Quotes about Loss

I didn't want to identify the body, or see it at all. If you don't see the body, it's easier to believe nobody's dead.

Blessed be those that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Nobody said when.

It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he's lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?

Zenia has stolen something from him, the one thing he always kept safe before, from all women, even from Roz. Call it his soul. She slipped it out of his breast pocket when he wasn't looking, easy as rolling a drunk, and looked at it, and bit it to see if it was genuine, and sneered at it for being so small after all, and then tossed it away, because she's the kind of woman who wants what she doesn't have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets. What

I watched your snapshot fade for twenty years.

I agree with you that Gilead ought to fade away-there is too much wrong in it, too much that is false, and too much that is surely contrary to what God intended-but you must permit me some space to mourn the good that will be lost.

Part of the life she should have had is just a gap, it isn't there, it's nothing.

there goes this day, down to where all the other days have gone, each one carrying something away with it.

She was something of his own that he had lost.

But not, surely, for the first time in human history. How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators

I've cut myself off. I can feel the place where I used o be attached. It's raw, as when you grate your finger. It's a shredded mess of images. It hurts. But where exactly on me is this torn-off stem? Now here, now there. Meanwhile the other girl, the one with the memory, is coming nearer and nearer. She's catching up to me, trailing behind her, like red smoke, the rope we share.

You can see it in her eyes: I am not there. But she exists, in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn't that a good thing? A blessing? Still, I can't bear it, to have been erased like that.