A Loss Of Words Quotes & Sayings

Our feelings about menstruation are the image of what it is to be a woman in this culture. While menstruation and the fear of revealing evidence of loss of body control bear possibilities of humiliation for women of which men are not aware, it is humiliating too to be that sex whose voice and presence carry less significance. It is humiliating to speak the same words as a man and have his heard, and not yours. It is humiliating to feel invisible when God gave you a body as solid as his. It is humiliating that women are accorded little dignity unless they are married. We twist these humiliations around, of course, and say it is glorious to have a man fight our battles for us, put us on a pedestal, take care of us. It is, if you enjoy being dependent on someone else. — Nancy Friday

When the attention is on me, off-camera, I get uncomfortable - sort of shy and at a loss for words, as you can probably tell? — Guillermo Diaz

Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being. It used to be refugee, but by now there was no such creature, no more refugees, only survivors. A name like a number
counted apart from the ordinary swarm. Blue digits on the arm, what difference? They don't call you a woman anyhow. Survivor. Even when your bones get melted into the grains of the earth, still they'll forget human being. Survivor and survivor and survivor; always and always. Who made up these words, parasites on the throat of suffering! — Cynthia Ozick

Gordon Edgley's sudden death came as a shock to everyone - not least himself. One moment he was in his study, seven words into the twenty-fifth sentence of the final chapter of his new book, And the Darkness Rained upon Them, and the next he was dead. A tragic loss, his mind echoed numbly as he slipped away. — Derek Landy

You could miss someone, but it did no good to fixate on loss. I wished I had the ready words of a Breeder or the ability to comfort with a soft touch. I didn't. Instead I had daggers and determination.
That would have to do. — Ann Aguirre

Dex rubbed his fingers over the stubble on Sloane's jaw when he heard it. Wait, was that ... . No, it couldn't be. Could it? He discreetly lowered his gaze to Sloane's, meeting his lover's wide eyes and confirming Dex wasn't hearing things. "Holy shit, you're purring!" Sloane bolted up right, turning to stare at Dex. "I was, wasn't I?" "I take it that's sort of a new thing for you." "I ... I've never done that before. Not while Human anyway. I didn't even know I could do that. I shouldn't be able to do that! It's ... ." Sloane looked like he was at a loss for words. "A little creepy?" Dex offered sympathetically. Sloane nodded. — Anonymous

An astronomer once explained to me that the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, is vast, too vast to be understood without metaphor, so he gave me one. He said if you picture the Milky Way as being the size of mainland Europe, our solar system - that's Mars, Venus, Saturn, us here on Earth (you remember from school) - in a Milky Way the size of Europe our solar system would fit inside a single teacup somewhere in Belgium. He paused for my amazement, which I duly offered. But really what can you say? "Ooh, a teacup." "Blimey, Belgium." "Cor, it makes you think, doesn't it?" Then he added, clearly sensing I was at a bit of a loss for words, having just been reduced to a dot on a speck in a teacup in a continent: "Russell, there are 400 million KNOWN galaxies in our universe. — Russell Brand

To lovers of the long and intricate history of language the disuse and final death of certain words is a matter of regret. Yet every age bears witness to the inevitableness of such loss. — Mary Ellen Chase

Why won't you look at me?" she murmurs.
He doesn't speak, seemingly at a loss for words.
"It's my scars." It comes out as barely a whisper.
Horror spasms across his face. "What? No," he says, a bit breathless. "You're beautiful. All of you. — Laura Kreitzer

The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn't the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God - no small things - but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them. — Joshua Ferris

You were afraid of me? Don't you meet with the Fallen in Sheol?"
"Yes, but none of them had ever stolen my heart nor left me without words to ponder its loss. — Amy A. Bartol

Hearing my brother's words coming out of Henry, this stranger in a strange town, made me feel wild with all the loss - wild and wired with no place to put those feelings. — Laura Anderson Kurk

Loss of someone we love cannot be adequately expressed with words. Grappling with loss, struggling with disconnection and despair, fills us with a sense of anguish and actual pain. Indeed, the parts of our brain that process physical pain overlap with the neural centers that record social ruptures and rejection. Loss rips us apart. — Daniel J. Siegel

Well, I'm sorry you couldn't make it either. I'm sorry I had to sit there in that church--which, by the way, had a broken air conditioner--sweating, watching all those people march down the aisle to look in my mother's casket and whisper to themselves all this mess about how much she looked like herself, even though she didn't. I'm sorry you weren't there to hear the lame choir drag out, song after song. I'm sorry you weren't there to see my dad try his best to be upbeat, cracking bad jokes in his speech, choking on his words. I'm sorry you weren't there to watch me totally lose it and explode into tears. I'm sorry you weren't there for me, but it doesn't matter, because even if you were, you wouldn't be able to feel what I feel. Nobody can. Even the preacher said so. — Jason Reynolds

There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken. There is a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief, which leads to joy. And a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being" --the poetess Rashani, quoted by — Maya Tiwari

We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty. — Albert Camus

The part of us that feels anger and depression is the same part that feels peace and love. If you refuse to feel the anger and the pain of a loss, you will not be able to feel anything else until that area heals. In other words, stay out of your own way. Let yourself feel bad if you want to feel bad. Feel joy, too. Healing is taking place. Give yourself the gift of healing. — Peter McWilliams

We see then how far the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than the monuments of power, or of the hands. For have not some books continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without the loss of a syllable or letter; during which time infinite palaces, temples, castles, and cities have been decayed and demolished? — Francis Bacon

Don't listen to those people who suggest you should be "over" your daughter's death by now. The people who squawk the loudest about such
things have almost never had to get over anything. Or at least not anything that was genuinely, mind-fuckingly, soul-crushingly life altering. Some of
those people believe they're being helpful by minimizing your pain. Others are scared of the intensity of your loss and so they use their words to
push your grief away. Many of those people love you and are worthy of your love, but they are not the people who will be helpful to you when it
comes to healing the pain of your daughter's death.
They live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died. — Cheryl Strayed

The inscription on his gravestone had felt so wholly insufficient the moment she saw it. Just a name and dates, carved by machine. Just the inadequate and impersonal. Loving Father and Husband, like every other headstone there, whether it was true or not. This was the tasteful way to do it, she knew, even though it showed none of the true shape of the man — Stuart Nadler

Kiss Across Time," she read. Well, that fit with the lyrics and Domhnall words. Domhnall lived through years of threat from enemies., the invasion of his country and the loss of his culture. His stories and epic poems were all full of death, glory, love, battles, dying and more... or would be, if she had ever been able to catch more than a glimpse of him from the corner of her eye, in research terms. — Teal Ceagh

BEANNACHT For Josie On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. And when your eyes freeze behind the gray window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colors, indigo, red, green and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight. When the canvas frays in the curach of thought and a stain of ocean blackens beneath you, may there come across the waters a path of yellow moonlight to bring you safely home. May the nourishment of the earth be yours, may the clarity of light be yours, may the fluency of the ocean be yours, may the protection of the ancestors be yours. And so may a slow wind work these words of love around you, an invisible cloak to mind your life. — John O'Donohue

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child. — Jodi Picoult

More frightening to me than any policy or politician is the ease with which the public is played for fools with words. The latest example is the 'Employee Freedom of Choice Act,' a bill that will do away with secret ballot elections among workers voting on whether to be represented by a union. It is an open invitation to intimidation - which is to say, loss of freedom of choice. — Thomas Sowell

The guilt fell upon him like a hammer to a nail. He dropped onto his bed, grabbing the picture frame that sat next to it. I'm sorry were the words that repeatedly came out of his mouth. All he could think was, how could he do that to her? To the woman he vowed to spend the rest of his life with. His stomach hurt just from thinking about it. — Courtney Giardina

Most people in America, if not the world, would agree that every advance involves some sacrifice. In fact, a common sports adage proclaims: "No pain, no gain." In other words, progress is always accompanied by a certain amount of loss. This concept is illustrated throughout history, literature and personal experience. One compelling illustration that some bad always accompanies some good is demonstrated in the Civil Rights movement. In 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white person. Although she was arrested and jailed, her brave efforts inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott which — Tom Clements

The balance of life; every loss is a gain. And every gain is a loss. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Although he would not remember it, when Lucien was born, the first thing he saw as he peeked over the edge of the world was Madame Lessard's bunghole. Well that can't be right, he thought. And he thought he might cry for the shock. Then the midwife flipped him over and the second thing he saw was the blue sky through the skylight. He thought, Oh, that's better. So he cried for the beauty and was at a total loss for words for almost a year. He wouldn't remember the moment, but the feeling would come back to him from time to time, when he encountered blue. — Christopher Moore

A Conceit
Give me your hand
Make room for me
to lead and follow
you
beyond this rage of poetry.
Let others have
the privacy of
touching words
and love of loss
of love.
For me
Give me your hand. — Maya Angelou

It takes about four days of virtuous living to create a little weight loss. That also happens to be the time required to get used to eating less. In other words, if you can get past day three of a fitness regimen, things improve. — Martha Beck

I remember Cannae," she said, raising her head, "when we thought all was lost. Carthage had defeated us, and there were those who gave up hope. Yet we survived, by our fortitude, and by believing that we should endure. There are times, Marcus, when courage is all you have."
I looked down at the stone floor, chastened into silence by her cold, stern words. This was her way, as it had always been. It was the Roman way. Grief was an indulgence; and though she surely suffered, her suffering was for her alone. It seemed hard, but she had come from a hard family, brave men and brave women who through the generations had survived by facing down hardship and loss. Of all her long line of ancestors, she was not going to be the one to break.
And nor, I decided, was I. — Paul Waters

The cabins they passed among seemed solemn in their abandonment, cramped by the watercourse and the overhanging brow of the cloudy mountain. Some of its people might yet be living, and Ada wondered how often they remembered this lonesome place, now still as a held breath. Whatever word they had called it would soon be numbered among the names of things which have not been passed down to us and are exiled from our memories. She doubted that its people, even in the last days, had ever looked ahead and imagined loss so total and so soon. they had not foreseen a near time when theirs would be another world filled with other people whose mouths would speak other words, whose sleep would be eased or troubled with other dreams, whose prayers would be offered up to other gods. — Charles Frazier

As she grew older, she was aware of her changing position on mortality. In her youth, the topic of death was philosophical; in her thirties it was unbearable and in her forties unavoidable. In her fifties, she had dealt with it in more rational terms, arranging her last testament, itemizing assets and heirlooms, spelling out the organ donation, detailing the exact words for her living will. Now, in her sixties, she was back to being philosophical. Death was not a loss of life, but the culmination of a series of releases. It was devolving into less and less. You had to release yourself from vanity, desire, ambition, suffering, and frustration - all the accoutrements of the I, the ego. And if you die, you would disappear, leave no trace, evaporate into nothingness ... — Amy Tan

The greatest tragedy in your life will not be the death of a loved one or a natural disaster; those things hurt like hell and devastate to the core. But loss like that is part of life. What's not necessary and is therefore most tragic is the demise of your truest identity, your dying before you're dead, the moments when you let the words and judgments of others define who you are instead of rising above that pain to be the person you were meant to be. No matter what has happened in your past, you are still capable of becoming a better version of who you are at this moment. Think right. Believe the voice inside of you that speaks the truth. You are a divine marvel. Act like it. Live like it. — Toni Sorenson

He had also been married to an English girl who was killed in a car accident, a fact to mention because he was the driver. His sorrow was complete; it was as if he had been dipped into a tragic rue. This loss permeated every pore and organ cell, left him, indeed, a complete man, all of one piece, one whole tincture of loss. He spoke in a gentle voice and listened to every word that everyone said, as if words were as much of a comfort as warm clothing. While he sipped his one beer and I had three, — Norman Mailer

I closed my eyes, grief spilling up through me. You'd think that after all these years of hurting, of saying goodbye to her over and over in my head, that this moment would be easier. Yet it wasn't. Because for a few brief weeks, I'd thought I'd be able to have my little sister back. That I could heal up some of the gaping wounds in my soul I'd pasted over with brash words and a hard exterior. — Shannon Mayer

She closed her eyes, silently continuing the pleas that she be given words that might soothe, words that would begin the healing of bereaved parents. She had seen, when she entered the kitchen, the chasm of sorrow that divided man and wife already, each deep in their own wretched suffering, neither knowing what to say to the other. She knew that to begin to talk about what had happened was a key to acknowledging their loss, and that such acceptance would in turn be a means to enduring the days and months ahead. — Jacqueline Winspear

I've come to the end of another book alive. At times like this I'm always at a loss for words. — Joe Coomer

Life was charmed but without politics or religion. It was the life of children of the children of the pioneers -life after God- a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven. Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life - and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt. I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God. — Douglas Coupland

The potential for loss of soul
to one degree or another
is the affliction of a society that as a collective has lost its sense of the holy, of a culture that values everything else above the spiritual. We live in such a spiritually impoverished culture
and in such a time. Loss of soul, to one degree or another, is a constant teasing possibility. We are invited at every corner to hedge on the truth, indulge outselves, act as if our words and actions have no ultimate consequence, make an absolute of the material world, and treat the spiritual world as if it were some kind of frothy, angelic fantasy. In such a world the soul struggles for survival; in such a world a man can lose his own soul and have the whole culture support him, and in such a world, conversely, the light of a single, great soul that lives in integrity can truly illumine the world. — Daphne Rose Kingma

Death is misery! The lifeless person was once full of life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances. — Italo Calvino

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction. — Tahereh Mafi

I'd said to them that when we read fiction, we pour our own paricular store of emotions - say, the sense of loss we feel for those disappeared from our lives - into the characters set before us. We take the few words with which the writer sketches these characters, the thing he said, the pain she felt, where they were, and our own emotional stockpile magically creates people. As the human eye fleshes out the pixilated image. Fictional characters are highly sophiticated Rorschach blots, and we, along with their author, are their authors. When you read a fictional character, you too are creating her. — Chandler Burr

Sorrow has a great refining influence on our sacred souls. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Who among us is not at a loss for words? Tears pour out. Tears of joy. Tears of relief. A stunning, whopping landslide of hope in a time of deep despair. In a nation that was founded on genocide and then built on the backs of slaves, it was an unexpected moment, shocking in its simplicity: Barack Obama, a good man, a black man, said he would bring change to Washington, and the majority of the country liked that idea. — Michael Moore

And then he went in the evening up to the nursery and told the boy how his mother was gone for a while to Elfland, to her father's palace (which may only be told of in song). And, unheeding any words of Orion then, he held on with the brief tale that he had come to tell, and told how Elfland was gone.
"But that cannot be," said Orion, "for I hear the horns of Elfland every day."
"You can hear them?" Alveric said.
And the boy replied, "I hear them blowing at evening. — Lord Dunsany

Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky mountainside, the explanation goes, you can't farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don't have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can't easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He's under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak. — Malcolm Gladwell

Indeed, so deep is my pleasure in the work of the garden that, if there be a dimension after death in which grieving for the loss of the world of senses is possible, I shall grieve for no person however once agonisingly desired and passionately beloved, for no emotional adventure however uplifting, for no success however warming, no infamy however exhilarating, for nothing half so much as I shall grieve to the loss of the earth itself, the soil, the seeds, the plants, the very weeds ... It is a love almost overriding my love the words that could express that love. — Hal Porter

He wanted it to be just right; he didn't want to make the mistake of trying to tell her he loved her, and having the words come out confused or ending up saying something completely different. He changed into a fresh suit, checked his hair and took a few deep breaths to calm himself, before returning to Amelia's chambers ... only to find her gone. A sigh of frustration escaped him. It was so typical. He told her there was a surprise for her, she was excited, and he was about to confess that he loved her ... of course it was only natural for her to ruin it by running off. It was so typically Amelia. — Elaine White

We curse everything, for we are cursed, and we have no arms to shelter her and no lips to press to her hair and above all no words to tell her that we know loss and we know pain and if they were monsters we could fight we would have slain them in her name long ago like the heroes of old. But we are not a hero. We are cursed. — Meagan Spooner

... Look, I'm real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot," Mandy apologized gloomily. "It's wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution."
"It's alright, I think she wants to be remediated," Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did.
"You don't have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you," Mandy pointed out. "People shouldn't be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don't want to. — Rebecca McNutt

Words are miraculous things. They describe, captivate, provoke, vivify, encompass, pervade, inspire, preserve, and comfort. So much more than that, in fact, so as to leave me at a loss of ... words. — Julian Whitaker

A better mother would shape that anger into loss and then, at least, into the kind of memory of love one can sustain, but Vianne was too empty to be a good mother right now. She could think of no words that weren't a lie or useless. — Kristin Hannah

Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I'd fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, 'So this is how it feels,' and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own. — Neil Gaiman

Ravenpaw might have made a fine warrior. His death has come too soon, and his loss will be felt by many of us for a long time." Empty words! thought Firepaw bitterly. What — Erin Hunter

Meaning can only be understood in relation to its environment. Therefore, the words only make full sense in context ... There are no absolutes, there is no meaning without relationships, everything is not only interacting but interdependent. The kahunas use this idea to help give a person a powerfully secure sense of significance, while at the same time teaching him that to heal himself is to heal the world, and to heal the world is to heal himself. This is not a loss of individuality, but an understanding that individuality itself is a relationship with the environment. — Serge King

The death of their two children isn't the erasure of two beings. It is the loss of God and the skies, it is the loss of the past and the future, of all their small-voiced words and their hearts. — A.S. Patric

The simple fact is that we live in a world of conflict and opposites because we live in a world of boundaries. Since every boundary line is also a battle line, here is the human predicament: the firmer one's boundaries, the more entrenched are one's battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain. The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil. The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure. The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes. The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with its loss. Most of our problems, in other words, are problems of boundaries
and the opposites they create. — Ken Wilber

How many losses does it take to stop a heart,
to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire? — Dorianne Laux

Nick watched her intently as he tried to sort through the anarchy of his thoughts. His usual appetite had vanished after their walk this morning. He had not eaten breakfast ... had not done anything, really, except to wander around the estate in a sort of daze that appalled him. He knew himself to be a callous man, one with no honor, and no means of quelling his own brutish instincts. So much of his life had been occupied with basic survival that he had never been free to follow higher pursuits. He had little acquaintance with literature or history, and his mathematical abilities were limited to matters of money and betting odds. Philosophy, to him, was a handful of cynical principles learned through experience with the worst of humanity. By now, nothing could surprise or intimidate him. He didn't fear loss, pain, or even death.
But with a few words and one awkward, innocent kiss, Charlotte Howard had devastated him. — Lisa Kleypas

Oh, I think that Lord Tyrion is quite a large man," Maester Aemon said from the far end of the table. He spoke softly, yet the high officers of the Night's Watch all fell quiet, the better to hear what the ancient had to say. "I think he is a giant come among us, here at the end of the world." Tyrion answered gently, "I've been called many things, my lord, but giant is seldom one of them." "Nonetheless," Maester Aemon said as his clouded, milk-white eyes moved to Tyrion's face, "I think it is true." For once, Tyrion Lannister found himself at a loss for words. He could only bow his head politely and say, "You are too kind, Maester Aemon." The blind man smiled. He was a tiny thing, wrinkled and hairless, shrunken beneath the weight of a hundred years so his maester's collar with its links of many metals hung loose about his throat. "I have been called many things, my lord," he said, "but kind is seldom one of them." This time Tyrion himself led the laughter. — George R R Martin

When I first came round in the medical center after my accident, the first face I saw was Ayrton's, with tears in his eyes. I had never seen that with Ayrton before. I just had the impression that he felt as if my accident was like one of his own. He helped me a lot with my career and I can't find the words to describe his loss. — Rubens Barrichello

If you open a book and find that the writer is trying to impress you with his knowledge of long, unusual words or by his use of foreign phrases, close the book quickly with no sense of loss or of deficiency or of having missed anything; for the author has not learned how to write and perhaps never will, and there is no need for you to offer yourself as a sounding board for his incompetence. — Burton Rascoe

Charlotte, dressed in a very short-skirted policewoman's outfit, was leading a dancing brigade, jumping around at the front of the room, her long red hair flapping up and down like a matador's cape. She was head girl, and she would shows us how to party if she had to.
I wasn't really sure why Charlotte had decided to come to the party as a stripper. I found myself at a loss for words as she complimented us on our costumes.
"You're a..." I tried to find the right thing to say. "Really...hot cop?"
"I'm Amy Pond," she said. "From Doctor Who. This is her kissogram outfit. — Maureen Johnson

And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be 'well,' or 'normal,' when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact.
You have this: You are thin. — Marya Hornbacher

A relationship between two people is made up, for the most part, of invisible things: memories, shared experiences, hopes and fears. When one person disappears, the other is left alone, as if holding a string with no kite. Memories can do a lot to sustain you, but the invisible stuff of the relationship is lost, even as unresolved issues remain: arguments never settled, kind words never uttered, things left un-said. They become like a splinter beneath the skin-unseen, but painful nevertheless. Until they're exposed, coping with the loss is impossible. — David Dosa

We human beings don't realize how great God is. He has given us an extraordinary brain and a sensitive loving heart. He has blessed us with two lips to talk and express our feelings, two eyes which see a world of colours and beauty, two feet which walk on the road of life, two hands to work for us, and two ears to hear the words of love. As I found with my ear, no one knows how much power they have in their each and every organ until they lose one. — Malala Yousafzai

He waited for Stephanie at the foot of the stairs and when she made her way down he lost his breath. To him she was the most beautiful woman in the world, no matter what she wore, with make up or without. But the way she looked when she walked towards him, he was at a loss for words; he couldn't even remember his own fucking name. — Celeste Carrara

So we did the only thing we knew to do. We got in the car and drove to Dallas to be at the funeral with Jen. As she and her family walked down the center aisle behind her dad's casket, she smiled at us despite the big tears that were rolling down her cheeks. And that's when I learned one of the most important lessons I've ever learned about what it means to be a good friend: you show up for your people. You don't wait for your friend to ask you to come; you get in your car and go. You don't have to know the right words to say, you don't have to offer sage wisdom about loss and love; you just show up. You hold her hand and hug her neck and wipe her tears. You let her know that you hurt because she is in pain, and you'd do anything to take it from her if you could. You listen.... You show up for your friend, in the good times and the bad times. — Melanie Shankle

Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often - will it be for always? - how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, 'I never realized my loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again. They — C.S. Lewis

There are words like 'orphan', 'widow' and 'widower' in all languages. But there is no word in any language to describe a parent who loses a child. How does one describe the pain of 'ultimate bereavement'! (Page 50) — Neena Verma

These students of mine, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exile in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry. — Azar Nafisi

I think the word dumbfounded is another one of those compounds I love to ponder. Only this one seems to make sense. It is like finding dumb. Like finding you are at a loss for words (completely amazed and astonished). At that very moment I was officially and irrevocably dumbfounded. There was no way to for me to explain what had just happened. — J.W. Lord

Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection "species loneliness" - a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors. It's no wonder that naming was the first job the Creator gave Nanabozho. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

No matter how shitty it got, I could always look back and say, "At least I don't have my arm stuck up a cow's vagina." In fact, that's kind of become my life's motto. It's also what I say when I'm at a loss for words when talking to people who are grieving the loss of their grandparents. — Jenny Lawson

At times like this There's not a lot that words can do To help ease your pain and sense of loss And though it may be hard to believe right now Know that the pain will ease with time And you will look back at the memories of your dear one And smile and remember a life well lived and loved. — Margaret Jones

Are there not a thousand forms of sorrow? Is the sorrow of death the same as the sorrow of knowing the pain in a child's future? What about the melancholy of music? Is it the same as the melancholy of a summer dusk? Is the loss I was feeling for my father the same I would have felt for a man better-fit to the world, a man who might have thrown a baseball with me or taken me out in the mornings to fish? Both we call grief. I don't think we have words for our feelings any more than we have words for our thoughts. — Ethan Canin

Even though their marriage had been dead for over two years (her words, not mine), this put her in the role of the innocent. She was now a woman scorned. ~Shattered Reality — Brenda Perlin

These words filled me with a sort of melancholy and I was at a loss for an answer, for I felt when I was with him, when I was talking to him - and no doubt it would have been the same with anyone else - none of that happiness which it was possible for me to experience when I was by myself. Alone, at times, I felt surging from the depths of my being one or other ot those impressions which gave me a delicious sense of well-being. But as soon as I was with someone else, as soon as I was talking to a friend, my mind as it were faced about, it was towards this interlocutor and not towards myself that it directed its thoughts, and when they followed this outward course they brought me no pleasure. — Marcel Proust

Social media is basically standing at a bucket filled with other people's vomit and you suck the vomit through a straw, and gag and wince at the unbearable taste of other people's vomit. Yet strangely we continue to suck through the straw as if we've never tasted such lovely vomit. And then before you know it you're old and you're grey. And that's the end of you. A lonely death. Your gravestone is marked with the six saddest words:

Social Media Drained My Soul Away

And they all mourn your loss at a budget funeral service while updating their social media statuses on mobile phones apps. And in years to come nobody remembers any of your updates; even those updates that you deep-down believed were going to bring about world peace. The Digital Age is more disposable than nappies and just as full of shit. — Rupert Dreyfus

I'm in love with language again because Luke B. Goebel is not afraid to take us back through the gullet of loss into the chaos of words. Someone burns a manuscript in Texas; someone's speed sets a life on fire; a heart is beaten nearly to death, the road itself is the trip, a man is decreated back to his animal past
better, beyond ego, beautiful, and look: there's an American dreamscape left. There's a reason to go on. — Lidia Yuknavitch

The cause of it all was a slight oversight, one small operation out of order. Sure, it was her fault, her responsibility, if it came to that, but from where I stood it seemed like a common enough mishap. A momentary lapse and - glitch! Could have happened to anyone. But not to her. A tiny crack in her head widened into a fissure, eventually becoming a gaping chasm. She wouldn't, she couldn't take another step. At a total loss for words, she froze in place. She was a sorry sight, a ship sinking slowly in the night sea. — Haruki Murakami

Heavy is the head that holds the pen of creation. We construct these characters from nothing, molding them from our imaginations. We give them hopes and dreams and unique personalities until they feel so real you're mind believes it must be so. We watch them grow by our hands, not always knowing the paths they will choose with the obstacles we throw at them. They take on a life of their own and often surprise even us by their actions we couldn't have imagined before it poured out of us onto the paper. We could change it if we really wanted to, but it would be forced and not be true to the characters. And when something tragic happens and one is lost, we feel that loss even though we know they were not a friend, a family member or even ourselves. It can be a hard thing to voice sometimes, to give tribute to the one's left behind with the real sadness over something not so real. But we find the words and press on to the next challenge, because that's what good writers do. — Jennifer A. Marsh

I think about that lost dignity you must be feeling and I want to tell you it doesn't matter. Not in the great scheme of things. This is just the end. It isn't the everything of you. And it's the everything we'll remember when the memory of this fades. xxx
I can't explain this though. The words are tangled on my tongue and I'm not sure they would make a difference. Becuase I guess for you the everything is done and there is only the now. And in the now your loss of dignity is everything. — Sarah Pinborough

For once the crofter was at a a rather loss for words, for to him nothing has ever been more completely unintelligible than the reasoning that is bred of tears. — Halldor Laxness

She couldn't put into words how desparately she wanted to know what had happened to Sarah. But she'd suddenly realized that Sarah was not the only one who had lost her memory of what happened when she was a little girl. Hundreds of thousands of people had lost their memories of what had happened to them ... — Denny Taylor

Jackson blinked again, almost at a loss for words as he ignored the mini Cooper reference, a term the girls loved and had begun calling their offspring. Having four women all entering the second trimester of their pregnancy at the same time was just about killing the brothers. How the hell had he become part of this? He wasn't married to any of them, and yet now he was the peanut butter bearer. Hell. "Four ... four types of peanut butter?" Jackson asked. "Yes. Four. I'm alone in the house with four pregnant women who all want peanut butter of their own choosing. For the love of God, help me." The panic in his brother's voice made Jackson smile. Matt had the pre-daddy jitters. In fact, all his brothers did. — Carrie Ann Ryan

Yukiko stared back at him. Slurred words and a soft stare, that stupefied, slack-jawed look slinking over his face and turning his skin to gray. An anesthetic, numbing the pain of well deserved loss. — Jay Kristoff

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed. — Dana Gioia

Highly esteemed dear Professor Franck,
In these days in which by your magnanimous decision you show the world where the insane oppression of the Jews leads to, I as one of your students would not like to be missing among those who declare their sincere thanks and unlimited veneration to you, and who especially now are filled with the highest admiration by your present step and the reason given by you, and who at the same time are filled with horror that such a thing is necessary.
I am at a loss for words to express what both my wife and I always and especially now feel for you. Please remember us to your wife and chidlren and accept our sincere greetings. — Gerhard Herzberg

His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science.

{Describing Ernest Rutherford upon his death at age 66. Thomson, then 80 years old, was once his teacher.} — J.J. Thomson

I thought at first she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her-green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs-would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere.

I still think that, sometimes. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just a matter, and matter gets recycled. — John Green

Unaware of them all, Temujin began to chant words he had not heard since old Chagatai had whispered them on a frozen night long before. The shaman's chant spoke of loss and revenge, of winter, ice, and blood. He did not have to struggle to recall the words; they were ready on his tongue as if he had always known them. — Conn Iggulden

No mother. Two small words, and yet within them lay a bottomless well of pain and loss, a ceaseless mourning for touches that were never received and words of wisdom that were never spoken. No single word was big enough to adequately describe the loss of your mother. — Kristin Hannah

The dead person once had a life! This is a misery? — Lailah Gifty Akita

I've missed you so much it's felt like missing you is all I am.
Like if someone looked inside me, there wouldn't be a skeleton and muscles and blood and nerves. There'd just be memories of you and all the things I've tried to say and ripped out of this notebook, all the things I want to say but can't because I don't have the words. — Elizabeth Scott

I'm normally not at a loss of words but I am a little taken aback by what you're wearing; it's a little different. — Joe Teti

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.
If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips
it is because I hear a man climb stairs
and clear his throat outside our door. — Leonard Cohen

T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right. — Iris Murdoch