“In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.”

“A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.”

“We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.”

“for not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent's love.”

“For years I had been aware of an important deficiency in the English language: a word to describe something a person loses that was never really hers.”

“Regret; The saddest word in the English language.”