He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss.
—Jack London in The Sea-Wolf
True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.
—Charles Caleb Colton
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.
—Samuel Johnson
Every girl wants to feel beautiful when they see 'that ex' again. You know the one I'm talking about. The one that had claimed enough of you that some of it had been lost in the parting.
—R.K. Lilley in Lovely Trigger
Love doesn't come along too often. Believe me, I know. When it does, only the foolish let it fade.
—H.M. Ward in Demon Kissed
Having this, and losing it, made it even sweeter the second time around.
—R.K. Lilley in Lovely Trigger
What they don't know is, no matter how they decide, they can't penalize me more than I'm already punishing myself.
—Ann Aguirre in Aftermath
Although one broken heart doesn't make me an expert in the subject, I believe you need both things—time and an emotional replacement—to fully mend one.
—Emily Giffin in Love the One You're With
A piece of me is gone. I think we're made up of all these different pieces and every time someone goes, you're left with less of yourself.
—Melina Marchetta in Saving Francesca
When you meet an extraordinary person, it's like they get inside you, under your ribs, and shuffle everything inside you around until they find space for greatness to grow. But extraordinary people always get away. And when they leave, they take that little part of you with them. Suddenly you find yourself with a gap in your chest that you don't know how to live with. Suddenly you're frightened of being yourself without them.
—Chloe Rattray in Sacré Noir
What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
—Helen Keller
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.
—Helen Macdonald in H is for Hawk
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
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
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