God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars.
—Elbert Hubbard
Nobody was ever replaced in life, no hole completely filled or loss totally healed. You didn't need a medical degree to know that the human body really wasn't stronger in the broken places. Like any bone, the cracks would always show if you looked hard enough.
—Lisa Scottoline in Come Home
That's the tragedy of falling in love; it brings with it the potential for loss.
—Sarah Rayner in One Morning
Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have bought it or baked it or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.
—Daniel Berrigan
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first boy is always the hardest to get over. It's just the way the world works.
—Sarah Dessen in That Summer
Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.
—Jonathan Tropper in This is Where I Leave You
Do you know what your problem is? You can't live with the idea that someone might leave.
—John Green in An Abundance of Katherines
I don't think you understand how easy it is to make a mistake that will cost you forever.
—Sarah Dessen in Someone Like You
It was too hard to fall in love with someone, learn all of their quirks and passions, assume you'd spend the rest of your life with them, and then suddenly have them snatched away forever.
—Caren Lissner in Starting from Square Two
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
—Samuel Butler
Oh, my friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts. It's what you do with what you have left.
—Hubert Humphrey
Rejection, though—it could make the loss of someone you weren't even that crazy about feel gut wrenching and world ending.
—Deb Caletti in The Secret Life of Prince Charming
Character is what you have left when you've lost everything you can lose.
—Evan Esar
I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war,… suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.
—Philip Caputo