Quotes & Sayings About Feeling Bereft

I half ran back to the car, feeling needlessly afraid. I was thinking of the violence of my last meeting with Scott, of the way he was at the end - wild and paranoiac, on the edge of madness. There'll be no peace for him now. How can there be? I think about that, and the way he used to be - the way they used to be, the way I imagined them to be - and I feel bereft. I feel their loss, too. — Paula Hawkins

His warmth was like a gift given and snatched away, and she stood there with her back to the window, feeling chilled, bereft, and undone. And angry. It was a childish, cartoonish anger- facing Akiva, she had wanted to beat her fists at his chest and then fall against him and feel his arms close around her. — Laini Taylor

For the rest of the afternoon, Rebecca wandered around the house tidying up halfheartedly, feeling bereft and disoriented, trying to balance impassive mass of all the ordinary things of her life with her sense that everything had changed. Inevitably, the weightless moments with Mike began to seem unreal. All her furniture said that love was a bubble and a fluke. — Tim Farrington

When we are cut off from the fulfillment of our basic needs we seek out substitutes to temporarily ease the longing. Bereft of connection to nature, connection to community, intimacy, meaningful self-expression, ensouled dwellings and built environment, spiritual connection, and the feeling of belonging, lots of us over-consume, overeat, over-shop, and over-accumulate. How much do you need to eat, to compensate for a feeling of not belonging? How much pornography to compensate for a deficit of intimacy? How much money to compensate for a deep sense of insecurity? No amount is enough — Charles Einstein

It was as if the demise of the owner had lent the flat a physical void it hadn't had before. At the same time he had the feeling that he wasn't alone. Harry believed in the existence of the soul. Not that he was particularly religious as such, but it was one thing which always struck him when he saw a dead body: the body was bereft of something ... the creature had gone, the light had gone,there was not the illusory afterglow that long-since burned-out stars have. The body was missing its soul and it was the absence of the soul that made Harry believe. — Jo Nesbo

Then perhaps there is a third kind of loss
the loss that comes when you notice the limits of your knowledge of God, when you feel bereft of guidance, when you feel the loss of God's saving power or of God's grace. This feeling of loss is really a way of noting, and mourning, God's hiddenness. This is the loss you name when you ask why God does not answer your prayers. It is the loss entailed when you realize that Jesus is more mysterious and more inscrutible than you had at first understood. — Lauren F. Winner

Had I no eyes but ears, my ears would love. That inward beauty and invisible;
Or were I deaf, thy outward parts would move each part in me that were but sensible: Though neither eyes nor ears, to hear nor see, yet should I be in love by touching thee.
'Say, that the sense of feeling were bereft me, and that I could not see, nor hear, nor touch, and nothing but the very smell were left me, yet would my love to thee be still as much; for from the stillitory of thy face excelling comes breath perfum'd that breedeth love by smelling. — William Shakespeare

My mind is, to use a disgustingly obvious simile, like a wastebasket full of waste paper; bits of hair, and rotting apple cores. I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends. It was that way with Ann: I admired her wit, her riding, her vivacious imagination - all the things that made her the way she was. I could lean on her as she leaned on me. Together the two of us could face anything - only not quite anything, or she would be back. And so she is gone, and I am bereft for awhile. But what do I know of sorrow? — Sylvia Plath