#loss

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 - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#grief #loss #life

...being Lulu, it made me realize that all my life I've been living in a small, square room, with no windows and no doors. And I was fine. I was happy, even. I thought. Then someone came along and showed me there was a door in the room. One that I'd never even seen before. Then he opened it for me. Held my hand as I walked through it. And for one perfect day, I was on the other side. I was somewhere else. Someone else. And then he was gone, and I was thrown back into my little room. And now, no matter what I do, I can't seem to find that door. ↗

— Gayle Forman

#heartbreak #loss #sadness #life

He lost his Self a thousand times and for days on end he dwelt in non-being. But although the paths took him away from Self, in the end they always led back to it. Although Siddhartha fled from the Self a thousand times, dwelt in nothing, dwelt in animal and stone, the return was inevitable; the hour was inevitable when he would again find himself in sunshine or in moonlight, in shadow or in rain, and was again Self and Siddhartha, again felt the torment of the onerous life cycle. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#personhood #life

Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency. ↗

— Ann Voskamp

#life #loss #life

Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#life-lessons #loss #life

Lest when I am gone you may be at a loss for an epitaph for me, let me give you one - He Fed Fevers. ↗

— Robert James Graves

#epitaph #fed #fevers #give #gone

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life. ↗

— Lionel Shriver

#life #loss #life

There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent. ↗

— Aleksandar Hemon

#life #loss-of-control #moments #life

In that inevitable, excruciatingly human moment, we are offered a powerful choice. This choice is perhaps one of the most vitally important choices we will ever make, and it determines the course of our lives from that moment forward. The choice is this: Will we interpret this loss as so unjust, unfair, and devastating that we feel punished, angry, forever and fatally wounded-- or, as our heart, torn apart, bleeds its anguish of sheer, wordless grief, will we somehow feel this loss as an opportunity to become more tender, more open, more passionately alive, more grateful for what remains? ↗

— Wayne Muller

#on-loss #life

Life went on, despite all the dying. ↗

— Oliver Pötzsch

#life #loss #life