Quotes & Sayings About Family Love And Loss

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn.
Oh, Mary Lou.
My baby.
My love. — Pete Hamill

Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime? — Sam Harris

I loved them too and while you might lay a greater claim to them, I defy you to miss your wife any more than I'll miss my best friend or your child, who was every inch a son to me. — Fiona McIntosh

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together - surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing. — Carl Sagan

The more you experience love, the more full of it you should be. But the opposite sometimes happens, because you fear the loss of life. You fear the vulnerability that can take the goodness of it away. This might have happened because when i was just a kid, i had the sense that your whole life can change with a death in the family. It's like they say - at least i say - It's the loss of money that leads to the love of it. You know, the people who care about money are never the people who made a lot. They're the people who have lost a lot. And I think that might be true in relationships, when if you've lost somebody important to you early on, you live in fear of that the rest of your life. I suppose that's one of the things that I would fear, and that might explain the rage you referred to earlier, which is real in me, at some point, it really is. An odd thing to own up to, but I do know it's true. — Michka Assayas

With time one ages, and with age one comes closer to their end. With time one builds a family, a house, a name and with age one learns to live without them. — Mrinalini Mitra

I cannot live without you. For to attempt to do so would be to rob both of us of each other, and that is thievery of the greatest sort. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I would court you, with all the grace and courtesy that you deserve, — C.S. Pacat

---Sleeps through the washes of the morning's colors and the warm brilliance of sunrise. She sleeps in a world where she remembers, perfectly, every detail about her husband, this day, that sentence, another touch. She will remember it all in the deepest sleep, and lose it again the moment her eyes open and she wonders how late it must be for the sun to already be so high and then remembers, in the next instant, what happened the day before. — Ashley Hay

In the beginning we start with roses. The king's flower right? Only they wilt in less than a day, especially when exposed to the elements. But Carnations? Oh, what a beautiful flower. They come in every color. True, some are painted, but that doesn't mean they are less beautiful, and they never wilt. — Ruth McLeod-Kearns

Memories is all that you have, which help you survive the storms and struggles of your daily life after you lose someone! — Nikita Dudani

I confessed to Tobias, soon after that, that I had lost my entire family.
And he assured me that he was my family now. -Tris Prior — Veronica Roth

And that's how it was with Garrett. Because he understood me, the me I wanted so desperately to be. Think about your best friend - how you tell them everything, how they're the person who knows you best, all your deepest fears and insecurities. They're the one you call when something amazing happens or when everything falls apart and you need someone to come over and watch movies and tell you that everything's going to be OK. It's not like family, who are obligated to love you and even then sometimes fail to be everything they're supposed to be. Your true friend has chosen you, and you them, and that's a different kind of bond.
That's Garrett to me. I'm used to talking to him all the time, about the most meaningless stuff. To have him gone feels like a loss, an absence haunting me every day. Without him, there's just the empty space that used to be filled with laughter and friendship and comfort.
Can you really blame me for finding it so hard to let go? — Abby McDonald

Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe anyone loves you for yourself.

I never believed that my parents loved me. I tried to love them but it didn't work. It has taken me a long time to learn how to love - both the giving and the receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value.

I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you?

I had no idea.
I thought that love was loss.
Why is the measure of love loss? — Jeanette Winterson

The causes of familial discord and distance are countless, but the results are often the same: secrecy, blame, sadness, hurt, confusion, and feelings of loss and grief. — Sharon Salzberg

An important dimension of Tess of the d'Urbervilles is its debt to the oral tradition; to stories about wronged milkmaids, tales of superstition, and stories of love, betrayal and revenge, involving stock figures. This gives Tess of the d'Urbervilles an anti-realistic inflection. From the world of ballad and folktale Hardy draws such fateful coincidences as the failure of Angel to encounter Tess at the 'Club-walking' on which he intrudes with his brothers, the letter to Angel that she accidentally slips under the carpet, the loss of her shoes when she tries to visit his family, and the family portraits on the wall of their honeymoon dwelling, as well as several omens. This chimes effectively with a world in which the rural folk have a superstitious and fatalistic attitude to life. — Geoffrey Harvey

The lessons I learned from my mother and her friends have guided me through death, birth, loss, love, failure, and achievement, on to a Fulbright scholarship and Harvard Business School. They taught me to believe that anything was possible. They have proven to be the strongest family values I could ever have imagined. — Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Whether one is rich or poor, educated or illiterate, religious or nonbelieving, man or woman, black, white, or brown, we are all the same. Physically, emotionally, and mentally, we are all equal. We all share basic needs for food, shelter, safety, and love. We all aspire to happiness and we all shun suffering. Each of us has hopes, worries, fears, and dreams. Each of us wants the best for our family and loved ones. We all experience pain when we suffer loss and joy when we achieve what we seek. On this fundamental level, religion, ethnicity, culture, and language make no difference. — Dalai Lama XIV

I get very nostalgic for times and places and experiences, but I have a wonderful group of core friends and family who I love and adore, so I don't mourn the loss of any particular friendship. I think they're all part of a path, and the ones that really mean something are still important in my life. — Katie Aselton

My mother's death supervened, and this was the greatest blow I had experienced in my life. I worshipped her ... I could not resign myself to the loss of a being on whom I counted to make invisible the unavoidable blemishes of my soul. — Salvador Dali

No, it really isn't, but trust me, getting divorced and having to start over is the least in life that isn't fair. I had to watch the parents of a way too young girl realize that their daughter died for no other reason than people can't figure out how to be nice to each other. It isn't that hard, just be nice and people might not have to suffer needlessly, but that isn't the world we live in, so young girls die. That isn't fair, Mom. People falling out of love is vicious and it sucks, but there are far worse things you could be going through. I know that sounds harsh but it's very true. — Jay Crownover

--and yet, in my heart, I always knew we loved each other, a part of me understanding that the passion with which we hurt each other came from something strong enough to withstand the blows we inflicted. Looking back, I guess I always felt that we would have time to work things out eventually, not imagining what was to come; that we would one day have to cut all ties and never speak again. — Camilla Way

When your own thoughts are forbidden, when your questions are not allowed and our doubts are punished, when contacts with friendships outside of the organization are censored, we are being abused, for the ends never justify the means. When our heart aches knowing we have made friendships and secret attachments that will be forever forbidden if we leave, we are in danger. When we consider staying in a group because we cannot bear the loss, disappointment and sorrow our leaving will cause for ourselves and those we have come to love, we are in a cult ... If there is any lesson to be learned it is that an ideal can never be brought about by fear, abuse, and the threat of retribution. When family and friends are used as a weapon in order to force us to stay in an organization, something has gone terribly wrong. — Deborah Layton

To lose someone you love is the very worst thing in the world. It creates an invisible hole that you feel you are falling down and will never end. People you love make the world real and solid and when they suddenly go away forever, nothing feels solid any more. — Matt Haig

But the more people we love and the more deeply we love them, the more vulnerable we are to loss and grief and loneliness. — Dean Koontz

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

It's like I'd been walking a tightrope with a big safety net underneath me, but I never really thought about the net until someone took it away. And then every single step scared me to death. — Margaret Peterson Haddix

Take the pain and grow beauty...You know I've always loved volcanoes. I love how they spew searing, deadly lava that goes on to nurture the most beautiful landscapes on earth. It's from searing pain that the deepest beauty can sprout — Carrie Firestone

I am thinking of our family's women
as faraway bulbs, their history
with crippling loss, and
how I am pieced together, shell and sand,
from the spine of their collective strength. — Jerrold Yam

It is not love that keeps us stuck in the past. Love fades over time. What introspective hearts seek is simply unanswered questions about why terrible things can happen to very good people. Closure never comes from reflection. It only comes from God's guidance and promptings. — Shannon L. Alder

She wasn't sure if she even needed him anymore and the thought made her sad. In consolation, she offered him a kind smile and reached for his dependable hand. — Tan Redding

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time
back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. — Thomas Wolfe

Grief is not a one-time thing for people with chronic health problems. Just like people grieving the loss of a loved one find the sadness washes over them at holidays or family events or even unexpected everyday moments, we who are grieving the loss of ourselves, or our former lives, will find the feelings come at random - when someone mentions an activity we used to love, or even something as simple as spilling a glass of milk, or not being able to find our keys. It doesn't mean you're a failure. It means you're human. And it's okay. Then — Kimberly Rae

When a family is broken by death, there is no clear way forward out of despair. It is easy to mistake grief for proof of love, and so refuse to relinquish it. For the first year or longer, there is a constant, grinding question that hands over you: Stay or go? You fixate on the fantasy of willing time to roll backward. You find the precise moment before they were taken, and plant your flag there. Death becomes the territory where our love lives, a dangerous place for the living to stay for very long. — Galadrielle Allman

Most people write off their longing for friends and family as so many losses in their lives, when they should count the fact that their heart is able to long so hard and to love so much as among their greatest blessings. — Etty Hillesum

Lucy gripped her chilled glass of orange and raspberry juice. When Rebecca talked about Austen, she'd mostly mentioned Mr. Darcy or Mr. Knightley. She hadn't really thought of the doe-eyed, pale-skinned heroines.
On the screen, Anne Elliot walked down a long hallway, glancing just once at covered paintings, her mouth a grim line. Lucy thought Jane Austen would start the story with the romance, or the loss of it, but instead the tale seemed to begin with Anne's home, and having to make difficult decisions. Maybe this writer from over two hundred years ago knew how everything important met at the intersection of family, home, love, and loss. This was something Lucy understood with every fiber of her being. — Mary Jane Hathaway

Don't spend too much time grieving for me, Elena. I know you're probably a little sad as you're reading this, since that means I'm dead and you're having to learn how to go on in a new way. I would be sad if you didn't miss me, so I won't tell you not to, but I will tell you to keep on living. The world is full of beautiful music, flowers, places, and experiences. Enjoy it all as much as you can. Just remember it's the people in your life that make it worthwhile...People and memories, not things are what's important in the end. Nothing else matters as much as that. — M. Reed McCall

He felt lighter than he had in weeks, and he realized that the monster he had been running from wasn't really a monster after all. It was simply that place in the heart that holds the measure of your history, the joy and the grief, the laughter and the tears, the magic and the wonder; all the ingredients that add up to the story of a life well lived. — Lilli Jolgren Day

The thing that's hard about it - the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance - is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now - the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong. — Dexter Palmer

Bargaining This stage is characterized by the non-BP making concessions in order to bring back the "normal" behavior of the person they love. The thinking goes, "If I do what this person wants, I will get what I need in this relationship." We all make compromises in relationships. But the sacrifices that people make to satisfy the borderlines they care about can be very costly. And the concessions may never be enough. Before long, more proof of love is needed and another bargain must be struck. depression Depression sets in when non-BPs realize the true cost of the bargains they've made: loss of friends, family, self-respect, and hobbies. The person with BPD hasn't changed. But the non-BP has. — Paul Mason

And you're everything I don't want." Julie pushed away, breaking his embrace, and shook her head. "If you loved me, you couldn't have done this. You couldn't have been so careless with me. You know pain, and loss, and hurt better than anyone." She hated each word as it came out of her mouth. "And that's what you gave me. I know that it's not the same. I know yours is worse. I'm so sorry for you, Matt. For your whole family. You've all been through hell. And you've been braver than anyone could. But I hurt now, too. And I can't love you. — Jessica Park

The word family is derived from the word famulus, meaning a servant, and in its early usage, familia, it literally meant the servants of a household. In its essence, the longing for family, and the ravenousness that the loss of family creates in us, isn't just for belonging: it's for the grace that abides in serving those we love. — Gregory David Roberts

It took me a while to realize--but thankfully realized before it was too late--that a fancy house, car, and cable television don't bring much happiness if you're dead. If you're at the weight that I was--or close to it--and you put your love of food and laziness ahead of the love of your family, you're being selfish. Nothing else you've ever done will matter if your family is left alone with that fancy house, car, and cable television when you're gone. It's one thing to leave this world unexpectedly in some tragic accident, but it's stupid and selfish when you're packing your bags every time you sit at the dinner table. — Shawn Weeks

... the fabric of family, the limits of love, the loss of innocence and the birth of knowledge. — Betty Smith

Your loss, Elliot said to both of them, and shut the door.
That was love: Elliot couldn't command it, couldn't demand it. He could only leave the chill echoing place where it was not. — Sarah Rees Brennan

The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has come
to live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoiding
you, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that
Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stones
weep. And the way we love is no exception — Susan Abulhawa

I guess we'll never know exactly what ... the reasons behind the losses we experience in this life. But being angry doesn't make them any less devastating. It only robs us of the happiness and love we can experience. Only forgiveness can set us free. — Christene Houston

She had a sense of longing and loss that she had never had before. It was as if her family history had been erased and they'd been left unmemorable.She imagined that Rachel's family must have similar feelings, but she did not try to share these thoughts with Rachel. — Denny Taylor