"When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets."
Loss quotes
Loss
3.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Loss
Browse quotes that often appear alongside loss — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Loss quotes (page 36 of 155)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"The shimmering night does not stay for mortals, not misfortunes, nor wealth, but in a moment it is gone, and to the turn of another comes joy and loss."
"A favorite science fiction writer of mine is William Faulkner! It was an idea that came to me once, years ago, and I've never quite been able to shake it. This is facetious, on one level at least. There are telepaths in As I Lay Dying. But I think the most compelling thing for me is there are moments with him where I just feel these are not humans talking to each other. These are some hyper-intelligent, yet-to-be-born organisms. The way they look at the past without having any loss of knowledge everything that ever happened is still here."
"The loss of memory isn't always the problem; sometimes--maybe even often--it's the solution."
"For a while, Mirabelle believes there will be a moment when he will cave in and let himself love her, but eventually she lets the idea go. She hits bottom. She dwells in the muck for several months, not depressed exactly, but involved in a mourning that at first she thinks is for Ray but soon realizes is for the loss of her old self."
"Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air. The loss of confidence that affected banks and financial instruments was not affecting cherubs, cupids and flattened popes. The objects hadn't changed: what was there before was there after. But a vacancy was created with the clamoring crowds deserted and retrenched."
"When you've cooked the marrow of the sun and moon, The pearl is so bright you don't worry about poverty."
"The new record started out being about loss, but it's morphed into being about how relationships go on even though one person is not in a body anymore."
"As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable."
"Christ said, "Resist not evil", and we do not understand it until we discover that it is not only moral but actually the best policy, for anger is loss of energy to the man who displays it. You should not allow your minds to come into those brain-combinations of anger and hatred."
"Antoine St. Exupery once mourned the loss of a man and the secret treasures that he held inside him. I loved Exupery; I will read him again, and he will talk to me, not being dead, or gone. Is that life after death — mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring? Maybe. I do not know."
"Loss brings pain. Yes. But pain triggers memory. And memory is a kind of new birth, within each of us. And it is that new birth after long pain, that resurrection - in memory - that, to our surprise, perhaps, comforts us."
"I have experienced loss in my life, but the thing that brings you back is your faith."
"I never seem to have anything that if I lost it I'd care too much about."
"I think what is probably hard for people to imagine is how wrapped up the 17 years' work on Harry Potter is with what was going on in my life at the time. I was mourning the loss of this world that I had written for so long and loved so much. I was also mourning the retreat it had been from - from ordinary life, which it has been. And it forced me to look back at 17 years of my life and remember things."
"I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the "Lady Vain.""
"Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.... At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said "Macondo" and another larger one on the main street that said "God exists"."
"Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush-these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth-bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love's exaltation."
"That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory."
"You can't show somebody what it's like to experience loss, but you can soundtrack it and help them experience their own loss. I am so lucky to have this venue to be able to say and talk about all the stuff I've been through."