Loss Of Wonder Quotes

In every generation until mine, most of humanity lived with the night sky. As people began moving into cities and using more illumination, the sky gradually disappeared. There must be a corresponding loss of wonder without the stars to remind us where we stand in creation. ~ Lawrence Wright

The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. ~ Eric Berne

If grief kills us not, we kill it. Not that I cease to grieve; for each hour, revealing to me how excelling and matchless the being was, who once was mine, but renews the pang with which I deplore my alien state upon earth. But such is God's will; I am doomed to a divided existence, and I submit. Meanwhile I am human; and human affections are the native, luxuriant growth of a heart, whose weakness it is, too eagerly, and too fondly, to seek objects on whom to expend its yearning. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

A lot of people approach their barn or horse like they are going to war, because it's been going badly. So you pick up the next day in a defensive mode instead of cleaning the slate and starting fresh. Animals live so much in the moment, so if you're bringing baggage from yesterday you're already at a loss. We do that with people too. ~ Cindy Meehl

Let the good service of well-deservers be never rewarded with loss. Let their thanks be such as may encourage more strivers for the like. ~ Elizabeth I

The Triumph Of Achilles

In the story of Patroclus
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him; they wore
the same armor.

Always in these friendships
one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparent, though the legends
cannot be trusted--
their source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.

What were the Greek ships on fire
compared to this loss?

In his tent, Achilles
grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal. ~ Louise Gluck

Management," according to the neorealists, means maintaining the conflict as "a low intensity confrontation" - which means the loss of local, human lives, without any damage to the mediating superpower. ~ Noam Chomsky

For those struggling with grief, there's no timetable. It can last months, years, or longer. There is no rush. Give yourself permission to take however long it may be to fully heal from your loss. ~ Dana Arcuri

Such is my experience - not that I ever mourned the loss of a child, but that I consider myself as lost! ~ Deborah Sampson

The Old Testament contains in many places, but especially in the book of Job, one of the most far-reaching defenses ever written of wilderness, of nature free from the hand of man. The argument gets at the heart of what the loss of nature will mean to us ... God seems to be insisting that we are not the center of the universe, that he is quite happy if it rains where there are no people - that God is quite happy with places where there are no people, a radical departure from our most ingrained notions. ~ Bill McKibben

Dear Jude

Thank you for your beautiful (if unnecessary) note. I appreciate everything in it. You're right; that mug means a lot to me. But you mean more, so please stop torturing yourself.

If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize dat no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.

Actually - maybe I am that kind of person after all. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

My mind couldn't fit itself around the shape of his absence. ~ Lia Mills

There is no knowing how or why dread comes on a parent. Of course, many times apprehension arises when there is no reason for it at all. And it comes most often to the parents of only children, parents who have indulged in black dreams of loss. ~ John Steinbeck

For a while, Mirabelle believes there will be a moment when he will cave in and let himself love her, but eventually she lets the idea go. She hits bottom. She dwells in the muck for several months, not depressed exactly, but involved in a mourning that at first she thinks is for Ray but soon realizes is for the loss of her old self. ~ Steve Martin

No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us - that's snatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence.
I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams - just as Sumire said. But it doesn't last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back. ~ Haruki Murakami

I don't feel part of the world. No one needs me or wants me or even likes me very much. I don't like myself. The world will keep turning without me. I'll be no great loss. I'm just a temporary misuse of a minute amount of carbon. ~ Barbara Elsborg

The moon taught me that only madness is pure. Once I'd made a start without it, my life was trodden territory, never really mine. At first I found this depressing, a sense of loss I could barely feel but which sapped me. In time I grew used to the feeling, which made it possible to bring more feet into my impure mind to track things up. If I couldn't go back, I might as well go forward. I ~ Catherine Ryan Hyde

I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into–into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions … into extrasensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. ~ Jacob Bronowski

In our hearts we know that with a different fate, we, too, could be in the ranks of the dispossessed, stripped of our identities and belonging nowhere. The refugee becomes a sinister symbol of what can quickly happen once personhood is denied and people are transformed into disposable units of contemptible impediments to the greed or power-mongering of others. ~ Dave Mearns

Looking through the eyes of grief, listening to the voices that rise from the grave, you bloom to a bud who sees the light breaking through the night. ~ Jayita Bhattacharjee

It has long been a source of wonder to me why the leading criminological writers
men like Edmund Lester Pearson, H. B. Irving, Filson Young, Canon Brookes, William Bolitho, and Harold Eaton
have not devoted more space to the Greene tragedy; for here, surely, is one of the outstanding murder mysteries of modern times
a case practically unique in the annals of latter-day crime. ~ S. S. Van Dine

Society considers the sex experiences of a man as attributes of his general development, while similar experiences in the life of a woman are looked upon as a terrible calamity, a loss of honor and of all that is good and noble in a human being. This double standard of morality has played no little part in the creation and perpetuation of prostitution. It involves the keeping of the young in absolute ignorance on sex matters, which alleged "innocence," together with an overwrought and stifled sex nature, helps to bring about a state of affairs that our Puritans are so anxious to avoid or prevent. ~ Emma Goldman

How long before the parts of my body realized, independently, that something was wrong and arrived, severally, at panic? Panic is a still thing. I have felt it before: each limb nerve organ coming into extreme alert unrelated to any other, ready for action, but who knows what action, as there is no action that could help here. ~ Joanna Walsh

Mourning is never really complete. The mappings of the old play remain in the cortex, like those mappings of the phantom limb. ~ Robert A Berezin

A sensible girl would not have been crying, grieving for the boy with the magic in his voice and the blues in his eyes, mourning the loss of something that was a lie-a lie-from beginning to end. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

One (practitioner of science) is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail's eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ. ~ Loren Eiseley

In dawdling through the greenhouse, where the loss of her favorite plants, unwarily exposed, and nipped by the lingering frost, raised the laughter of Charlotte,-and in visiting her poultry-yard, where in the disappointed hopes of her dairymaid, by hens forsaking their nests, or being stolen by a fox, or in the rapid decease of a promising young brood, she found fresh sources of merriment. ~ Jane Austen

It would be dreadfully
ironic, I mused, if once I earned a soul, I forgot everything about being fey, including all my memories of her. That sort of ending seemed
appropriately tragic; the smitten fey creature becomes human but forgets why he wanted to in the first place. Old fairy tales loved that sort of irony. ~ Julie Kagawa

One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight. ~ James Thurber

The beauty of Delicate Arch explains nothing, for each thing in it's way, when true to it's own character, is equally beautiful. If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful-that which is full of wonder. ~ Edward Abbey

Something in me was changing season too. I was no longer striving, fighting to change the unchangeable, not clenching in anxiety at the life we'd been unable to hold on to, or angry at an authoritarian system too bureaucratic to see the truth. A new season had crept into me, a softer season of acceptance. Burnt in by the sun, driven in by the storms. I could feel the sky, the earth, the water and revel in being part of the elements without a chasm of pain opening at the thought of the loss of our place within it all. I was a part of the whole. I didn't need to own a patch of land to make that so. I could stand in the wind and I was the wind, the rain, the sea; it was all me, and I was nothing within it. The core of me wasn't lost. Translucent, elusive, but there and growing stronger with every headland. ~ Raynor Winn

Grief is a solitary journey. No one but you knows how great the hurt is. No one but you can know the gaping hole left in your life when someone you know has died. And no one but you can mourn the silence that was once filled with laughter and song. It is the nature of love and of death to touch every person in a totally unique way. Comfort comes from knowing that people have made the same journey. And solace comes from understanding how others have learned to sing again. ~ Helen Steiner Rice

Whoever said it was better to have loved and lost was completely full of shit. ~ Paula Stokes

The ache of loss didn't make sense, because Laurent had never been his. ~ C.S. Pacat

The English are loth to express their feelings, but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent-up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain. ~ Winston Churchill

As often as I feel certain that God exists, I feel as often at a loss to say what difference it makes
that He exists
or even; that to believe in God, which I do, raises more questions than it presents answers. Thus, when I am feeling my most faithful, I also feel full of a few hard questions that I would like to put to God
I mean,critical questions of the How-Can-He, How-Could-He, How-Dare-You variety." But don't let this religious "stuff" turn you off. This is fiction, pure and simple. He just brings out some great thoughts on the way. ~ John Irving

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

If there is to be no loss whatever of dignity or self-respect in getting and staying on relief, then there can be no gain in dignity or self-respect in makings some sacrifices to keep off. ~ Henry Hazlitt

But here in my hometown, history was like a fine dust that settled out on everything. There was nothing to counter it. The culture had been hardened by a religion suspect of joy, yet fascinated by sin. Its moral acceptance of slavery eroded compassion. And gentility became a necessary pretense to cover the resentment created long ago when the North's industrial prestige trumped the agrarian South. It was not an easy place to feel lighthearted or triumphant. Nor was it an easy place to remember the beauty of wonder and awe. ~ Christina Carson

Weeping ... betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure. ~ Jon Krakauer

I recognized that Christianity had taught me that sacrifice is the way of life. I forgot the neighbor who raped me, but I could see that when theology presents Jesus' death as God's sacrifice of his beloved child for the sake of the world, it teaches that the highest love is sacrifice. To make sacrifice or to be sacrificed is virtuous and redemptive.

But what if this is not true? What if nothing, or very little, is saved? What if the consequence of sacrifice is simply pain, the diminishment of life, fragmentation of the soul, abasement, shame? What if the severing of life is merely destructive of life and is not the path of love, courage, trust, and faith? What if the performance of sacrifice is a ritual in which some human beings bear loss and others are protected from accountability or moral expectations? ~ Rebecca Ann Parker

I'm a fool, the new day rises on the world and on my foolish life: I'm a fool, I loved the blue dawns over racetracks and made a bet Ioway was sweet like its name, my heart went out to lonely sounds in the misty springtime night of wild sweet America in her powers, the wetness on the wire fence bugled me to belief, I stood on sandpiles with an open soul, I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss - I am made of Cody, too - ~ Jack Kerouac

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

Enter the writing process with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery. Let it surprise you. ~ Charles Ghigna

The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death). ~ George Steiner