Quotes and passages on loss

Death is not the greatest
loss in life. The greatest loss
is what dies inside us
while we live.

Norman Cousins

I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most; 'Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. Alfred Tennyson "In Memoriam"

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have--life itself. Walter Anderson

Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That's the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what's left, that's the part you have to make up as you go. Katharine Weber The Music Lesson

From separation and loss, I have learned a lot. I have become strong and resilient, as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. Isabel Allende

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

Arthur Schopenhauer
Parerga and Paralipomena

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I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them,
and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

Gail Caldwell
Let's Take the Long Way Home

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

Rebecca Solnit
A Field Guide to Getting Lost

I cannot conceive of a greater loss than
the loss of one's self-respect.

Mohandas Gandhi

When you lose something in your life, stop thinking it's a loss for
you. . . it is a gift you have been given so you can get on the right
path to where you are meant to go, not to where
you think you should have gone.

Suze Orman

Loss alone is but the wounding of a heart; it is
memory that makes it our ruin.

Brian Ruckley
Fall of Thanes

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
The Knitting Sutra

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
Angel

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and
the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized
by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure
the most precious gift I have--life itself.

Walter Anderson

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have
known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss,
and have found their way out of those depths.

Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross

One of the key elements of human behavior is, humans have a
greater fear of loss than enjoyment of success. All the academic
studies will show you that the fear of loss of capital is far
greater than the enjoyment of gains.

Laurence D. Fink

Ten years ago, I still feared loss enough to abandon myself
in order to keep things stable. I'd smile when I was sad,
pretend to like people who appalled me. What I now know
is that losses aren't cataclysmic if they teach the heart and
soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.

Martha Beck

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.

Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

Rumi

You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be
badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over
the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live
forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come
through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—
that still hurts when the weather gets cold,
but you learn to dance with the limp.

Anne Lamott

Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses,
from beginning to end. That's the given. How you respond to
those losses, what you make of what's left, that's the
part you have to make up as you go.

Katharine Weber
The Music Lesson

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone.
It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out.
You cannot read loss, only feel it.

Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

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Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever
finally comes to realise that nothing really belongs to them.

Paulo Coelho

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

Arthur Schopenhauer
Parerga and Paralipomena

The fear of loss . . . it can destroy you as much as the loss itself.

Sarah J. Maas
Empire of Storms

From the spiritual side:

Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know
the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion
for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of
unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our
prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts,
to make a better person of a good one.

Dean Koontz
The Darkest Evening of the Year