Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph: killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.
—Leonard Cohen
Whatever life takes away from you, let it go.
—Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements
I should let people in. If they leave, they leave. If I break, I break. It happens to everyone.
—Sarah Addison Allen in Garden Spells
You don’t ever really let go, though. You don’t stop. You don’t stop hurting, you don’t stop loving. It doesn’t go away, you just keep living and eventually things get pushed into the background of your life so it’s not consuming you every day. And then one day you know you’re okay. It still hurts, you still miss that person. And yeah, you forget the details. The way she smelled, the way her mouth tasted, how her skin felt, the sound of her voice. It’s almost like a different life, a different person that loved her, was with her. But on a day-to-day level, you know you’re okay. Sort of.
—Jasinda Wilder in Falling Into You
Whoever said it got easier with time was wrong, death never got easier. The pain dulls around your heart, numbing the spot the deceased inhabited in your chest—but it was never easier. Loss was still loss—a physical pain, a hurt that reaches deep inside you and smothers your soul, forever indenting their memory.
—Kelsie Leverich in The Valentine’s Arrangement
When all else is lost, the future still remains.
—Christian Nestell Bovee
What love we've given, we'll have forever. What love we fail to give, will be lost for all eternity.
—Leo Buscaglia
Why were girls in such a hurry to grow up? She would never understand. Childhood was magical. Leaving it behind was a magnificent loss.
—Sarah Addison Allen in The Peach Keeper
It's better to have loved and lost than to have to do forty pounds of laundry a week.
—Laurence J. Peter
The world is full of hundreds of beautiful things we can never possibly have time to discover, and there is no time to be unkind or envious or ungenerous, and no sense in enslaving the mind to the trivialities of the moment. For you can be equal to the greatness of life only by marching with it; not by seeking love but by giving it, nor seeking to be understood but learning to understand. And when it is all over, there will be an agony of remorse because one spared the effort and did not make more of that little span of opportunity; and knowing reality at last, who knows but that one will look back with unassuageable regret upon one's pitiful little faith.
—Vivienne de Watteville
If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?
—Erich Fromm
I think anyone who opened their heart enough to love without restraint and subsequently were devastated by loss knows that in that moment you are forever changed; a part of you is no longer whole. Some will never again love with that level of abandon where life is perceived as innocent and the threat of loss seems implausible.
—Donna Lynn Hope
Death is not the greatest fear. Neither is loss. Living is.
—Joel Peckham
There are two things to remember about a revolution: first, we're gonna get our asses kicked, and second, we're gonna win.
—Unknown
You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost.
—Jonathan Tropper in This is Where I Leave You