loss Quotes

“Do I want to live? . . . [W]ould you like to live with your soul in the grave?”

“I have to remind myself to breathe—almost to remind my heart to beat!”

“He shall never know I love him.”

“‘Are you possessed with a devil,’ he pursued, savagely, ‘to talk in that manner to me when you are dying? Do you reflect that all those words will be branded in my memory, and eating deeper eternally after you have left me?‘”

Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.

“The greatest enemy is one that has nothing to lose.”

“On the beach, Roran stood alone, watching them go. Then he threw back his head and uttered a long, aching cry, and the night echoed with the sound of his loss.”

Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain.

“I am braver than I was because I have lost all; and he who has nothing to lose can afford all risks.”

“You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you have lost a part.”

“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

“Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.”

“That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more: Too common! Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break.”

“Thank you for coming into my life and giving me joy, thank you for loving me and receiving my love in return. Thank you for the memories I will cherish forever. But most of all, thank you for showing me that there will come a time when I can eventually let you go. ”

“I have come to realize that destiny can hurt a person as much as it can bless them, and I find myself wondering why--out of all the people in all the world I could ever have loved--I had to fall in love with someone who was taken away from me.”

“I’ve been in mortal danger for months; I’m kind of used to it now. But I’m nervous again. Dying would suck, but my crewmates dying would be way worse.”

“I wonder if they’ll ever find out what really happened. I’ve been so busy staying alive I never thought of what this must be like for my parents.”

“She’d brooded on her loss, misery had brewed in her heart, that female horror, Grendel’s Mother, living in the murky cold lake assigned her since Cain had killed his only brother, slain his father’s son with an angry sword.”

“I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone.”

“All were subdued and doubtful at heart. Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and later ask—perhaps more than once—where the dead person is and when he is coming back. When Pipkin had planted in himself, like some somber tree, the knowledge that Hazel would never return, his bewilderment exceeded his grief: and this bewilderment he saw on every side among his companions.”

“There’s always something left to lose.”

“Everyone called it losing Mother, but she wasn’t lost. She was gone, and no matter where I went—another town, another country, Fairyland, or Gnome caverns—I wouldn’t find her. We’d never talk again, or laugh together. Or swim in the River Lucarno. Or slide down the banister or play tricks on Bertha. Or a million things.”

“When I find myself filling with rage over the loss of a beloved, I try as soon as possible to remember that my concerns and questions should be focused on what I learned or what I have yet to learn from my departed love. What legacy was left which can help me in the art of living a good life? Did I learn to be kinder, To be more patient, And more generous, More loving, More ready to laugh, And more easy to accept honest tears? If I accept those legacies of my departed beloveds, I am able to say, Thank You to them for their love and Thank You to God for their lives.”

“Sacrifice, you made one. I made one. We all make them. But you are angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost . . . You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life.”

“And like everyone else, Louie and Phil drank. After a few beers, Louie said, it was possible to briefly forget dead friends.”

“Degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.”

“Esperanza bent closer to look at the stems rooted in mulch [...] Now, if they bloomed she could drink the memories of the roses that had known Papa.”

“‘I’m sorry,’ Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on.”

“She was sad about what happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who’d lost nothing, was not.”

“She was alive, and they were dead. She had to try to make her life big.”

“At that moment they heard from behind them a loud noise—a great cracking, deafening noise as if a giant had broken a giant’s plate.... The Stone Table was broken into two pieces by a great crack that ran down it from end to end; and there was no Aslan.”

“They swallow her whole and she never looks back at me. Not once.”

“I see a few friends - people I used to think were my friends - but they look away.”

“It was sad like few other hymns I’d heard. I don’t know why exactly, but I started to hum it as I saw more uniformed officers entering the vestibule outside the visitation room. It seemed like something that might help...After a few minutes, the family joined me. I went over to Herbert’s wife as she held him tightly, sobbing softly. I whispered to her, ‘We have to let him go.’ Herbert saw the officers lining up outside, and he pulled away from her slowly and told me to take her out of the room.”

“They put me on death row for six years! They threatened me for six years. They tortured me with the promise of execution for six years. I lost my job. I lost my life. I lost my reputation. I lost my – I lost my dignity.”

“And I bet she’ll be a stronger person because of what she’s lost today. I have a feeling that once you live through something like this, you become a little bit invincible.”

“‘I can lose you like that if I don’t lose you today. I’ll let you go. If you stay.’”

“Maybe, if I wear the glasses long enough, I can be like her. I can see what she saw. I can be both of us at once so no one will have to miss her, most of all me.”

“When the Dementors approached him, he heard the last moments of his mother’s life, her attempts to protect him, Harry, from Lord Voldemort, and Voldemort’s laughter before he murdered her...”

“Which of my feelings are real? Which of the mes is me? There is only one me I’ve ever really liked, and he was good and awake as long as he could be.”

“Being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.”

“Suddenly I’m having one of those moments that you have after losing someone - when you feel as if you’ve been kicked in the stomach and all your breath is gone, and you might never get it back. I want to sit down in the dirty, littered ground right now and cry until I can’t cry anymore.”

“He knew he was being stupid, knew that the Nimbus was beyond repair, but Harry couldn’t help it; he felt as though he’d lost one of his best friends.”

“I stand in front of the mirror and study my face.…It is the face of a sad, lonely girl something bad has happened to. I wonder if my face will ever look the same again, or if I’ll always see it in my reflection - Finch, Eleanor, loss, heartache, guilt, death.”

“Prince Jones had made it through and still they had taken him.”

“Hence it is that while other nations part with their gold and silver as unwillingly as if one tore out their bowels, those of Utopia would look on their giving in all they possess of those metals (when there were any use for them) but as the parting with a trifle, or as we would esteem the loss of a penny!”

“With a sense of loss we recall the important tasks that have been shunted aside. We realize that we’ve become slaves to the tyranny of the urgent. Is there any escape from this pattern of living? The answer lies in the life of our Lord.”

“And I am sure it is never sadness—a proper, straight natural response to loss—that does people harm, but all the other things, all the resentment, dismay, doubt and self-pity with it.”

“His father sat down on the dirt beside him...He was crying now, crying so hard he could barely breathe. His father pulled Jess over on his lap as if he were Joyce Ann. ‘There. There,” he said, patting his head. ‘Shhh. Shhh.‘”

“She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there – like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.”

“He screamed something without words and flung the papers and paints into the dirty brown water… He watched them all disappear. Gradually his breath quieted, and his heart slowed from its wild pace. The ground was still muddy from the rains, but he sat down anyway. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere. Ever again. He put his head down on one knee.”

“I know so many women who have kept the things she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded.”

“The three of us sat at the table, and it seemed as though about six people were missing.”

“Every new event - everything I did for the rest of my life - would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.”

“Frustration, disillusionment and a profound sense of loss came to characterize the war-weary survivors and influenced their artistic productions.”

“What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.”

“No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat.”

“Deborah and Zakariyya stared at the screen like they’d gone into a trance, mouths open, cheeks sagging. It was the closest they’d come to seeing their mother alive since they were babies.”

“It’s a strange thing, becoming an orphan at sixteen. To lose your family long before you’ve had time to create your own to replace it. It’s a very specific sort of loneliness.”

“It was indeed a shattering loss; for this was an enchanted horn and, whenever you blew it, help was certain to come to you, wherever you were.”

“Either this girl loses her sister, I think, or she’s going to lose herself.”

″‘My mother had a look on her face that I’ll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate.‘”

“And there, on the golden gravel of the bed of the stream, lay King Caspian, dead, with the water flowing over him like liquid glass […] And all three stood and wept. Even the Lion wept: great Lion-tears, each tear more precious than the Earth would be if it was a single solid diamond. And Jill noticed that Eustace looked neither like a child crying, nor like a boy crying and wanting to hide it, but like a grown-up crying.”

“Asagai: Then isn’t there something wrong in a house—in a world—where all dreams, good or bad, must depend on the death of a man? Beneatha: AND YOU CANNOT ANSWER IT! Asagai: I LIVE THE ANSWER!”

“I thought of the countless refugees trekking toward freedom. How many millions of people had lost their home and family during the war?”

“Every time the light shines through the window we built, or any window at all, you’ll know I’m right there with you, okay? That’s going to be me. I’ll be the light in the window.”

“Ay, every generation, every man is a part of his past.”

“That is the inescapable math of tragedy and the multiplication of grief. Too many good people die a little when they lose someone they love. One death begets two or twenty or one hundred. It’s the same all over the world.”

“And if you’ve ever wondered what happens when a person close to you is taken too soon - and it’s always too soon - you may find other truths here, truths that may break the grip of sadness in your life, that may set you free from guilt, that may even bring you back to this world from wherever you are hiding. And then you will never feel alone.”

“‘Most of all,’ he continued, ‘I miss that feeling when you go to sleep at night and when you wake up in the morning. It’s the feeling that everything is all right in the world. You know, that amazing feeling that you’re whole, that you’ve got everything you want, that you aren’t missing anything. Sometimes when I wake up, I get it for just a moment. It lasts a few seconds, but then I remember what happened, and how nothing has been the same since.’”

″‘Endure the hardships of your present state; Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate.’ These words he spoke, but spoke not from his heart; His outward smiles conceal’d his inward smart.”

“O country lost, and gods redeem’d in vain, If still in endless exile we remain!”

“Every loss is unprecedented. You can’t ever know someone else’s hurt, not really—just like touching someone else’s body isn’t the same as having someone else’s body.”

“That’s the way that goes.”

“I spent a year following every useless clue. You know this. Don’t torture me with the memory of my failure. ”

“When misfortune comes, The wisest even lose their mother wit.”

“When you go through a disappointment, when you go through a loss, don’t stop on that page. Keep moving forward. There’s another chapter in front of you, but you have to be willing to walk into it.”

“Sharing tales of those we’ve lost is how we keep from really losing them.”

“The causes of his embitterment were many, remote and near. He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret.”

“The sheep were not insured. –All the savings of a frugal life had been dispersed at a blow: his hopes of being an independent farmer were laid low—possibly for ever.”

″... having children-creating a family, so to speak- had taken on entirely new significance for her in the wake of her family’s losses.”

“without any assistance or guidance from you i have loved you assiduously for 8 months 2 wks & a day i have been stood up four times i’ve left 7 packages on yr doorstep forty poems 2 plants & 3 handmade notecards i left town so i cd send to you have been no help to me on my job you call at 3:00 in the mornin on weekdays so i cd drive 27 1/2 miles cross the bay before i go to work charmin charmin but you are of no assistance i want you to know this waz an experiment to see how selifsh i cd be if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover if i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another if i cd stand not being wanted when i wanted to be wanted & i cannot so with no further assistance & no guidance from you i am endin this affair this note is attached to a plant i’ve been waterin since the day i met you you may water it yr damn self”

″‘Nothing generous about it. New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.’ Had I been a Bokononist then, that statement would have made me howl.”

A couple of years after his wife died. It was too much to love in the apartment without her, everything reminded him, so when an apartment opened up in the floor above me he moved in.”

“A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite.”

“A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite.”

“Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.”

″[That] was why Yura was so shaken by his mother’s death, because he had been lost in that forest with her and was suddenly left alone in it, without her.”

“—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Yours arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”

“Something broke in Neville’s throat. He sat there silently while tears ran slowly down his cheeks. In a week the dog was dead.”

“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.”

“She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you’ll know loss the rest of your life.”

“In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”

“He had wandered through the streets for hours, neither knowing nor caring where he was going. All he knew was that he couldn’t return to the empty rooms of the house, couldn’t look at the things they had touched and held and known with him.”

“There’s no great loss without some small gain.”

″Dear Catherine, I’ve been sitting here thinking about all the things I wanted to apologize to you for. All the pain we caused each other. Everything I put on you. Everything I needed you to be or needed you to say. I’m sorry for that. I’ll always love you ‘cause we grew up together and you helped make me who I am. I just wanted you to know there will be a piece of you in me always, and I’m grateful for that. Whatever someone you become, and wherever you are in the world, I’m sending you love. You’re my friend to the end. Love, Theodore.”

“I remember saying in a voice that was not like my own that it was too light.”

“But now that I see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow.”

“I will never forget Jason. He was a good soldier. He honored me. But the war goes on.”

“I have tried to gild war, and to solace myself for the loss of dear and gallant friends, with the thought that a soldier’s death for a cause that he believes in will count for much, whatever may be beyond this world.”

“Seven pounds, nine shillings and sixpence turned out to be the value they’d put on Arthur’s life. I sat alone at the kitchen table, and I think that was the moment I knew I’d never see my husband again.”

“Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement. The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it.”

“Do you ever think that people who find it tougher to say what they’re feeling are the ones who feel things more intensely? As if they’re the ones who really understand what it means to love someone? As if they have to keep their defenses high, because they care too much and have too much to lose?”

“Annemarie felt a surge of sadness; the bond of their friendship had not broken, but it was as if Ellen had moved now into a different world, the world of her own family and whatever lay ahead for them.”

“I feel all the same things when I do things alone as when Ole Golly was here. The bath feels hot, the bed feels soft, but I feel there’s a funny little hole in me that wasn’t there before, like a splinter in your finger, but this is somewhere above my stomach.”

“She was all that I knew, all that was dear. I’d loved her and she’d loved me. Now I was alone in the world. How would I do without her? My thoughts echoed the landlady: What would become of me?”

“Alex had realized during those months how enormous their mother’s presence had been and how painful her absence was now.”

“I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It’s my spirit, my soul if you will. There is only a blank there now- medals where my soul used to be.”

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

“I feel like the world is divided into two types of people: people who know loss and people who don’t.”

“The worst part, the absolute worst part, is the constant slipping of your tongue into the new empty space, where you know a tooth supposed to be but a’int no more.”

“Loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”

“The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”

“This is what they don’t discuss with you after loss. The rage that bubbles up inside you, creating further divisions in your already fractured self.”

“My father had only been dead two years, so Mother knew just what lay in Eliza’s heart. They both supped sorrow with a big spoon, that’s what Mother said. It took years, but the smile slowly returned to Eliza’s face.”

“I don’t know how to put all that into words. I’m not okay. I haven’t been okay in a long time. It isn’t just Mom’s death. Dad—sometimes I’m afraid. And Ty … I’m afraid I’ll lose Ty too.”

“And do not be paralyzed. It is better to move than to be unable to move, because you fear loss so much: loss of order, loss of security, loss of predictability.”

“we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another,”

“The fear of loss …it can destroy you as much as the loss itself.”

“Al barely made it home in one piece. Alone, without his friend, he was heartbroken.”

“He was hers and she was his and they had found each other across centuries of bloodshed and loss, across oceans and kingdoms and war.”

“He had said the very last word he would have applied to war, once he had had a good look at it, was “purifying,” and the thought that those women could believe the world was any way purer for the loss of their own sons and husbands was appalling to him.”

“We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.”

“It has meant getting in touch with my body and feelings in real time, and learning to express them. I am learning to engage in generative conflict, to say no, to feel my limits, taking time to feel my heartache when it comes—from living in America, from interpersonal trauma or grief, from movement losses.”

″‘I’ll do better, Mary. I swear I will.’ Mary didn’t answer. She just looked at Father. Her eyes were sad as Granny’s used to be. Nat knew what she was thinking. ‘You’ve lost your last anchor to windward.‘”

“The Prince Giglio, by reason of his tender age at his royal father’s death, did not feel the loss of his own crown and empire. As long as he had plenty of toys and sweetmeats, a holiday five times a week and a horse and gun to go out shooting when he grew a little older, and, above all, the company of his darling cousin, the King’s only child, poor Giglio was perfectly contented.”

“Thou art my diamond, and I would rather lose all other diamonds in the world than aught should come to thee. So, if thou doubtest, let me go, or let not any go at all.”

“As Pip watched them play-fighting, she couldn’t help but wonder whether the Singhs ever laughed like that anymore. Or the Bells. Maybe laughter was one of the very first things you lost after something like that.”

“He tilted his head and watched me, unspeaking. He didn’t need to point out that both times I’d visited this town, I’d come without a mother.”

I shook my head, chewing my lip. Without realizing it, I had really enjoyed talking to someone who didn’t know that I was motherless, hadn’t seen me broken and raw after I lost her.

“I hadn’t had easy in three years. I had friends who stopped knowing how to talk to me, or got tired of me being mopey, or we’re so focused on boys that we no longer had anything in common.”

The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead and I was disturbed to find myself at check. Had he not been dead I would have gone into the little dark room behind the shop to find him sitting in his arm-chair by the fire, nearly smothered in his great-coat.

I found it strange that neither I nor the day seemed in a mourning mood and I felt even annoyed at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something by his death.

“Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?”

But I could have made her happy, Mr. Gillingham. God, how I would have worked to make her happy! But now that is impossible. To offer her the hand of a murderer would be as bad as to offer her the hand of a drunkard. And Mark died for that. I saw her this morning. She was very sweet. It is a difficult world to understand.

There is no use in loving things if you have to be torn from them, is there? And it’s so hard to keep from loving things, isn’t it?

“Deeper their heart grows and nobler their bearing, Whose youth in the fires of anguish hath died.”

“I want to be quite silent and quiet and try to realize it. I can’t realize it. Half the time it seems to me that Matthew can’t be dead; and the other half it seems as if he must have been dead for a long time and I’ve had this horrible dull ache ever since.”

“What! My little book I was so fond of, and worked over, and meant to finish before Father got home? Have you really burned it?” said Jo, turning very pale, while her eyes kindled and her hands clutched Amy nervously.

How still the room was as they listened breathlessly, how strangely the day darkened outside, and how suddenly the whole world seemed to change, as the girls gathered about their mother, feeling as if all the happiness and support of their lives was about to be taken from them.

When he had gone, she went to her little chapel, and sitting in the twilight, prayed for Beth, with streaming tears and an aching heart, feeling that a million turquoise rings would not console her for the loss of her gentle little sister.

Alone! he was alone again! again condemned to silence—again face to face with nothingness! Alone!—never again to see the face, never again to hear the voice of the only human being who united him to earth!

“I have nothing, I tell you—I have nothing,” he cried, frantically.

Alas, you, who would have been such a powerful protector to me in the days of your health and strength, can now only sympathize in my joys and sorrows, without being able to take any active part in them.

“God has supported me through all; and then, my dear marquis, he would certainly have done everything for me that I performed for him. It is true that since I left him, I seem to have lost my senses.”

Albert, this money, which was formerly designed to promote the comfort and tranquillity of the woman I adored, may now, through strange and painful circumstances, be devoted to the same purpose.

“Oh, feel for me, who could offer millions to that poor woman, but who return her only the piece of black bread forgotten under my poor roof since the day I was torn from her I loved.”

He had room in his heart only for two idols—his wife and himself: he doted on both, and adored one, and I couldn’t conceive how he would bear the loss.

A sob was the only sound he heard. He saw as though in a mist, a black figure kneeling and buried in a confused mass of white drapery. A terrible fear transfixed him. It was then he heard a voice exclaim “Valentine is dead!”

I knew nothing of this engagement, of this love, yet I, her father, forgive you, for I see that your grief is real and deep; and besides my own sorrow is too great for anger to find a place in my heart. But you see that the angel whom you hoped for has left this earth—she has nothing more to do with the adoration of men. Take a last farewell, sir, of her sad remains; take the hand you expected to possess once more within your own, and then separate yourself from her forever.

“Maximilian,” said the count, “the friends that we have lost do not repose in the bosom of the earth, but are buried deep in our hearts, and it has been thus ordained that we may always be accompanied by them.”

“I believed you dead; why did I survive you? What good has it done me to mourn for you eternally in the secret recesses of my heart?”

“I haven’t seen him for over a year. He got blood poisoning and lost one finger, and couldn’t play the violin any more; and then he went away.”

My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Not merely the value of the lives and the material that it destroys,

I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.

“Now, whether,” pursued Herbert, “he had used the child’s mother ill, or whether he had used the child’s mother well, Provis doesn’t say; but she had shared some four or five years of the wretched life he described to us at this fireside, and he seems to have felt pity for her, and forbearance towards her. Therefore, fearing he should be called upon to depose about this destroyed child, and so be the cause of her death, he hid himself (much as he grieved for the child), kept himself dark, as he says, out of the way and out of the trial, and was only vaguely talked of as a certain man called Abel, out of whom the jealousy arose. After the acquittal she disappeared, and thus he lost the child and the child’s mother.”

“My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there. But that poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy,—all gone by!”

“I wish I could hold you,” she continued, bitterly, “till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, ‘That’s the grave of Catherine Earnshaw? I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I’ve loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them!’ Will you say so, Heathcliff?”

You had distinctly impressed on me the idea that Catherine was the whole joy of your life: I can’t imagine how you think of surviving her loss.

They were emptying his room out; taking away everything that was dear to him; they had already taken out the chest containing his fretsaw and other tools; now they threatened to remove the writing desk with its place clearly worn into the floor, the desk where he had done his homework as a business trainee, at high school, even while he had been at infant school—he really could not wait any longer to see whether the two women’s intentions were good.

Strange as it may appear, it was with the household, the family, that Konstantin Levin was in love, especially with the feminine half of the household. Levin did not remember his own mother, and his only sister was older than he was, so that it was in the Shtcherbatskys’ house that he saw for the first time that inner life of an old, noble, cultivated, and honorable family of which he had been deprived by the death of his father and mother.

“These rooms ought to belong only to us. Oh, how fallen in their destination! How unworthily occupied! An ancient family to be so driven away! Strangers filling their place!”

The trouble is this, Kaa. Those nut-stealers and pickers of palm leaves have stolen away our man-cub of whom thou hast perhaps heard.

“I asked you to go with me yesterday because you are all I have left.”

“No one could love a child more than I loved your brother”—tears came into his eyes as he spoke—“but is it not a duty to the survivors that we should refrain from augmenting their unhappiness by an appearance of immoderate grief? It is also a duty owed to yourself, for excessive sorrow prevents improvement or enjoyment, or even the discharge of daily usefulness, without which no man is fit for society.”