I can't pretend to know what it feels like to lose a child, but I assume it's the worst pain I've ever felt times a thousand, or times a hundred thousand.

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About Elin Hilderbrand

Elin Hilderbrand is an American writer, mostly of romance novels. Her novels are typically set on and around Nantucket Island, where she resides. In 2019, New York magazine called Hilderbrand "the queen of beach reads".

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What was it about life now? The people who weren't present always seemed to be more important than the people who were.

—Elin Hilderbrand in Beautiful Day

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He'd learned that when you love someone purely enough, all you wanted was for that person to be happy.

—Elin Hilderbrand in Summerland

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Nobody knows where it comes from, and nobody knows where it goes. Love doesn't make sense most of the time and that's what's so wonderful about it.

—Elin Hilderbrand in The Beach Club

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That's the thing about marriage. It can look perfect to people from the outside but be utterly imperfect on the inside. The reverse is true as well. No one knows what goes on in a marriage except for the two people living in it.

—Elin Hilderbrand in Beautiful Day

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Sometimes you regret the things you do, but they're over and done. Regretting the things you didn't do is tougher, because they're still out there…haunting you. The what-ifs.

—Elin Hilderbrand in The Matchmaker

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More quotations tagged with “loss”

There was just something about her dying that I had understood but not really understood, if you know what I mean. I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn't really hit you.

—Jesse Andrews in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

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When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, ready to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn't pathological. It's normal. It's why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother.

—Hope Edelman in Motherless Daughters

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Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

—Meghan O'Rourke in The Long Goodbye

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The more loss we feel, the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life not knowing what grief is.

—Frank O'Connor

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There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.