115 Quotes About Coping With Loss

Navigating the turbulent waters of grief can be one of life's most challenging journeys. Whether you've lost a loved one, a cherished pet, or a significant part of your life, the feelings of loss can be overwhelming and isolating. Yet, amid this emotional turmoil, words have the power to heal, comfort, and offer perspective. Quotes provide not only solace but also a gentle reminder that you are not alone in your experience. In this collection, we've gathered 115 poignant quotes about coping with loss, each offering a unique insight or a comforting embrace for those in need of a guiding light. These words of wisdom from diverse voices across the ages aim to inspire resilience and hope, helping you find your way on the path to healing.

1. “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

2. “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” - Cormac McCarthy

3. “Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.” - W.S. Merwin

4. “Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.” - Rumi

5. “Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.” - Zora Neale Hurston

6. “Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.” - Steve Almond

7. “There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there's loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another.” - Charlie Kaufman

8. “We had a kettle; we let it leak:Our not repairing made it worse.We haven't had any tea for a week...The bottom is out of the Universe.” - Rudyard Kipling

9. “Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.” - Roland Barthes

10. “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

11. “I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was reproof. Shouldn't I feel better than I had in the dead of night.” - Francine Prose

12. “If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?” - Jodi Picoult

13. “Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing."Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me.But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kindness."He wiped my cheeks, saying Ssshh. I buried my face in his shoulder.True kindness is stabilizing," I went on. "When you feel it and when you express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. Like all there is to achieve. It's life, demystified. A place out of self, a network of simple pleasures, not a waltz, but like whirls within a waltz."You're the one now," Jack said definitively. "That's why you met her. She had something she had to pass on." (p. 95)” - Hilary Thayer Hamann

14. “Surprised by joy—impatient as the WindI turned to share the transport—Oh! with whomBut thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,That spot which no vicissitude can find?Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—But how could I forget thee? Through what power,Even for the least division of an hour,Have I been so beguiled as to be blindTo my most grievous loss!—That thought's returnWas the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;That neither present time, nor years unbornCould to my sight that heavenly face restore.” - William Wordsworth

15. “To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost.” - Peter Høeg

16. “Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss?” - Susan Gordon Lydon

17. “When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty [...] I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again. (p. 262)” - Raymond Chandler

18. “Because there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded, nor a people so small they cannot offer mighty comfort.” - Carmen Agra Deedy

19. “Never give all the heart, for loveWill hardly seem worth thinking ofTo passionate women if it seemCertain, and they never dreamThat it fades out from kiss to kiss;For everything that's lovely isBut a brief, dreamy, kind delight.O Never give the heart outright,For they, for all smooth lips can say,Have given their hearts up to the play.And who could play it well enoughIf deaf and dumb and blind with love?He that made this knows all the cost,For he gave all his heart and lost.” - W. B. Yeats

20. “You never knew the last time you were seeing someone. You didn't know when the last argument happened, or the last time you had sex, or the last time you looked into their eyes and thanked God they were in your life.After they were gone?That was all you thought about.Day and night.” - J.R. Ward

21. “Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?” - Jodi Picoult

22. “No matter how much he talked, she never answered him, but he knew she was still there. He knew it was like the soldiers he had read about. They would have an arm or a leg blown off, and for days, even weeks after it happened, they could still feel the arm itching, the leg itching, the mother calling.” - Pat Cunningham Devoto

23. “The dusty tombs of long-dead exorcist priests lay in the alcoves below, surmounted by stone effigies, the features eroded by the passing of time and the reverent caresses of their grateful parishioners, a reminder, she knew all too well, of the brevity of life.” - Sarah Ash

24. “When we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we grow up, and we were free to travel around the counry, we would always go and find it in Norfolk...And that's why years and years later, that day Tommy and I found another copy of that lost tape of mine in a town on the Norfolk coast, we didn't just think it pretty funny; we both felt deep down some tug, some old wish to believe again in something that was once close to our hearts.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

25. “When We Two PartedWhen we two partedIn silence and tears,Half broken-heartedTo sever for years,Pale grew thy cheek and cold,Colder thy kiss;Truly that hour foretoldSorrow to this.The dew of the morningSunk chill on my brow—It felt like the warningOf what I feel now.Thy vows are all broken,And light is thy fame:I hear thy name spoken,And share in its shame.They name thee before me,A knell to mine ear;A shudder comes o'er me—Why wert thou so dear?They know not I knew thee,Who knew thee too well:Long, long shall I rue thee,Too deeply to tell.In secret we met—In silence I grieve,That thy heart could forget,Thy spirit deceive.If I should meet theeAfter long years,How should I greet thee?With silence and tears.” - George Gordon Byron

26. “I knew that somewhere God was laughing. He had taken the other half of my heart, the one person who knew me better than I knew myself, and He had done what nothing else could do. By bringing us together, He had set into motion the one thing that could tear us apart.” - Jodi Picoult

27. “Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose," began the man. "You included. And we are professionals at finding out that very thing. Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity. This is something we can pinpoint. Only when it is gone do people realize it even existed.” - Haruki Murakami

28. “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

29. “[That wall] might be breached sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken.The most terrible thing, though, was the fear that the wall could never be breached, that in his heart Alai was glad of the separation, and was ready to be Ender's enemy. For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other.” - Orson Scott Card

30. “But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.” - Mitch Albom

31. “...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

32. “What madness, to love a man as something more than human! I lived in a fever, convulsed with tears and sighs that allowed me neither rest nor peace of mind. My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry. Everything that was not what my friend had been was dull and distasteful. I had heart only for sighs and tears, for in them alone I found some shred of consolation.” - St. Augustine

33. “Adam is crying and somewhere inside of me I am crying, too, because I'm feeling things at last. I'm feeling not just the physical pain, but all that I have lost, and it is profound and catastrophic and will leave a crater in me that nothing will ever fill.” - Gayle Forman

34. “There's a bit of magic in everythingAnd then some loss to even things out.” - Lou Reed

35. “Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life.” - Caitlin Kittredge

36. “How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.” - Barbara Kingsolver

37. “I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.” - Barbara Kingsolver

38. “So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.” - Margaret George

39. “It sucks that we miss people like that. You think you've accepted that someone is out of your life, that you've grieved and it's over, and then bam. One little thing, and you feel like you've lost that person all over again.” - Rachel Hawkins

40. “You think you're lost but you're not lost on your own. You're not alone. I will stand by you, I will help you through when you’ve done all you can do.If you can’t cope, I will dry your eyesI will fight your fight, I will hold you tight and I wont let go” - Rascal Flatts

41. “And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.” - Terry Pratchett

42. “Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.” - Jodi Picoult

43. “it is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.” - Lemony Snicket

44. “He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely. Nevertheless.” - Christopher Isherwood

45. “Later, when his father left him, the boy cried over his pet, until eventually his father sent a servant to take the body of the bird away and bury it. The boy never cried again, and he never forgot what he'd learned: that to love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be the one destroyed.” - Cassandra Clare

46. “I think about my mother singing after lunch on a Summer afternoon, twirling in blue dress across the floor of her dressing room” - Audrey Niffenegger

47. “Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in. Bonsai trees twist in miniature. I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.” - Jodi Picoult

48. “Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.” - Haruki Murakami

49. “She's not here," I tell him. Buttercup hisses again. "She's not here. You can hiss all you like. You won't find Prim." At her name, he perks up. Raises his flattened ears. Begins to meow hopefully. "Get out!" He dodges the pillow I throw at him. "Go away! There's nothing left for you here!" I start to shake, furious with him. "She's not coming back! She's never ever coming back here again!" I grab another pillow and get to my feet to improve my aim. Out of nowhere, the tears begin to pour down my cheeks. "She's dead, you stupid cat. She's dead.” - Suzanne Collins

50. “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

51. “From Orient PointThe art of living isn't hard to muster:Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.When someone makes you promises, don't trust herunless they're in the here and now, and just herwilling largesse free-handed to a friend.The art of living isn't hard to muster:groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end.When someone makes you promises, don't trust herto know she can afford what they will cost herto keep until they're kept. Till then, pretendthe art of living isn't hard to muster.Cooking, eating and drinking are a clusterof pleasures. Next time, don't go round the bendwhen someone makes you promises. Don't trust herpast where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust herwords to mean more to you than she'd intend.The art of living isn't hard to muster.You never had her, so you haven't lost herlike spare house keys. Whatever she opens,when someone makes you promises, don't. Trust yourart; go on living: that's not hard to muster.” - Marilyn Hacker

52. “Though sorrow may impede my heart,It is of great love to have known you.” - C. Elizabeth

53. “Reckon it's best if you don't have anyone you care about; then it can't hurt you. Don't have to be afraid of losing someone if you no one to lose.” - Karen Maitland

54. “When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.” - C.S. Lewis

55. “You may say suicide is a loss of control and cowardly. Foolish as it may sound, I am prepared to argue.” - Dee Remy

56. “My insides feel like they are crumbling like a towering JENGA game. I lose.” - Stephanie Campbell

57. “Holding the knife with the blade against my palm, it became so clear how my life would only contain shadows now. Shadows of things gone; not just the people themselves but everything connected to them. Was this my future? Every moment, every tiny thing I saw and did and touched, weighted by loss. Every space in this house andmy town and the world in general, empty in a way that could never be filled.” - Jennifer Castle

58. “Anyone? On Snow's visit before the Victory Tour, he challenged me to erase any doubts of my love for Peeta. "Convince me," Snow said. It seems, under that hot pink sky with Peeta's life in limbo, I finally did. And In doing so, I gave him the weapon he needed to break me.” - Suzanne Collins

59. “You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall.” - Mary Lawson

60. “You could lose the ones you loved in the blink of an eye—and he was willing to bet, when it happened, you weren’t thinking about all the reasons that could have kept you apart. You thought of all the reasons that kept you together. And, no doubt, how you wished you’d had more time. Even if you’d had centuries… When you were young, you thought time was a burden, something to be discharged as fast as possible so you could be grown-up. But it was such a bait-n-switch—when you were an adult, you came to realize that minutes and hours were the single most precious thing you had. No one got forever. And it was a fucking crime to waste what you were given.” - J.R. Ward

61. “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an harrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.” - C.S. Lewis

62. “Little Joe was still behind him. Eli could feel it. He wanted to look back, but he couldn’t. The tears were too close. If he were Fancy, he’d turn around and kick and buck and moo and do just about anything to keep his calf near. But Eli wasn’t Fancy; he was a farmer.” - Sandra Neil Wallace

63. “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.” - C.S. Lewis

64. “Gifts of grace come to all of us. But we must be ready to see and willing to receive these gifts. It will require a kind of sacrifice, the sacrifice of believing that, however painful our losses, life can still be good — good in a different way then before, but nevertheless good. I will never recover from my loss and I will never got over missing the ones I lost. But I still cherish life. . . . I will always want the ones I lost back again. I long for them with all my soul. But I still celebrate the life I have found because they are gone. I have lost, but I have also gained. I lost the world I loved, but I gained a deeper awareness of grace. That grace has enabled me to clarify my purpose in life and rediscover the wonder of the present moment.” - Jerry Sittser

65. “Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.” - Alain De Botton

66. “It's being without him that I'll never get used to.” - Christopher Buecheler

67. “I could kill you a thousand times over Abraham, but we would never be even. You took everything I had.” - Christopher Buecheler

68. “Be patient. Your skin took a while to deteriorate. Give it some time to reflect a calmer inner state. As one of my friends states on his Facebook profile: "The true Losers in Life, are not those who Try and Fail, but those who Fail to Try.” - Jess C. Scott

69. “Grief, regret, pain, and of course anger. Another loss. And when you compare this one loss to the hundreds and maybe thousands that occur people stop thinking they matter. It does matter though. Every loss matters.” - Natalie Valdes

70. “Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.” - Lionel Shriver

71. “Don't love anything that can be taken away.” - Ron Rash

72. “A small profit it better than a big loss” - Ron Rash

73. “I want to tell the rebels that I am alive. That I'm right here in District Eight, where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of unarmed men, women and children. There will be no survivors." The shock I've been feeling begins to give way to fury. "I want to tell people that if you think for one second the Capitol will treat us fairly if there's a cease-fire, you're deluding yourself. Because you know who they are and what they do." My hands go out automatically, as if to indicate the whole horror around me. "This is what they do and we must fight back!""President Snow says he's sending a message. Well I have one for him. You can torture us and bomb and burn our districts to the ground, but do you see that?" One of the cameras follows where I point to the planes burning on the roof of a warehouse across from us. "Fire is catching!" I am shouting now, determined he will not miss a word of it, "And if we burn, you burn with us!” - Suzanne Collins

74. “Rasa kehilangan itu wajar. Tapi percaya deh, semuanya akan baik-baik aja. Suatu hari, lo akan bangun dan nggak merasakan apa-apa. Semua beban dari masa lalu lo, rasa sedih ini, puff! hilang begitu saja. Dan saat itu, lo akan lebih ikhlas menjalani semuanya, karena lo udah menerima bahwa kenyataan nggak bisa diubah.” - Winna Efendi

75. “You were standing in the wake of devastation And you were waiting on the edge of the unknown And with the cataclysm raining down Insides crying "Save me now" You were there, impossibly alone” - Linkin Park

76. “When you lose someone, you get used to living day to day without them. But you’ll never get used to the “10 second heartbreak.” That’s the time it takes to wake to full consciousness each day and remember…” - Nina Guilbeau

77. “What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?” - Amy Reed

78. “How easy it was to lose everything you had always thought you'd have forever.” - Cassandra Clare

79. “To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was this what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn't like it, but it made it easier to go on.” - Banana Yoshimoto

80. “The two brothers who sought to get their only family back, to feel her warmth, one lost his last family member and the other could never feel warmth again.The one who wanted her baby back lost chance of having one again,And the one who had a vision to see his country change became blind.” - Hiromu Arakawa

81. “LXXIXWhen I die, I want your hands on my eyes.I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once more.I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.I want what I love to continue to live,and you whom I love and sang above everything else.to continue to flourish, full-flowered.So that you can reach everything my love directs you to. So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,so that everything can learn the reason for my song.” - Pablo Neruda

82. “...what happens when you returnand find nothingbut a hollowed shell,shingles and floor,walls and echoesand the light that lead you herehas now burned outand the ones who built ithave traveled afarand you cant go to them,no matter what shoes you wear.” - Kellie Elmore

83. “And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.” - Emma Donoghue

84. “Reshuffllng of thoughts - facilitates a refreshed perspective to a mental deadlock!” - Deeba Salim Irfan

85. “Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn’t remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts.” - Michelle Sagara West

86. “This wasn't the first time that I'd come close to death, but it was the first time I'd been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you've loved.” - Madeleine L'Engle

87. “I told him I had once lost everything I had, too, and that I think that can be God’s way of building walls around us to force us to look up at Him.” - Kimberly Novosel

88. “I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy,why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why.Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my pastwas my life.” - Janet Fitch

89. “The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces— those, I think, are the sensations of grief.” - Catherynne M. Valente

90. “In other words, I was a moderately happy penguin who was occasionally attacked by sadness.” - Takuji Ichikawa

91. “I wanted to ask my father about his regrets. I wanted to ask him what was the worst thing he'd ever done. His greatest sin. I wanted to ask him if there was any reason why the Catholic Church would consider him for sainthood. I wanted to open up his dictionary and find the definitions for faith, hope, goodness, sadness, tomato, son, mother, husband, virginity, Jesus, wood, sacrifice, pain, foot, wife, thumb, hand, bread, and sex. "Do you believe in God?" I asked my father."God has lots of potential," he said."When you pray," I asked him. "What do you pray about?""That's none of your business," he said. We laughed. We waited for hours for somebody to help us. What is an Indian? I lifted my father and carried him across every border.” - Sherman Alexie The Toughest Indian in the World

92. “Each memory rips through me, and although I stow myself against the emotions, I can’t prevent the pain that accompanies each image. Pain for a love never acknowledged, pain for a friendship now gone. Pain for a loss I can’t possibly endure.” - Christine Fonseca

93. “That's the tragedy of falling in love; it brings with it the potential for loss.” - Sarah Rayner

94. “There is a widespread sense of loss here, if not always of God, then at least of meaning.” - Charles Taylor

95. “It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people's too - yours, Leo's, Dad's. We have to expand at the moment we feel the most shrunk.” - Rosamund Lupton

96. “..there are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.” - José Saramago

97. “Wandering is better than place sometimes, than home, than destination. Sometimes she can eke out the idea that wandering is possibility, chance, serendipity--he might be there, that place she didn't think to look, hadn't worked hard enough to find....” - Michelle Latiolais

98. “She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need.” - Michelle Latiolais

99. “Some losses never heal you just learn to carry the burden and shed a tear every now and then” - Tina Gayle

100. “I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.” - Robin McKinley

101. “I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

102. “For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.” - John Scalzi

103. “The moonlight rained down on the beach as if to shine a spotlight on my solitude, and I wanted to cry out at it, ‘Why did you take her? You, surrounded by all of your twinkling stars and infinite wonders and darkness. There’s already enough beauty where you are.” - Rachael Wade

104. “The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering. The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.” - Andrea Dworkin

105. “I've seen too much sacrifice to believe that God is behind all of it, and I've seen sacrifice that has no indicia of the hand of God at all. Loss is not always part of some greater plan explainable by reference to the actions of a divine being with a divine purpose.” - Neil Abramson

106. “He smiled his shy smile at her as he went into the yard. Anne took the memory of it with her when she went to her room that night and sat for a long while at her open window, thinking of the past and dreaming of the future. Outside the Snow Queen was mistily white in the moonshine; the frogs were singing in the marsh beyond Orchard Slope. Anne always remembered the silvery, peaceful beauty and fragrant calm of that night. It was the last night before sorrow touched her life; and no life is ever quite the same again when once that cold, sanctifying touch has been laid upon it.” - L.M. Montgomery

107. “For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.” - Charles Dickens

108. “I remember his eyes. They are just like mine. Every time I look in the mirror I see him. I try not to look at my self too much.” - Ida Løkås

109. “And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn't have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.” - Augusten Burroughs

110. “Now he understood. After a while, pain simply stopped. It was as though your mind was able to create a firewall beyond which it would not let you venture. You had to have a break from your anguish, or you'd go crazy. It was the psychological equivalent to fainting when physical pain became overbearing.” - Elizabeth Berg

111. “For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

112. “One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.” - K.L. Toth

113. “I'm so in love with you I can't stand up.” - Kim Addonizio

114. “We're all bits that the war didn't take, Flinty thought, gazing at the stranger's back. But those left behind had a right to know more about the beast who'd chewed their lives and spat the remnants out.” - Jackie French

115. “His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her. What once was life, he thought, is always life and he knew that her image would preside in his intellect as a sort of measure and standard of brightness and repose.” - Colm Tóibín