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“Hearing him talk about his mother, about his intact family, makes my chest hurt for a second, like someone pierced it with a needle.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent

“Will. For a moment her heart hesitated. She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem's violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story

“Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life.”
― Caitlin Kittredge, Bone Gods

“Years of love, followed by heartache.
Those are the years that define me.
Those are the years that know��
love’s eternity is you.”
― C. Elizabeth

“History is just a way of keeping score, but it doesn't have to be who we are.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“No - no - no!" someone was shouting. "No! Fred! No!"

And Percy was shaking his brother, and Ron was kneeling beside them, and Fred's eyes stared without seeing, the ghost of his last laugh still etched upon his face.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“You swallow hard when you discover that the old coffee shop is now a chain pharmacy, that the place where you first kissed so-and-so is now a discount electronics retailer, that where you bought this very jacket is now rubble behind a blue plywood fence and a future office building. Damage has been done to your city. You say, ''It happened overnight.'' But of course it didn't. Your pizza parlor, his shoeshine stand, her hat store: when they were here, we neglected them. For all you know, the place closed down moments after the last time you walked out the door. (Ten months ago? Six years? Fifteen? You can't remember, can you?) And there have been five stores in that spot before the travel agency. Five different neighborhoods coming and going between then and now, other people's other cities. Or 15, 25, 100 neighborhoods. Thousands of people pass that storefront every day, each one haunting the streets of his or her own New York, not one of them seeing the same thing.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York

“I want to be two people at once. One runs away.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“Instead of asking
why they left,
now I ask,
what beauty will I create
in the space the no longer
occupy?”
― Rudy Francisco

“And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, is that if something happened to one of us--excuse me for saying this--but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory.”
― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

“You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can't go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“How can I judge?" she said at last. "To me, he is a hero. To the world a monster." She let her head fall into her arms and started crying quietly. "I miss him! Curse him! I miss him!"

Mithorden put a hand on her shoulder and let her cry for a few minutes. A sad smile slowly spread across his face. "I'm glad you can forgive him," he said at last.

Luthiel lifted her head. "How do you know?"

Because you miss him.”
― Robert Fanney

“I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.”
― Robin McKinley, Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast

“When Summer lies upon the world, and in a noon of gold, Beneath the roof of sleeping leaves the dreams of trees unfold;
When woodland halls are green and cool, and wind is in the West, Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is best!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“The moment you start arguing with an ignorant fool, you have already lost.”
― Imam Ali AS

“I kept thinking back to all those nights in Connecticut, when I was out the door as soon as dinner was over, yelling my plans behind me as I headed to my car, ready for my real night to begin—my time with my family just something to get through as quickly as possible. And now that I knew that the time we had together was limited, I was holding on to it, trying to stretch it out, all the while wishing I’d appreciated what I’d had earlier.”
― Morgan Matson, Second Chance Summer

“Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep ... Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass.”
― May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“They say “Follow your heart”��.
��. But I can’t follow you where you’re going��”
― Ranata Suzuki

“It's not easy losing someone," she said. "It never goes away, does it?" "The Phantom Pain, they call it," I said. "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.”
― John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

“Dr. Webb says that losing a sibling is oftentimes much harder for a person than losing any other member of the family. "A sibling represents a person's past, present, and future," he says. "Spouses have each other, and even when one eventually dies, they have memories of a time when they existed before that other person and can more readily imagine a life without them. Likewise, parents may have other children to be concerned with--a future to protect for them. To lose a sibling is to lose the one person with whom one shares a lifelong bond that is meant to continue on into the future.”
― John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back

“It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do not weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was this what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn't like it, but it made it easier to go on.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything else has ended and nothing else can ever begin.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin

“When it comes to love and loss, acceptance is never easy. We can't make someone see all we have to give, make them love us, or make them change. All we can do is move on and stop wasting time.”
― April Mae Monterrosa

“What madness, to love a man as something more than human! I lived in a fever, convulsed with tears and sighs that allowed me neither rest nor peace of mind. My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry. Everything that was not what my friend had been was dull and distasteful. I had heart only for sighs and tears, for in them alone I found some shred of consolation.”
― St. Augustine

“The feeling of abandonment overwhelmed me as I realised that no one had waited, or cared where I was.”
― Emily Williams, Letters to Eloise

“What was once a home she had taken apart one piece at a time, one day...She sold her belongings for money to buy food.  First the luxuries: a small statue, a picture.  Then the items with more utility: a lamp, a kettle.  Clothes left the closet at a rate of a garment a day…she burned everything in the basement first; then everything in the attic.  It lasted weeks, not months.  Though tempted, she left the roof alone.  She stripped the second floor, and the stairs.  She extracted every possible calorie from the kitchen.  she wasn’t working alone, because neighbourhood pirates simultaneously stole anything of value outside: door and window frames, fencing, stucco.  They pillaged her yard.  Breaking in was a boundary her neigbours had not yet crossed.  But the animals had.  Rats and mice and other vermin found the cracks without much effort.  Like her, they sought warmth and scraps of food.  With great reluctance, she roasted the ones she could catch.  She spent her nights fighting off the ones that escaped.”
― John Payton Foden, Magenta