Caring for others tends to be the first cut when we review our personal time budget. It does not necessarily fulfill the goals of my ambition; it will not pave the way for my success;...

How do you go to your own house when something has gone bad on the inside, when it doesn’t seem like your place to live anymore, when you almost cannot recall living there although it...

Well, uh… well, have fun watching your home movies then,” Mandy finished, but she didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.

Like so many plain cups on the shelves. You can reach for them, use them without thinking. Most of them don’t matter. Sometimes you lose your grip on one of them and it falls and...

We can only lose what we have first claimed.

But thou art with us, with us in the past,The present, with us in the times to come.There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair,No languor, no dejection, no dismay,No absence scarcely can there be,...

The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn’t change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the...

Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.

Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only because the living must bury the dead? Because of the...

We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.

she slammed the door andwas gone.I looked at the closed doorand at the doorknoband strangelyI didn’t feelalone.

I’m lost, will you be my mother” type.

Years of love, followed by heartache. Those are the years that define me.Those are the years that know– love’s eternity is you.

I could kill you a thousand times over Abraham, but we would never be even. You took everything I had.

…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...

How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing...

Often, things are left unsaid. Everyone is guilty of thinking and feeling things… of loving or appreciating others… and of taking for granted that those others will just be there… to continue to share life’s...

Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

The old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy … a razor-wire...

It feels weird, being out in the real world again. Around people just living their lives like normal. Their presence is oppressive. The very fact that the world is going on as usual, like nothing...

The difference between me and the trees is that the trees let go of their leaves. I keep holding onto mine. The trees make room for new life. I don’t.

When you are at a loss of words then go with your feelings. If you feel nothing you must rely on your thinking. If your thinking is not clear then lean on the spirit. With...

It is important to recognize when you have been detached from life for too long. The fact is you are still alive, and I can only imagine that your loved one would want you to...

She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What...

Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.

In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn’t. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was...

My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts...

So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.

Again he thought of his own losses, and he wondered why it was that the things a person had lost— or might lose— defined him more than the things he yet possessed.

Ever since the Christmas of ’53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of...

We formed an impromptu circle just so we could look at each other and memorize faces. We hardly noticed the waiting officials. We hardly noticed anything but our little family whose ties weren’t loosening at...

There is an hour, a minute – you will remember it forever – when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don’t know – can’t know...

I need to take that love and spread it around. What a waste to just keep it tucked inside.

People talk of sorrow as if it is soft, a thing of water and tears. But true sorrow is not soft. True sorrow is a thing of fire, and rock. It burns your heart, crushes...

One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never...

It’s time to live with what we have and mourn what we lost.

Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.

Loss taught me the value of tears. Just as the rains come down to wash away debris and dust, tears unleashed can bring relief.

There was a man whose only son died of a sudden illness. He did not mourn for his son, nor was he sad about it. His friends were curious about his behavior, so they asked...

‘Better to have loved and lost,’ my ass.Anyone parroting that little platitude had obviously never lost anyone of consequence.

Well, if you live long enough, you lose a lot. Just as long as you don’t throw them away. Whatever you loose, you’ll find again, but what you throw away you never get back.-Oibore (Enishi’s...

EnragedI throw myself to the ground and I scream,my best friend is gone, this world is so mean.I cry as I pound my fists on his grass,I’m very upset that our time went so fast.My...

Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves...

enriched” by all this.

Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites.For the line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was on longing...

It is not always a problem finding the truth, it is however sometimes a problem accepting it.

It was the blue-tinged taste of a regret so deep you could never plumb its depths. It was the victory at Rajal that never came, it was his brother walking away down the long dark...

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

I know that it’s easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and...

Within and within. Dreaming. How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts.