146 Quotes About Coping With Loss

Experiencing loss is one of the most challenging aspects of the human journey, touching every soul in profound and unique ways. As we navigate the complexities of grief, finding comfort and understanding through the words of others can be invaluable. Whether you're seeking solace, searching for strength, or looking to support someone dear to you, our carefully curated selection of the top 146 quotes about coping with loss offers poignant insights and heartfelt expressions. Let these quotes guide you through emotional healing, reminding you that you are not alone on this path.

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. “If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?” - Jodi Picoult

3. “It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.” - Chuck Palahniuk

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

5. “Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censerSwung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor."Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee--by these angels he hath sent thee--Respite--respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore!Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!"Quothe the Raven, "Nevermore.” - Edgar Allan Poe

6. “When You Are Old"WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” - W.B. Yeats

7. “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

8. “He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.” - Michael Ondaatje

9. “You don't know who is important to you until you actually lose them.” - Mahatma Gandhi

10. “It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

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

12. “...all of our laments could not add a single second to her life, not one additional beat of the heart, nor a breath. ” - Audrey Niffenegger

13. “Fly me up to where you are beyond the distant star. I wish upon tonight to see you smile, if only for a while to know you're there. A breath away's not far to where you are.” - Josh Groban

14. “We wrote our names in the sandYou crossed mine out: I can't getback to the way I was.” - Kiera Woodhull

15. “Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,Silence the pianos and with muffled drumBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.Let aeroplanes circle moaning overheadScribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;For nothing now can ever come to any good.” - W.H. Auden

16. “Watching them, Harmony felt too shaken to take a step. Eddie and Sheba were young; but she herself had become old. Even if she wasn’t particularly old if you just counted years, the fact was years were no way to count. Happenings were the way to count, the big happening that separated her from youth or even middle age was the death of her daughter, Pepper. That death made her realize that life, once you got around to producing children, was no longer about being pretty or having boyfriends or making money – it was about protecting children; getting them raised to the point where they could try life as adults. It didn’t have to be just children that come out of your body, either. It could be anyone young who needed something you had to give. Some grown men were children; some grown women, too. Harmony knew that she had spent a good part of her life, taking care of just such men. But now that she felt old she didn’t think she wanted to spend much more of her energy protecting men who had had a good chance to grow up, but had blown it. If she never had another boyfriend – something she had been worrying about, on the plane – it might be a little dull in some areas, like sexual areas, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. What would be the end of the world would be to let some little girl like Sheba get in the car with a bad man who would make a U-turn across the street and kill her right there in front of the pay phones, where pimps and crack dealers were making their calls.” - Larry McMurtry

17. “You’ve been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you.” - Sarah Hall

18. “Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone. Or set me on an airplane traveling west, crossing the date line again and again, losing this day, then that, until the day of loss still lies ahead, and you are here instead of sorrow.” - Nessa Rapoport

19. “Down, down, down into the darkness of the graveGently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” - Edna St. Vincent Millay

20. “Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

21. “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

22. “I look back to where my life had been. It's always risky to think of letting go. That's why this is the perfect ending. Nothing left to reconcile.” - Loretta Ellsworth

23. “The lost glove is happy.” - Vladimir Nabokov

24. “Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.” - Andrew Solomon

25. “When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.” - Pat Schweibert

26. “I knew what it was like to lose someone you loved. You didn't get past something like that, you got through it.” - Jodi Picoult

27. “Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.” - Gail Caldwell

28. “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

29. “Price of peace could only be valued by people who had suffered loss in the war.” - Toba Beta

30. “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

31. “Don't let's ask for the moon! We have the stars!” - Olive Higgins Prouty

32. “It was inevitable, of course, but somehow it didn't seem right to Alex that they would never remember the sound of Carly's laughter, or know how deeply she'd once loved them.” - Nicholas Sparks

33. “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

34. “WHEN SOMEBODY GOES AWAY THERE'S THINGS YOU WANT TO TELL THEM. WHEN SOMEBODY DIES MAYBE THAT'S THE WORST THING. YOU WANT TO TELL THEM THINGS THAT HAPPEN AFTER.” - Louise Fitzhugh

35. “It takes a year, nephew... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone.” - Annie Proulx

36. “Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river.” - Jodi Picoult

37. “I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

38. “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

39. “Losing your faith in a world where God is all around you is a precarious business. When God shows his face on a daily basis to your friends and neighbors, it is, on some level, impossible to stop believing in Him. Instead i felt that God chose to exclude me from His world. Since i was the only one to lose faith, to stop hearing Christ's voice, i thought perhaps it was my fault that Roy had left us. I thought i was being punished for some unknown sin. I had learned early in my Catholic career that one could sin silently in one's heart. One could even sin without ever discovering what one had done or why it was wrong. What had i done, i asked myself, to make God disappear and take Roy with Him.” - Alison Smith

40. “I often lose motivation, but it's something I accept as normal.” - Bill Rodgers

41. “As I child, I came to this idea with a horrified fascination. Once upon a time, I wasn’t here. Before that, my parents weren’t here. And before that…” - John Burnside

42. “What is the difference between my life and my love? One gets me low, the other lets me go.” - Vikram Seth

43. “He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.” - Jodi Picoult

44. “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.” - Annie Dillard

45. “You never know what you have till you've lost it.” - Alyson Noel

46. “Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.” - William Trevor

47. “What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?” - Jorge Luis Borges

48. “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

49. “I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.” - Audrey Niffenegger

50. “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

51. “Rejection, though--it could make the loss of someone you weren't even that crazy about feel gut wrenching and world ending.” - Deb Caletti

52. “It was one of those times you feel a sense of loss, even though you didn't have something in the first place. I guess that's what disappointment is- a sense of loss for something you never had.” - Deb Caletti

53. “He came up and kissed me on my forehead, and before he stepped away, I closed my eyes and tried hard to memorize this moment. I wanted to remember him exactly as he was right then, how his arms looked brown against his white shirt, the way his hair was cut a little too short in the front. Even the bruise, there because of me.Then he was gone.Just for that moment, the thought that I might never see him again… it felt worse than death. I wanted torun after him. Tell him anything, everything. Just don’t go. Please just never go. Please just always be near me, so I can at least see you.Because it felt final. I always believed that we would find our way back to each other every time. That no matter what, we would be connected—by our history, by this house. But this time, this last time, it felt final. Like I would never see him again, or that when I did, it would be different, there would be a mountain between us.I knew it in my bones. That this time was it. I had finally made my choice, and so had he. He let me go. I was relieved, which I expected. What I didn’t expect was to feel so much grief.Bye bye, Birdie.” - Jenny Han

54. “I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life” - Roland Barthes

55. “His departure gave Catherine the first experimental conviction that a loss may be sometimes a gain.” - Jane Austen

56. “I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.” - Louise Erdrich

57. “Sometimes the opposite of loss is loss.” - Penelope Scambly Schott

58. “Years of love, followed by heartache. Those are the years that define me.Those are the years that know– love’s eternity is you.” - C. Elizabeth

59. “No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it” - Paulo Coelho

60. “I never used to realize it, I guess. I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble at all if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.” - Ernest Hemingway

61. “Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.” - Michael Ondaatje

62. “How do people know they are sane? Can a person be gripped by lunacy, only to be released a short time later, never to relive the episode again?” - Dee Remy

63. “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.” - Christopher Paolini

64. “A lot of things are inherent in life -change, birth, death, aging, illness, accidents, calamities, and losses of all kinds- but these events don't have to be the cause of ongoing suffering. Yes, these events cause grief and sadness, but grief and sadness pass, like everything else, and are replaced with other experiences. The ego, however, clings to negative thoughts and feelings and, as a result, magnifies, intensifies, and sustains those emotions while the ego overlooks the subtle feelings of joy, gratitude, excitement, adventure, love, and peace that come from Essence. If we dwelt on these positive states as much as we generally dwell on our negative thoughts and painful emotions, our lives would be transformed.” - Gina Lake

65. “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

66. “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

67. “I prithee send me back my heart,Since I cannot have thine;For if from yours you will not part,Why, then, shouldst thou have mine?Yet now I think on't, let it lie,To find it were in vain;For thou hast a thief in either eyeWould steal it back again.Why should two hearts in one breast lie,And yet not lodge together?O Love! where is thy sympathy,If thus our breasts thou sever?But love is such a mystery,I cannot find it out;For when I think I'm best resolved,I then am in most doubt.Then farewell care, and farewell woe;I will no longer pine;For I'll believe I have her heart,As much as she hath mine.” - John Suckling

68. “Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn. Oh, Mary Lou. My baby. My love.” - Pete Hamill

69. “When Summer lies upon the world, and in a noon of gold, Beneath the roof of sleeping leaves the dreams of trees unfold;When woodland halls are green and cool, and wind is in the West, Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is best!” - J.R.R. Tolkien

70. “There are a million ways to lose someone you love.” - Tammara Webber

71. “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” - John Green

72. “What did I do to make Mommy leave?”“You didn’t do anything. This isn’t your fault.”“Then why?” she’d wailed.“I don’t know,” her daddy had said, and he looked so sad.“It isn’t fair!”“No, it isn’t, baby. Not by a mile. The world’s only as fair as you can make it. Takes a lot of fight. A lot of fight. But if you stay in here, in your own little cave, that’s one less fighter on the side of fair.” - Libba Bray

73. “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

74. “There is no peace, I'm sorry to say. We find it. We lose it. We find it again. We lose it again.” - Kurt Vonnegut

75. “See, that’s the difference,” Mauvin said. “I suffer a loss and people console me. Royce suffers a loss and whole towns evacuate.” - Michael J. Sullivan

76. “The only true borders lie between day and night, between life and death, between hope and loss.” - Erin Hunter

77. “Here the whole world (stars, water, air,And field, and forest, as they wereReflected in a single mind)Like cast off clothes was left behindIn ashes, yet with hopes that she,Re-born from holy poverty,In lenten lands, hereafter mayResume them on her Easter Day."(Epitaph for Joy Davidman)” - C.S. Lewis

78. “You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.'Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up.Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that '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 were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

79. “I have loved and lost in so many different ways. And I have died endless deaths… So when I ask myself, the question today, who am I? My answer is…I do not know.” - Patti Roberts

80. “Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. His heart leaped up and although he didn't know it then, it was how he would remember her most clearly forever after- lovely Susan, the girl in the window. So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.” - Stephen King

81. “All four of us were young and undaunted and our smiles were so strong that it made me smile even then on the couch, with a kind of loss.” - Markus Zusak

82. “We lose our soul, to find our life.” - Joanne Crisner

83. “Then, in spite of everything, he began to smile. So much of his existence in Everlost had been full of despair. Despair, and a fear of losing what he had. But Allie was not lost, she was just there across the river, waiting for him to find her. Nick was not lost either--not entirely.It was then that Mikey McGill realized something. It must have been his sister who first called this place Everlost, because by naming it so, it stripped away all hope except for a faith in her, and the "safety" she could provide. Well, Mary was wrong on all counts, because nothing in Everlost was lost forever, if one had the courage to search for it.Mikey held tightly on to this shining truth as he and the golem sunk into the earth. Then with all the force of his heart, his mind, and his soul, Mikey McGill began to dig.” - Neal Shusterman

84. “As she cried, I could feel growing there, as had once before, a presence between us: the tiny perfect form of Sherry nestled between her parents' bodies. Our bodies were shaped by her absence, by the almost unbearable weight of her loss.” - Robert J. Wiersema

85. “If you love someone, they leave you. But if you don't love someone, they leave you, too. So your choice isn't between loving and losing but only between loving and not loving.” - Steve Rasnic Tem

86. “The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.” - James Patterson

87. “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

88. “This is the kind of thing that makes sense to them; this is a language they know. They know what to do with`disease'. They know how to attach a doctor's medical descriptions to hope.” - Amy Reed

89. “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

90. “The coach who goes home and doesn't think about the game he just lost is bound to repeat his mistakes.” - Keith Cooper

91. “My life is now divided into two periods: With June and After June. I can't wrap my mind around the idea of it.” - Hannah Harrington

92. “En effet: je mourais déjà. Je venais d'apprendre cette nouvelle horrible que tout humain apprend un jour ou l'autre: ce que tu aimes, tu vas le perdre. "Ce qui t'a été donné te sera repris." Face à la découverte de cette spoliation future, il y a deux attitudes possibles: soit on décide de ne pas s'attacher aux êtres et aux choses, afin de rendre l'amputation moins douloureuse; soit on décide, au contraire, d'aimer d'autant plus les êtres et les choses, d'y mettre le paquet - "puisque nous n'aurons pas beaucoup de temps ensemble, je vais te donner en un an tout l'amour que j'aurais pu te donner en une vie.” - Amélie Nothomb

93. “There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.” - Ann Patchett

94. “Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.” - Paul Celan

95. “Jo claimed that the reason people survived breakups was that within days of the amputation, Mother Nature started reminding you of what you had been doing without, what could have been better, all the samll discontents you had been filing away.” - Emma Donoghue

96. “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

97. “...real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.” - Emma Donoghue

98. “To the poor memories of drunks,' she said. 'To all the lovely nights forever lost.” - S. Fitts

99. “The guy who broke up with me... he was exactly like you, in the beginning. Charming, and nice. They're all like you in the beginning. But I always end up like this. And I can't do it anymore.” - Lisa Kleypas

100. “You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.” - Barbara Kingsolver

101. “It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things. When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things, can you?” - Kazuo Ishiguro

102. “I want to be two people at once. One runs away.” - Peter Heller

103. “When you break up with someone, and I’m not talking casual breakups here, it’s hard to take the sudden absence of such an important person in your life. It reminded me of when I’d stopped going to school and the weird uneasy feeling I’d gotten afterward, like I was forgetting to do something. My life until that point had pivoted around some form of education, and all of a sudden, it was gone. Homework, classes, running around, and then – bam – nothing but a life of work stretching out before you. No one prepares you for that feeling or even mentions it. You just suddenly have a gap and have to decide how to fill it. A break up is like that gap, only much, much more painful. One day the person you talked to constantly or did stuff with is just absent. Gone. Poof. And even though I’m not one of those people who has to be in a relationship all the time, I was feeling at a loss.” - Lish McBride

104. “Everyone who lives long enough to love deeply will experience great losses. Don't let fear of loss, or the losses themselves, take away your ability to enjoy the wonderful life that is yours.” - Barbara "Cutie" Cooper

105. “Why love what you will lose?There is nothing else to love.” - Louise Gluck

106. “I wish I could take my brain and put it inside your head,” Winslow said. “Just for a moment. Then you’d know what all I can’t find how to say.” - Alan Heathcock

107. “She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

108. “Steven dreamed of you the very secondyou died(So the poem goes)and you may have visited himBut I'm pretty sure you don't believein poems” - Jon Paul Fiorentino

109. “... The women's song was always the same, as monotonous as the beating of the waves against the beach: loss, loss. The conch offered them no enchantment. When they put their ear to it, all they heard was the echo of their mourning.” - Carsten Jensen

110. “I guess this was what it felt like to love someone and feel like you had lost them. Even when you were still holding them in your arms.” - Margaret Stohl

111. “The gastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody's sister now.” - Rosamund Lupton

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

113. “Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss equaled the need to love again, more.” - Elizabeth Berg

114. “Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.” - Roland Barthes

115. “And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget.” - Colleen McCullough

116. “Yes, it's worth it. The pain of sorrow is terrible and hard to bear, but the joy of love makes it worthwhile. p123” - Kate Sherwood

117. “He felt something trickle down his face and he wiped it away irritably. When he looked at the back of his hand, he found trails of red. He had never cried in his life; in fact, he could not cry with no tear ducts. But now, at last, he was. He was crying tears of blood. For her.” - Phillip W. Simpson

118. “Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels.” - Laini Taylor

119. “I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers - as in a looking glass, darkly - one's absent friends.” - Vincent Van Gogh

120. “Everyone is “extremely nice”—and yet I feel entirely alone. (“Abandonitis”).” - Roland Barthes

121. “She wasn’t crying at all. This was what scared him the most. Where had she locked up the things he’d seen her feeling that day when she heard? She wasn’t that big a girl to hold all of it—to hold her brother’s life and his death inside of her. To hold all his long-limbed raging tidal motion and all the loss of that.” - Francesca Lia Block

122. “A lesson for all of us is that for every loss, there is victory, for every sadness, there is joy, and when you think you’ve lost everything, there is hope.” - Geraldine Solon

123. “She has been surprised by grief, its constancy, its immediacy, its unrelenting physical pain.” - Michelle Latiolais

124. “For all her culture's attention to the physical, it seemingly has little to salve the creatural anguish of losing someone else's body, their touch, their heat, their oceanic heart...she doesn't want another body, she wants the body she loved, the forceps scar across his cheek that she traced with her hand, his penis, its elegant sweep to the side, the preternaturally soft skin. One wants what one has loved, not the idea of love.” - Michelle Latiolais

125. “There will always be a part of you that misses her. You'll see something that reminds you of her and want to tell her about it, only to realize she's not there anymore. Then you'll feel her loss all over again. (Ravyn) You're not helping me, Ravyn. (Jack)I know, buddy. But you will eventually make peace with yourself, and that's the most important thing. Eventually, you'll even be able to smile again when you think about her. (Ravyn)” - Sherrilyn Kenyon

126. “Suffering is one of life's great teachers.” - Bryant McGill

127. “One always has to be willing to lose to be able to win... in battle and in life. I wonder. Are you willing to lose, Rayla?” - Christie Rich

128. “I didn't mean to scare you. I'm not suicidal if that's what's freaking you out. I'm not fucked up in the head. I'm not deranged. I'm not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm just a brother who loved his sister more than life itself, so I get a little intense when I think about her.” - Colleen Hoover

129. “I think there were times when I was so afraid of losing you that I forgot I even had you at all.” - Ashly Lorenzana

130. “Funny how an absence can feel like a presence, like that space practically glows with her outline and make me notice how she's not here.” - Joan Steinau Lester

131. “I still want to feel you against me.” Her gaze dropped to his hands. “I want you to stay with me. Hold me. Just tonight. If I lose you again tomorrow then it will still be worth it. I will lose you a hundred times, if you would but hold me in your arms each time before my loss.” She saw his eyes water, but no tears emerged...” - B.C. Morin

132. “Pain and guilt tore through him. His soul was bleeding to death. He stood there, waiting to die. How could he not? But such wounds were not fatal.” - Diana Pharaoh Francis

133. “Everything worth having can be carried in your heart.” - Betina Krahn

134. “I stare at the pile of discarded remnants and think of my mother. Did she touch that pillar there? Does her scent still linger in a fragment of glass or a splinter of wood? A terrible emptiness settles into my chest. No matter how much I go about living, there are always small reminders that make the loss fresh again.” - Libba Bray

135. “Walk openly, Marian used to say. Love even the threat and the pain, feel yourself fully alive, cast a bold shadow, accept, accept. What we call evil is only a groping towards good, part of the trial and error by which we move toward the perfected consciousness…God is kind? Life is good? Nature never did betray the heart that loved her? Why the reward she received for living intensely and generously and trying to die with dignity? Why the horror at the bridge her last clear sight of earth?...I do not accept, I am not reconciled. But one thing she did. She taught me the stupidity of the attempt to withdraw and be free of trouble and harm... She said, “You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Now you know. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born, just to be!”I had had no answer for her then. Now I might have one. Yes, think of it, I might say. And think how random and indiscriminate it is, think how helplessly we must submit, think how impossible it is to control or direct it. Think how often beauty and delicacy and grace are choked out by weeds. Think how endless and dubious is the progress from weed to flower.Even alive, she never convinced me with her advocacy of biological perfectionism. She never persuaded me to ignore, or look upon as merely hard pleasures, the evil that I felt in every blight and smut and pest in my garden- that I felt, for that matter, squatting like a toad on my own heart. Think of the force of life, yes, but think of the component of darkness in it. One of the things that’s in whale’s milk is the promise of pain and death. And so? Admitting what is so obvious, what then? Would I wipe Marion Catlin out of my unperfected consciousness if I could? Would I forgo the pleasure of her company to escape the bleakness of her loss? Would I go back to my own formula, which was twilight sleep, to evade the pain she brought with her?Not for a moment. And so even in the gnashing of my teeth, I acknowledge my conversion. It turns out to be for me as I once told her it would be for her daughter. I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow.” - Wallace Stegner

136. “He passed through her with his soul caressing hers goodbye. And in that final hour he was with her one last time.” - Donna Lynn Hope

137. “May you hear my feeble voice! It will tell you that here below there is a heart full of the memory of you.” - Herculine Barbin

138. “You see how I tryTo reach with wordsWhat matters mostAnd how I fail.” - Czesław Miłosz

139. “A relationship between two people is made up, for the most part, of invisible things: memories, shared experiences, hopes and fears. When one person disappears, the other is left alone, as if holding a string with no kite. Memories can do a lot to sustain you, but the invisible stuff of the relationship is lost, even as unresolved issues remain: arguments never settled, kind words never uttered, things left un-said. They become like a splinter beneath the skin-unseen, but painful nevertheless. Until they're exposed, coping with the loss is impossible.” - David Dosa

140. “You mean to tell me you're mourning the loss of someone who never existed?” - Taylor Nadeau

141. “…(my father) would say nothing,And I could not find a silenceAmong the one hundred Chinese silencesThat would fit the one he createdEven though I was the one Who had just made up the businessOf the one hundred Chinese silences-The Silence of the Night Boat. And the Silence of the Lotus, Cousin to the Silence of the Temple BellOnly deeper and softer…” - Billy Collins

142. “I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think—no, you will realize—that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.” - Mary Oliver

143. “How can you ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom” - Jodi Picoult

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

145. “God take what He would," she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn't mean a thing.” - Toni Morrison

146. “One of the things that helps use cope with loss is the fact that while memories may remian, the emotions associated with them will fade like old photographs. At the same time, there is a masochistic desire to retain those feelings spurred on by the dread of losing the power they hold. Sometimes I can't think of anything more awful than simply being human.” - James Pratt