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Loss Quotes

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Loss Quotes

“Children, dear and loving children, can alone console a woman for the loss of her beauty.”

Children Literature Loss Dear Console Her Beauty Loving Children

Author:Honore de Balzac

“That always seemed to be the most critical test that a child was confronted with - loss of parents, loss of direction, loss of love. Can you live without a mother and a father?”

Children Mother Father Parent Loss Tests Critical Love Loss Loss Of A Parent

Author:Maurice Sendak

“I have more energy to run after our four children. Weight loss and great skin were a bonus!”

Children Running Energy Loss Four Skins Weight Weight Loss Bonus

Author:Niecy Nash

“...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.”

People World Children Made Ideas Body Pain Memories Loss Impossible Bird Senses Rhythm Parks Limbs Ghetto Phantoms Fathom Amputation Greenery Warsaw Phantom Limbs

Author:Diane Ackerman

“He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.”

World Wells Children Lost Parent Loss Pleasure Known Constructs

Book:The Road

Source: The Road

“Such a thing as the child left alone to die in the hallway was unknown on the marsh. But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge -- dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. Even the irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be.”

“There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.”

Firsts Believe Children Moments Loss Sleep Grief Forever First Time Weight Fugitive Sleeping Child

Author:Anne Michaels

“If it is perfectly acceptable for a widow to disfigure herself or commit suicide to save face for her husband's family, why should a mother not be moved to extreme action by the loss of a child or children? We are their caretakers. We love them. We nurse them when they are sick. . . But no woman should live longer than her children. It is against the law of nature. If she does, why wouldn't she wish to leap from a cliff, hang from a branch, or swallow lye?”

Ifs Should Children Doe Action Faces Law Mother Wish Loss Husband Sick Suicide Moved Extremes Commit Branches Leap Nurse Acceptable Laws Of Nature Cliffs Widows Loss Of A Child Caretakers

Author:Lisa See

“Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

Source: Slouching towards Bethlehem

“Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.”

“Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.”

Inspirational Children Littles Law Loss Grief Events Kings Eternal Size Grieving Proportion Crowns Dolls

Book:The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's

Source: The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's

“The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, "—three," and years later, "Three," she will say, "—four.”

Years Mind Children I Can Body Moving Mother Three Asks Lost Loses Loss Steps Gone Four Worst Glad One Step At A Time

Book:The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

Source: The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

“She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.”

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.”

Source: Black Glass: Short Fictions