concept

loss Quotes

100+ of the best book quotes about loss
01
Share
“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.”
Ben Sherwood
author
The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud
book
Florio Ferrente
character
death
loss
young
finding the truth
close relationships
concepts
02
Share
“‘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.’”
03
Share
“And like everyone else, Louie and Phil drank. After a few beers, Louie said, it was possible to briefly forget dead friends.”
04
Share
“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.”
05
Share
“Degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.”
06
Share
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.”
07
Share
“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.”
08
Share
“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.”
09
Share
“She was alive, and they were dead. She had to try to make her life big.”
10
Share
“‘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.”
11
Share
“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.”
12
Share
“O country lost, and gods redeem’d in vain, If still in endless exile we remain!”
Virgil
author
Beroe
Iris
characters
despair
loss
exile
concepts
13
Share
“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.”
14
Share
″‘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.”
Virgil
author
Aeneas
character
loss
encouragement
hope
concepts
15
Share
“I see a few friends - people I used to think were my friends - but they look away.”
16
Share
“They swallow her whole and she never looks back at me. Not once.”
17
Share
“That’s the way that goes.”
Fences
book
sadness
change
loss
concepts
18
Share
“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.”
19
Share
“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.”
20
Share
“‘I can lose you like that if I don’t lose you today. I’ll let you go. If you stay.’”
21
Share
“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.”
22
Share
“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...”
23
Share
“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.”
24
Share
“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.”
25
Share
“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.”
26
Share
“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.”
27
Share
“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.”
28
Share
“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.”
29
Share
“I spent a year following every useless clue. You know this. Don’t torture me with the memory of my failure. ”
30
Share
“Prince Jones had made it through and still they had taken him.”
31
Share
“‘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?‘”
32
Share
“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.”
33
Share
“The greatest enemy is one that has nothing to lose.”
34
Share
“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!”
Utopia
book
treasures
loss
gold
concepts
35
Share
“Being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.”
36
Share
“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.”
37
Share
“When misfortune comes, The wisest even lose their mother wit.”
38
Share
“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.”
39
Share
“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.‘”
40
Share
“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.”
41
Share
“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.”
42
Share
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.
sadness
grief
loss
concepts
43
Share
“I know so many women who have kept the things she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded.”
44
Share
″... having children-creating a family, so to speak- had taken on entirely new significance for her in the wake of her family’s losses.”
45
Share
“I am braver than I was because I have lost all; and he who has nothing to lose can afford all risks.”
46
Share
“The three of us sat at the table, and it seemed as though about six people were missing.”
47
Share
“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.”
48
Share
“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”
49
Share
“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.”
50
Share
“You must save what you can of your life; you musn’t lose it all simply because you have lost a part.”
51
Share
“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.”
52
Share
“What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.”
53
Share
“Frustration, disillusionment and a profound sense of loss came to characterize the war-weary survivors and influenced their artistic productions.”
54
Share
“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.”
55
Share
“Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.”
56
Share
“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.”
57
Share
“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.”
58
Share
“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. ”
59
Share
“Either this girl loses her sister, I think, or she’s going to lose herself.”
60
Share
″‘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.‘”
61
Share
“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.”
62
Share
“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!”
63
Share
“I thought of the countless refugees trekking toward freedom. How many millions of people had lost their home and family during the war?”
64
Share
“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.”
Andy Weir
author
Mark Watney
character
family
loss
concepts
65
Share
“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.”
66
Share
″‘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.”
67
Share
“Sharing tales of those we’ve lost is how we keep from really losing them.”
68
Share
“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.”
69
Share
“Ay, every generation, every man is a part of his past.”
70
Share
“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.”
Ella
character
death
loss
concepts
71
Share
“There’s always something left to lose.”
72
Share
“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.”
73
Share
“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.”
74
Share
“Do I want to live? . . . [W]ould you like to live with your soul in the grave?”
75
Share
“He shall never know I love him.”
76
Share
“I have to remind myself to breathe—almost to remind my heart to beat!”
77
Share
Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.
78
Share
“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.”
79
Share
“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
80
Share
“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.”
81
Share
“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.”
Andy Weir
author
Mark Watney
character
death
loss
concepts
82
Share
“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.”
Anonymous
author
loss
concept
83
Share
“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.”
84
Share
“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.”
85
Share
“A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite.”
86
Share
“A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite.”
87
Share
“She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you’ll know loss the rest of your life.”
88
Share
“April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.”
89
Share
“Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.”
90
Share
“—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.”
91
Share
“In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.”
92
Share
“Something broke in Neville’s throat. He sat there silently while tears ran slowly down his cheeks. In a week the dog was dead.”
93
Share
″[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.”
94
Share
“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.”
95
Share
“There’s no great loss without some small gain.”
96
Share
″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.”
97
Share
“I remember saying in a voice that was not like my own that it was too light.”
98
Share
“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.”
99
Share
“I will never forget Jason. He was a good soldier. He honored me. But the war goes on.”
100
Share
“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.”
101
Share
“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.”
102
Share
“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.”
103
Share
“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?”
104
Share
“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.”
105
Share
“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.”
106
Share
“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?”
107
Share
“Alex had realized during those months how enormous their mother’s presence had been and how painful her absence was now.”
108
Share
“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.”
109
Share
“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.”
110
Share
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.
111
Share
“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.”
112
Share
“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.”
113
Share
“Al barely made it home in one piece. Alone, without his friend, he was heartbroken.”
114
Share
“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.”
115
Share
“Loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”
116
Share
“The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”
117
Share
“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.”
118
Share
″‘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.‘”
119
Share
“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.”
120
Share
“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”
121
Share
“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.”
122
Share
“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.”
123
Share
“I feel like the world is divided into two types of people: people who know loss and people who don’t.”
124
Share
“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.”
125
Share
“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.”
126
Share
“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,”
127
Share
“The fear of loss …it can destroy you as much as the loss itself.”
128
Share
“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.”

Recommended quote pages

View All Quotes

Bookroo

Book Clubs

Follow Bookroo