#loss

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

— Rebecca Solnit

#letting-go #loss #art

For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#beowulf #loss #poignant #regret #sorrow

So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us - that's snatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of insurmountable emptiness... Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost. Or at least there exists a silent place where everything can disappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And as we live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threads attached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their lives are fleeting. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#loss #love #relationships #beauty

It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, but it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: music, laughter, the physics of falling leaves, automobiles, holding hands, the scent of rain, the concept of subway trains... if only one could leave this life slowly! ↗

— Roman Payne

#beauty #carpe-diem #dying #holding-hands #laughter

I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself. ↗

— Robin McKinley

#grief #heartbreak #loss #sorrow #beauty

I heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their name women give themselves to him. If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside our door. ↗

— Leonard Cohen

#loss #love #poem #poetry #beauty

We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea. ↗

— Pema Chödrön

#attachment #loss #beauty

What did I do to make Mommy leave?” “You didn’t do anything. This isn’t your fault.” “Then why?” she’d wailed. “I don’t know,” her daddy had said, and he looked so sad. “It isn’t fair!” “No, it isn’t, baby. Not by a mile. The world’s only as fair as you can make it. Takes a lot of fight. A lot of fight. But if you stay in here, in your own little cave, that’s one less fighter on the side of fair. ↗

— Libba Bray

#loss #beauty

I don't think it is as much a human foible as it is a human curse that we cannot understand the beauty of a thing until it is gone. ↗

— Richard Paul Evans

#beauty

Describe plum-blossoms? Better than my verses...white Wordless Butterflies ↗

— Reikan

#haiku #plum-blossoms #beauty