“Sometimes it is good fortune to be abandoned. While we are looking after our losses, our selves may slip back inside.”

Ameni Rozsa

more info

“Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main this is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

John Steinbeck

more info

“Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces—down to the last glassy splinter.”

Saul Bellow

more info

“When it comes to politics—no, I don’t cry. I would never think of crying about any loss of an office, because that’s always a possibility, and if you’re professional, then you deal with it professionally.”

Nancy Pelosi

more info

“The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.”

Jeanette Winterson

more info

“That’s how it works. When a baby dies, other dead children become suddenly visible: Daughters and sons. First cousins. The neighbor kid. The first child. The last child. Your older brother. Some of their names have been forgotten; some never had names in the first place. They disappeared under heaps of advice. Don’t dwell. Have another child, a makeup baby. Life is for the living. But then another baby dies, and here they are again, in stories, and you will love them all, and—if you are the mother of a dead child yourself—they will keep coming to you. A couple I know just lost their baby. And you will know that your lost child has appeared somewhere else in the world. I know a couple…”

Elizabeth McCracken

more info

“I remember after my mother died, a year or two afterwards, thinking, well you know, I’m lucky in a way because nothing as bad as this will ever happen to me again. And then I had children. And I realized that there is one thing worse than losing your parent, and that’s losing your children.”

Anna Quindlen

more info

“…you know from having watched friends of yours who have gone through loss that it doesn’t tend to be a big muscle thing, that it’s not the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s those small disconnections from life, from energy, from happiness, that kind of subtle way in which people who have lost people they love are tilted away from the world.”

Anna Quindlen

more info

“I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandparents ailing and stuck in Florida, their tough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory: a jewel box kept in a medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that’s where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.”

Lorrie Moore

more info

“When was the first time you realized the next time would be the last time?”

Will Oldham

more info