Quotes about Loss

Your whole life is filled with losses, endless losses. And every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression, and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper. The question is not how to avoid loss and make it not happen, but how to choose it as a passage, as an exodus to greater life and freedom.

In glades they meet skull after skull/Where pine-cones lay--the rusted gun,/Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat/And cuddled-up skeleton;/And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,/And comrades lost bemoan:/By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged--/But the Year and the Man were gone. (The Armies of the Wilderness)

But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.

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.

I believe it matters how you treat people. I believe in Heaven. I don't believe that this is it, and then we're done. I have a lovely relationship with God, although when I've lost someone or I've seen a sick child, I've had conversations with Him in which I've had to ask, 'How can that be right?'

Children can only grow from something you love to something you lose.

So often animals come into shelters where their owners have passed away. And they've been perfect pets for most of their lives. So there's an adult animal sitting in a cage that's completely trained, sleeps through the night, is past that puppy stage.

When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I might add - I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast.

There's never been a doctor who served many patients who, despite their best efforts, did not lose some of them to death. But they understood that was part of life itself.

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world.

I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.

He who loses money, loses much; He who loses a friend, loses much more; He who loses faith, loses all.