are left nodding like a zombie and throwing teacups at a wall. ~ Corey Ann Haydu

Disney features, especially the early ones, were horror movies with cute critters: Greek tragedies with a hummable chorus. Forcing children to confront the loss of home, parent, friends and fondest pets, these films imposed shock therapy on four-year-olds. ~ Richard Corliss

I had to get used to it because my life was no longer safe and I was no longer protected like I once was. ~ Brenda Perlin

You never quite realize how much you love and need him until the very moment you realize he's slipping away ... ~ Alice

When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty [ ... ] I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. (p. 262) ~ Raymond Chandler

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

One of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

One tragic example of the loss of forests and then water is found in Ethiopia. The amount of its forested land has decreased from 40 to 1 percent in the last four decades. Concurrently, the amount of rainfall has declined to the point where the country is rapidly becoming a wasteland. ~ Al Gore

Cookie, you have to stop preemptively ending things before they even start. I know you're afraid of making yourself vulnerable, but if you keep impeding things before they even begin, just out of fear, you'll never know." I'd never know joy. Shit damn. I worried she was right. What if I was snapping into "screw you, your loss" mode too fast? How do you take back, "No you're the one who missed"? Me and my drama trap doors. ~ Stephanie Klein

Leaving wasn't a personal thing where I intentionally wanted to stick it to management or anyone. This is business. I felt I should have been rewarded for helping the Indians turn around a half century of losing. It was a shame they decided to treat me that way, after all I did for them. I helped this team go from one-hundred six losses to basically one-hundred six wins and into the World Series. And what do I get for it? Nothing. ~ Albert Belle

It's like a 'Fragile' sticker's on my forehead, and instead of taking a chance and saying something that might break me, they'd rather say nothing at all. But the silence is worst. ~ Angie Thomas

Impatience turns an ague into a fever, a fever to the plague, fear into despair, anger into rage, loss into madness, and sorrow to amazement. ~ Jeremy Taylor

My prayer became 'May I find peace ... May I love this life no matter what.' I was seeking an inner refuge, an experience of presence and wholeness that could carry me through whatever losses might come. ~ Tara Brach

To stand firm in the condition of loss, is to understand where we are in the process ~ S.L. Northey

Rabbits (says Mr. Lockley) are like human beings in many ways. One of these is certainly their staunch ability to withstand disaster and to let the stream of their life carry them along, past reaches of terror and loss. They have a certain quality which it would not be accurate to describe as callousness or indifference. It is, rather, a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild creature, intent above all upon survival, is as strong as the grass. ~ Richard Adams

Comforting someone when they were stricken with loss was something else. It meant commitment. It meant caring. It meant you wanted to ease their pain, and at the same time you were thanking God that whatever the bad thing was that had happened, it hadn't happened to them. ~ Cassandra Clare

My mother's death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her ... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul. ~ Salvador Dali

She was worth running for. Worth every loss in my life. Worth stepping outside the law. Worth living, dying, and everything in between. ~ C.D. Reiss

Nesryn Sobbed, tugging and tugging.
Sartaq smiled at her ــ gently. Sweetly. In a way she had not yet seen.
"I Loved you before I ever set eyes on you," he said.
"Please," Nesryn wept.
Sartaq's hand tightened on hers. "I wish we'd had time."
A Hiss behind him, a rising bulk of shining black ــ
Then the prince was gone. Ripped from her hands.
As if he had never been. ~ Sarah J. Maas

What people recognize is that there's a fear that the United States is in an unstoppable decline. They see the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the Soviet Union and our loss militarily going forward. ~ Michele Bachmann

Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone. Or set me on an airplane traveling west, crossing the date line again and again, losing this day, then that, until the day of loss still lies ahead, and you are here instead of sorrow. ~ Nessa Rapoport

Without ever exactly putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory. Something new appears in the world-a baby, say, or a car or a house, or an individual shows some special talent-with luck and huge expenditures of soul and effort you might keep the project stoked for a while, but eventually, ultimately, its going down. This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can't fathom why it's not more widely percieved, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell. The war is fucked? Well, duh. Nine-eleven? Slow train coming. They hate our freedoms? Yo, they hate our actual guts! Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity. ~ Ben Fountain

Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart. ~ Trent Zelazny

Her mother had told her the mortal world was pocked with memorials and monuments to loss. They build with steel and stone and promise to remember, she'd said. But they never do. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Do you think she's going to hang out your dirty laundry for all to see?"
"How can you say she has sense after what she pulled today? Bah! You don't know what you're talking about."
"What Willow did today was nothing more than an act of rebellion, a way to let off steam and let you know, in the only way she knew how, that your treatment of her is entirely unacceptable."
"Woman, what you need is a man, then maybe you wouldn't be putting your nose in everybody's business."
"Why,Mr. Vaughn, are you applying for the job?" Miriam asked, with an ill-humored smile.
"Hell,no!"
"Then I suggest you leave my personal life out of this. My life is in perfect order, which is more than can be said for yours!"
Owen grunted and took a pull on his pipe.
Well aware of his bold perusal, Miriam attacked her darning as if it were infinitely more engaging than any conversation with the man across the room from her.
Owen wasn't a handsome man by any standards with his bearlike build and ruddy complexion. And heaven knew he wasn't very likeable either. Thus, Miriam was at a complete loss to explain her powerful attraction to him. Good heavens, she thought, I haven't felt so giddy since that time on my eighteenth birthday when Hiriam pulled me behind Aunt Harriet's coachhouse and we... The landlady's face reddened. ~ Charlotte McPherren

Broken and bewildered, my brother had the house cleared and packed away, painted and polished, all in the first month or two after the wave. For him, that was the practical thing to do, to impose order on the unfathomable, perhaps. ~ Sonali Deraniyagala

He was filled with loss and an off-brand of nostalgia for events that were supposed to become part of his past but now wouldn't at all. In the mind's special processes, a ten-mile run takes far longer than the minutes reported by a grandfather clock. Such time, in fact, hardly exists in the real world; it is all out on the train somewhere, and you only go back to it when you are out there. He and Mize had been through two solid years of such regular time-warp escapes together. There was something different about that, something beyond friendship; they had a way of transferring pain back and forth, without the banality of words. ~ John L. Parker Jr.

It's a weak faith that only serves God in times of blessing. The book of Job teaches us that true faith, genuine faith, great faith is revealed only when we serve and trust God in the hard times, the times of suffering, loss, and opposition. That's the kind of faith that makes the world sit up and take notice. ~ Ray Stedman

When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

As you release, align and commit to your life's purpose, you begin to access more of your lightbody. And as we birth this new world together, you may go through preparation stages, as your physical body restructures and reassembles into its new form. As you embark on this journey, you may go through periods of feeling loss, sadness and grief as you may be faced with the reality that you will never return back to this old world that held you safe for so many lifetimes. We are moving into a new energy, and a new world, and in this new world will be different ways to live, create and be. Nothing will ever be the same again. We are changing from the inside out and sometimes from the outside in! ~ Lee-Anne Peters

Surrender--stillness--a ready welcoming of all stripping, all loss, all that brings us low, low into the Lord's path of humility--a cherishing of every whisper of the Spirit's voice, every touch of the prompting that comes to quicken the hidden life within: that is the way God's human seed-vessels ripen, and Christ becomes "magnified" even through the things that seem against us. "Mine but to be still: Thine the glorious power, Thine the mighty will. ~ I. Lilias Trotter

That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
"It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it -
books, bricks, grief -
it's all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down."
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled -
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply? ~ Mary Oliver