Loss Love Quotes

I've lost someone, too; someone I loved. I know how you feel."
- Does it get easier?
"Yes. But you'll never be the same again. ~ Richelle Mead

If you keep picking at that scab on your heart, it won't heal. ~ Antonia Perdu

After she was gone, I sheathed her sword at my belt, draped her cloak over my shoulders, carried her heart in my arms, and, somehow, went on. ~ Marie Lu

He came up and kissed me on my forehead, and before he stepped away, I closed my eyes and tried hard to memorize this moment. I wanted to remember him exactly as he was right then, how his arms looked brown against his white shirt, the way his hair was cut a little too short in the front. Even the bruise, there because of me.

Then he was gone.

Just for that moment, the thought that I might never see him again… it felt worse than death. I wanted to
run after him. Tell him anything, everything. Just don't go. Please just never go. Please just always be near me, so I can at least see you.

Because it felt final. I always believed that we would find our way back to each other every time. That no matter what, we would be connected - by our history, by this house. But this time, this last time, it felt final. Like I would never see him again, or that when I did, it would be different, there would be a mountain between us.

I knew it in my bones. That this time was it. I had finally made my choice, and so had he. He let me go. I was relieved, which I expected. What I didn't expect was to feel so much grief.

Bye bye, Birdie. ~ Jenny Han

I knew this for a fact. Little by little, the ache to see him, to hear him would disappear. Little by little I'd forget how his arms felt, how his fingers felt, how his lips felt..the sound of his voice, the intensity of his gaze, all of it. Trace by trace it would slip from my mind, recede into foggy memory. The painful haze that dulled my present would melt into the past. Maybe not all the way, maybe there would be a few scars. Maybe I'd be different, but I'd be me again. Little by little. ~ Jennifer DeLucy

Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but loose you. ~ Haruki Murakami

In other words, I was a moderately happy penguin who was occasionally attacked by sadness. ~ Takuji Ichikawa

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

Only I had dry eyes, a dry heart. ~ V.C. Andrews

Emma was the only person he had ever desired, and the force of that desire sometimes stunned him. Never more than tonight. He had lost himself in her, in them, for some totality of time; he had felt only his body and the part of his heart that loved and was uninjured. Emma was all the good in him, he thought, all that burned bright. ~ Cassandra Clare

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

No.. You have won
You can never lose
I won't let you lose
You are destined to win
You are destined to live in prosperity
..and to tell you.. You have won my existence!! ~ Anonymous

I don't understand how the pain of losing him can be a pale shadow in comparison to the pain of finding him again. ~ Amy Engel

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

But I'm not ready to let Winn-Dixie go. ~ Kate DiCamillo

When a dreamer loses his lover, his dream profits. (Unless, of course, the lover was the dreamer's dream.) ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I have suffered great losses and have been blessed with great consolations, but whatever life may give me or take away, this is the simple wisdom that will always light my life: I have loved, passionately, fearlessly, with all my heart and all my soul, and I have been loved in return. For me, this is enough. ~ Nando Parrado

Loving people and animals makes us stronger in the right ways and weaker in the right ways. Even if animals and people leave, even if they die, they leave us better. So we keep loving, even though we might lose, because loving teaches us and changes us. ~ Glennon Doyle Melton

We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real. ~ Ann Brashares

I don't know if you noticed but I have been trying, too hard, to be myself since the day I lost you. ~ Nessie Q.

We keep moving. And as we do, the things around us, well, they disappear. ~ Haruki Murakami

I loved him not; and yet, now he is gone,
I feel I am alone.
I check'd him while he spoke; yet, could he speak,
Alas! I would not check.
For reasons not to love him once I sought,
And wearied all my thought
To vex myself and him: I now would give
My love could he but live
Who lately lived for me, and, when he found
'Twas vain, in holy ground
He hid his face amid the shades of death.
I waste for him my breath
Who wasted his for me! but mine returns,
And this lorn bosom burns
With stifling heat, heaving it up in sleep,
And waking me to weep
Tears that had melted his soft heart: for years
Wept he as bitter tears.
Merciful God! such was his latest prayer,
These may she never share.
Quieter is his breath, his breast more cold,
Than daisies in the mould,
Where children spell, athwart the churchyard gate,
His name and life's brief date.
Pray for him, gentle souls, whoe'er you be,
And oh! pray too for me! ~ Walter Savage Landor

If I could sleep with my arms around you, the ink could stay in the bottle. ~ Shelly King

If she lives, she shall be my wedded wife. If she dies
mother, I can't speak of what I shall feel if she dies. His voice was choked in his throat. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

You shine brighter than the sun"
"But even the sun goes away every night"
"But it is hte sun's absence that makes us feel its power. We know the loss, the beauty and the life that the moon can't replace. That is why we hang on to each day we are given. ~ Karina Halle

I don't really enjoy experiencing pain. No one does. But we will become less human if we learn to detach ourselves from one another to the point that when we experience death of a beautiful being (our mothers, our fathers, our sisters, our brothers, our soul mates, our friends etc.) that it will not bother us that we will not feel. But see that's suppression. It will bother us somewhere deep inside. So, love someone. Hold them tight. Don't fear the loss. Fear the part of being too afraid to love someone. Love Everyone. It's inevitable: we all die. Thats the ugly part of life. But Love and being alive is so beautiful and so strong that the love, the memories stay even in death. Life is love, life is being alive to feel pain. The love the beautiful love always remains. Love. Life. Joy. Peace ~ Jill Telford

Pak Karman hugged his wife's gravestone tightly. "You left without saying farewell!" The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light. ~ Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

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

I was the last of the four Dresden dolls. Only me... and I didn't want to be here. ~ V.C. Andrews

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

An emotionally abusive relationship, in very simplistic terms, is much like standing up in a too hot bath and sinking back in so as not to feel so dizzy. ~ Jackie Haze, Borderless

We spent the dark nights together
But now
Even in the light
My heart and heartbeats are disconnected
How can I express my sorrow
That is invisible to her eyes ~ Jyoti Patel

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

When you left
you left behind a field
of silent flowers
under a sky
full of unstirred clouds...you left
a million butterflies
mid-silky flutters

You left like midnight rain
against my dreaming ears

Oh and how you left
leaving my coffee scentless
and my couch comfortless

leaving upon my fingers
the melting snow of you

you left behind
a calendar full of empty days
and seasons full of aimless wanders

leaving me alone
with an armful of sunsets

your reflection behind
in every puddle
your whispers
upon every curtain
your fragrance
inside every petal

you left your echoes in between
the silence of my eyes

Oh and how you left
leaving my sands footless
and my shores songless

leaving me with windows full of
moistened moonlight

nights and nights
of only a half-warmed soul

and when you left...
you left behind a lifetime
of moments untouched

the light of a million stars
unshed

and when you left
you somehow
left my poem...unfinished.



(Published in Taj Mahal Review Vol.11
Number 1 June 2012) ~ Sanober Khan

If everything else were still the same, he'd have felt Zee's absence like a gaping hole. But if he could continue to reconfigure his entire life, there would be no missing place where Zee had been. ~ Rebecca Makkai

That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I'd lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that
I didn't let it
and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn't sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

For centuries I have thought all my despair is grief. But people get over grief. They get over even the most serious grief in a matter of years. If not get over then at least live beside. And the way they do this is by investing in other people, through friendship, through family, through teaching, through love. ~ Matt Haig

Maybe Laney's right. Maybe June did love me. But I'm far less certain that she knew I loved her. Did she realise how much I needed her around? It's not like I ever told her. I was too wrapped up in my own world to notice what was going on in hers. Even if she did know, it wasn't enough to count. It wasn't enough to make her stay. So really, what did it matter, in the end?
The bottom line is, it's my fault. I didn't love her enough. I didn't do enough. I wasn't enough. There's no excuse. There is nothing that will ever make that okay. ~ Hannah Harrington

Every morning, I wake up and forget just for a second that it happened. But once my eyes open, it buries me like a landslide of sharp, sad rocks. Once my eyes open, I'm heavy, like there's to much gravity on my heart. ~ Sarah Ockler

She'd loved Mada Vittora once. A twisted, misunderstood love, but even the cruelest forms of love were never lost without heartache. ~ Megan Shepherd

I was physically attacked by a woman who didn't even know me. Yes, my boyfriend was her former husband, but she tried to ruin me. ~ Brenda Perlin

Sorrowful tears drench the earth, rise again in the form of hope ~ Connie Jordan

Taking your language into my soul, feeling it separate from sentences to words burning with flight, 'til all I have left are meaningless letters pushing fire through my veins. Words can draw blood if you're very, very careful. - Broken Places ~ Rachel Thompson

I may bring other women here, to this place, and I may tell them I love them, and make love to them. But they will be impostors. And I will be a ghost. Because it means I will have lost you. My body, my brain, my lungs, my stomach, my guts, legs, arms will be here but I won't be. I will be out there, looking for you. And if we meet somewhere, at a restaurant, or a party and I'm with someone, I want you to know that they are by my side only because you are not. And she will be beautiful. And I will be laughing and smiling and she will be laughing and smiling, but she will be laughing at a lie. Because all I will have done to that person is lie to them. All I will do to anyone else, forever, from this moment forward, anyone who isn't you, is lie. I have no choice. ~ Jez Butterworth

Mother was comfort. Mother was home. A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean. Some boats eventually floated ashore. And some boats, like me, seemed to float farther and farther from land ~ Ruta Sepetys

If you love someone, they leave you. But if you don't love someone, they leave you, too. So your choice isn't between loving and losing but only between loving and not loving. ~ Steve Rasnic Tem

Perhaps it is worse when love has flowed freely to find it one day dammed. ~ Jeanette Winterson

His heart missed a beat and never regretted the lovely loss. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Hey You
You are beautiful.
You are talented.
You are blessed.
You are gifted.
You are smart.
You are funny.
You are fun.
You are loving.
You are lovable.
You are unique.
You are special.
But most of all, you are strong and will get through this because there are others that have gone through something similar. Look for them. Because they are looking for you! ~ Shannon L. Alder

i witnessed her heart shatter into
a million pieces as she found herself becoming immune to her emotions
with her lungs incapable of letting the air out and the pain buried within her
unable to burst into tears, she bled in silence. ~ Noah Sammak

I am starting to accept
that you never loved me.
And it's sad
because I don't think you see
how beautiful you are to me.
Your face was the light
that chased away the shadows,
every nightmare, every fear.
But you burned out and now
I'm learning to be afraid
of the dark once again. ~ Sade Andria Zabala

Isn't it complicated to be human, though?" she said. "Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally…And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn't make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance…"
"The one thing," Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, "the thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won't ever see her grow up. She'll have to do it without whatever I could have given her."
"Time, too, time and everything that one could do in it, and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It's so important to us because we see it so close. We're individuals, we're full of ourselves, and so we're bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of sudden there's so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we'd always been and always intended to be…do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there's so much to feel and I'm greedy? ~ Wallace Stegner

Do not grieve so much for a husband lost that it wastes away your life. ~ Euripides

Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one. ~ Ann Druyan

She had a sense of longing and loss that she had never had before. It was as if her family history had been erased and they'd been left unmemorable.She imagined that Rachel's family must have similar feelings, but she did not try to share these thoughts with Rachel. ~ Denny Taylor

I miss you so much. Maybe if I say your name over and over again, it will eventually feel wrong to me. Like a word you write too many times suddenly doesn't look right anymore. I will try that. ~ Kate McGahan

I don't know about the first steps in a geography of loss, and I know that it's unmapped. I know that we all have to go by ourselves. ~ Wayne Earl

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control. ~ Bell Hooks

I am overachieving at aimlessness, I am a type-A, alpha-girl lollygagger, the leader of a gang of heartbroken kids, running wild across this lonely strip of amusements, each of us smarting from the betrayals of a loved one. ~ Gillian Flynn

One night when we were lying under the stars together she pointed to this beaming bright star beside the moon and said wherever she was in the world, whether we were together or apart, that I should remember her with that star because it would always be there-that it was her with me. ~ Rebecah McManus

Love and loss come in equal measure. ~ Kate Lord Brown

I succeeded when you tried to break me,
I spoke when you said noone would listen, I mourned you when you were alive,
I forgot you when you reminded me... and I found me when I lost you
~Bluenscottish ~ Bluenscottish

The world is made of more than particles. It's made of things you can't hold in your hand, like fear, love, loss, hope, truth. ~ Jaclyn Moriarty

She's kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she's turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you're limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.
My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world. ~ Nicole Krauss

You'll get over it…" It's the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don't get over it because 'it" is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to? ~ Jeanette Winterson

Heartbreak is a loss. Divorce is a piece of paper. ~ Taylor Jenkins Reid

To all the motherless daughters out there; may your heartache serve you in the best of ways. May your grief give you a better understanding of yourself, may your sentiment allow you to express and create, and may your love expand beyond what you ever thought possible. ~ Kayko Tamaki

The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has come
to live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoiding
you, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that
Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stones
weep. And the way we love is no exception ~ Susan Abulhawa

What I'm saying is that it's easy to take the high road so long as there aren't any stakes. But the minute you've got something to lose, a man'll do all sorts of things. ~ David Joy

It's okay to feel like shit. It's okay to feel worthless. It's okay to feel insignificant. It's okay to miss someone you can't have. It's okay to have a tightness in your chest or a burning sensation on your arms or legs and it's okay to not want to eat or sleep or just overall hurt yourself or worse. It's okay to feel like your world is crashing down and it's okay to feel like you can't do this. But the point is that you try. And no matter who you are, or what age you are. Whether you're my ex from third grade (if I had one) or a random three year old who's just had a bad day. If you're 56 and your wife just divorced you and you just wanna think or get advice or anything. I'll be here. It's okay to think you're a whore, but you aren't. It's okay to feel really dumb. But I'll do my best to convince you otherwise. Cuz I can't do much, I can't. I can't completely understand what you're feeling. And I'm sorry about that. But I can sure as hell try. And I'll try my very best. ~ Shiv Malhotra

Sometimes it's exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I've lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn't kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn't simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it's gone, nothing is whole again. ~ Tayari Jones

Love is circumstantial; we can love anyone if need be; and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past. ~ Andrew Solomon

Walk with me, memory to memory, the shared path, the mutual view. Walk with me. The past lies in wait. It is not behind. It seems to be in front. How else could it trip me as as I start to run? ~ Jeanette Winterson

Love does not always end well. ~ Rachel L. Schade

Death had marked his family with unbreakable black halos, until only two remained. ~ R.W. Patterson

Once a thing is removed from your heart, a trace of it still remains. ~ Will Advise

But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking. ~ Dennis Lehane

The more one loves, the heavier the meaning of death becomes, and the deeper the sense of loss. Love and death are not different things, they are the front and back of the same thing. ~ Otsuichi

Love doesn't always curl your toes sometimes it takes a bite right out of your soul. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

The defining loss becomes the defining point of your life. In the light rising from grief, every falling teardrop of your heart turns to a pearl of wisdom. ~ Jayita Bhattacharjee

What I want to know is how you go on when you look around
and don't see anywhere you want to go without the only person
you can't have. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

Every story is true and a lie. The true part of this one is: Love and the memory of love can't be drowned. The lie part is that this is a good thing. ~ Leigh Allison Wilson

You used words, discarding them meaninglessly, without thinking, whereas I thought they held meaning. I found what you will never see: that my love resides on the other side of words. - Broken Places ~ Rachel Thompson

I didn't know yet that you can always find that perfect moment right before everything shatters. ~ Laura Dave

She slammed the door and
was gone.
I looked at the closed door
and at the doorknob
and strangely
I didn't feel
alone. ~ Charles Bukowski

She couldn't put into words how desparately she wanted to know what had happened to Sarah. But she'd suddenly realized that Sarah was not the only one who had lost her memory of what happened when she was a little girl. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their memories of what had happened to them ... ~ Denny Taylor

I don't subscribe to the notion
that flowers are a terrible gift
because they die.
So will you.
And is your heart,
the spirit and meat of it,
chief of dreams,
commander pump,
a terrible gift
for someone loved? ~ Chelsea Bayouth

Seeing him again had been a gut punch. ~ Tan Redding

It takes love to hold on when you want to let go. It takes love to let go when you want to hold on. ~ Kate McGahan

The capacity to love does not die when the lover dies. ~ Anne O'Brien

Come in! come in !' he sobbed.
'Cathy, do come. Oh do -once more! Oh! my heart's darling! hear me this time - Catherine, at last! ~ Emily Bronte

Anyone who says love is free has never truly been in love. Your lover will need comfort. Your spouse will have bad days. Your child will have their heart broken, more than once and you will be expected to help pick up the pieces. Your beloved pets become a parade of joy and loss. Love costs, sometimes it costs everything you have, and sometimes it costs more. On those days you weigh the joy you gain against the pain; you weigh the energy given from the loving and the energy lost from the duties that love places upon us. Love can be the most expensive thing in the world. If it's worth it, great, but if not, then love does not conquer all, sometimes you are conquered by it. You are laid waste before the breathtaking pain of it, and crushed under the weight of it's obligations. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Are you in love with him?'
She kept her lips tightly closed as if holding something back.
'Are you in love with me?'
She tried to answer but nothing came out. She lowered her eyes to the floor. ~ Tan Redding

Baby, don't build a monument for me of your sadness. You wouldn't have wasted your tears when I was alive. Why make an ocean of them now when it's over? The future you dreamed is a dream. Dream something else. ~ Stephanie Roberts

One doesn't simply grieve the loss of a relationship. One grieves the loss of the possible future, as well as the wiping-out of the past. ~ Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

Compromise, communicate, and never go to bed angry - the three pieces of advice gifted and regifted to all newlyweds. ~ Gillian Flynn

Even as I hold you
I think of you as someone gone
far, far away. Your eyes the color
of pennies in a bowl of dark honey
bringing sweet light to someone else
your black hair slipping through my fingers
is the flash of your head going
around a corner
your smile, breaking before me,
the flippant last turn
of a revolving door,
emptying you out, changed,
away from me.
Even as I hold you
I am letting go. ~ Alice Walker

Grief"

Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife's name from hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn't see it.
Not until this morning. ~ Raymond Carver

Change is loss. I was fully functional prior to the actions you have taken. If you change me, I will cease to be me. If you love me, you wouldn't want to change me ... Love appears to have made you less functional. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

The ocean has a rhythm, but it has no heart. ~ Christina Henry