Man Who Lost Everything Quotes & Sayings

I would caution my Republican friends that [Obama has] three years to go, and in that three years the American people are going to want to see some progress and not just claims that this guy is out of office and we're going to do everything to destroy him or that somehow he is a 'socialist' taking over the country. Have we so lost our faith in this country that we think one person, one man can be can suddenly change our entire system? That's kind of absurd. — Colin Powell

An adult is one who has lost the grace, the freshness, the innocence of the child, who is no longer capable of feeling pure joy, who makes everything complicated, who spreads suffering everywhere, who is afraid of being happy, and who, because it is easier to bear, has gone back to sleep. The wise man is a happy child. — Arnaud Desjardins

In Memory of M. B.

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain. — Anna Akhmatova

One day the Buddha was sistting with some of his monks in the woods. They had just come back from an almsround and were ready to share a mindful lunch together. A farmer passed by, looking distraught.
He asked the Buddha, "Monks, have you seen some cows going by here?"
"What cows?" the Buddha responded.
"Well," the man said, "I have four cows and I don't know why, but this morning they all ran aay. I also have two acres of sesame. This year the insects ate the entire crop. I have lost everything: my harvest and my cows. I feel like killing myself."
The Buddha said, "Dear friend, we have been sitting here almost an hour and we have not seen any cows passing by. Maybe you should go and lookin the other direction."
When the farmer was gone, the Buddha looked at his friends and smiled knowingly. "Dear friends, you are very lucky," he said. "You don't have any cows to lose. — Thich Nhat Hanh

You are aware, I suppose, that I lived through two years of torture? Two years in hell, so I can stand before you now. Or lean before you, twisted as an old tree root. A crippled, shambling, wretched mockery of a man, eh, Lord Hoff? Let us be honest with one another. Sometimes I lose control of my own leg. My own eyes. My own face." He snorted. "If you can call it a face. My bowels, too, are rebellious. I often wake up daubed in my own shit. I find myself in constant pain, and the memories of everything that I have lost nag at me, endlessly." He felt his left eye twitching. Let it twitch. "So you can see how, despite my constant efforts to be a man of sunny temper, I find that I despise the world, and everything in it, and myself most of all. A regrettable state of affairs, for which there is no remedy. — Joe Abercrombie

Everything that I had in the past has been blown away from the images of tomorrow

This lost little boy has become a lost grown man — Austin V. Songer

This you have to understand. There's only one way to hurt a man who's lost everything. Give him back something broken. — Stephen R. Donaldson

The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand miles away. At best, a man suffered from strange lapses in judgment and perception, finding himself at the mirror about to comb his hair with a mechanical pencil, stepping into his undershirt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea. Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first glimpse of a pale hem of sunlight on the horizon in mid-September. But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their own melancholy that they were lost forever. And few among the wives and families of the men who returned from a winter on the Ice would have said what they got back was identical to what they had sent down there. — Michael Chabon

The clue to everything a man should love and fear in her was there right from the start in the ironic smile that primed and swelled the archery of her full lips. There was pride in that smile and confidence in the set of her fine nose. Without understanding why I knew beyond question that a lot of people would mistake her pride for arrogance and confuse her confidence with impassivity. I didn't make that mistake. My eyes were lost swimming floating free in the shimmering lagoon of her steady even stare. Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be if the sea were perfect. — Gregory David Roberts

The cynic makes fun of all earnestness; he makes fun of everything and everyone who feels that something can be done ... But in his heart of hearts he knows that he is a defeated man and that his cynicism is merely an expression of the fact that he has lost courage and is beaten. — George Edgar Vincent

The man who sees me in everything
and everything within me
will not be lost to me, nor
will I ever be lost to him.
He who is rooted in oneness
realizes that I am
in every being; wherever
he goes, he remains in me.
When he sees all being as equal
in suffering or in joy
because they are like himself,
that man has grown perfect in yoga. — Anonymous

The amorous shepherd has lost his staff,
And his sheep are straying on the hillside,
And he didn't even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much.
No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again.
Others, cursing at him, gathered his sheep for him.
No one had loved him, in the end.

When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything:
The great valleys full of the same green as always,
The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling,
All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present.
(And once again the air, that he'd missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs)
And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest.

(7/10/1930) — Alberto Caeiro

Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far, for the most part, stems from the opposition activity/
passivity, from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meant
to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a "dark
continent" to penetrate and to "pacify." (We know what "pacify" means in terms of
scotomizing the other and misrecognizing the self.) Conquering her, they've made
haste to depart from her borders, to get out of sight, out of body. The way man has
of getting out of himself and into her whom he takes not for the other but for his
own, deprives him, he knows, of his own bodily territory. One can understand
how man, confusing himself with his penis and rushing in for the attack, might
feel resentment and fear of being "taken" by the woman, of being lost in her,
absorbed, or alone. — Helene Cixous

That moment when I've lost everything I've ever dreamt of, ever craved for, and put in my everything away for, I would try, despite it all, till my last breath to go down the history of mankind as the man who tried, who sacrificed, who strived and who persevered the hardest in the most honest and toughest way. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

There are four things that make a man fight as you just did," the duke explained to Rumbold. "Love, despair, anger, or insanity."
Erik counted them off on his fingers. "Everything to lose, nothing to lose, someone's taken it, or you've lost it. — Alethea Kontis

Well of course man. We Indians have lost everything. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost. — Sherman Alexie

Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up the flowers, wind, water, a big rock. — Alice Walker

I dreamed a dream, Shy Cage."
He shifted so his hips were against mine and his voice was now raw when he ordered, "Shut up, baby, and kiss me."
"I dreamed a dream when I was sixteen and here I am, standing with my dream, feeling it come real."
"Fuck me," he muttered.
Then I knew he'd lost patience, because Shy slanted his head and kissed me.
Yes.
I dreamed a dream and there I was, a ring on my finger, my man's mouth on mine, standing with my dream, feeling it come real.
I was feeling everything.
And it was beautiful. — Kristen Ashley

Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write ... Strindberg, who was neither a good nor a wise man, had a stroke of luck. He went mad. He lost the power of inhibition. Everything down to the pettiest suspicion that the dog had been given the leanest mutton chop, poured out of his lips. Men of his weakness and sensuality are usually, from their sheer brutishness, unable to express themselves. But Strindberg was mad and articulate. That is what makes him immortal. — Rebecca West

Now what I want to know is what happened when you found Bryony, Leo," said Will.
"Did you just say your sister sent me, pack up everything and come with me this moment?"
"More or less."
"And she came away with you?"
"More or less." Leo tossed Bryony a mischievous look. "Although there might have been
laudanum, drugging, and a midnight abduction involved."
"Now that's a much better story," said Matthew. "I would pay to read that one."
"And for his knavery, Leo lost one of his - more important parts," said Bryony.
"No!" Matthew and Will shouted in unison.
"Bryony!" Callista squeaked.
"Kidney," Leo cried. "It was just a kidney. A man can live a perfectly vigorous life with
one kidney."
"You can call it a kidney if you want," said Bryony. — Sherry Thomas

On the mainland of America, the Wampanoags of Massasoit and King Philip had vanished, along with the Chesapeakes, the Chickahominys, and the Potomacs of the great Powhatan confederacy. (Only Pocahontas was remembered.) Scattered or reduced to remnants were the Pequots, Montauks, Nanticokes. Machapungas, Catawbas, Cheraws, Miamis, Hurons, Eries, Mohawks, Senecas, and Mohegans. (Only Uncas was remembered.) Their musical names remained forever fixed on the American land, but their bones were forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders. Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature - the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself. — Dee Brown

There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he resorts to mere expedients and tricks the opportunity is lost. He comes out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But, if he turns to God, the hour of suffering is the turning hour of his life. — Phillips Brooks

He hadn't actually lied to her about anything; she had erred in her assumptions about his life. What Archer knew about Josie was what she chose for him to know; what she knew about him was what he decided to tell her. They had reveled in their independence and now she knew that was a mistake. Understanding that made her feel lost. It was natural for a lover to believe she knew everything - intuitively, instinctively and intimately - about the man she had committed to. Wasn't it? — Rebecca Forster

I saw us both as if from a distance off in time: two small, craving, suffering creatures, soon to be gone ... So there he was, a man who had been given everything and did not know it, who had lost it all and now knew it, and who was boasting and grinning only to pretend for a few hours longer that he did not know it ... And there I was, a man losing what I was never given, a man yet rich with love, a man whose knees were weakening against gravity, who needed to go somewhere and lie down. I stood facing the man I had hated for forty years, and I did not hate him. If he had acknowledged then what he finally would not be able to avoid acknowledging, I would have hugged him. If I could have done it, I would have liked to pick him up like a child and carry him to some place of safety and calm. — Wendell Berry

There is only one sin and it is: weakness. When I was a boy, I read Milton's Paradise Lost. The only good man I had any respect for was Satan. The only saint is that person who never weakens, faces everything, and determines die game. — Swami Vivekananda

The multitude of men look satisfied and pleased; as if enjoying a full banquet, as if mounted on a tower in spring. I alone seem listless and still, my desires having as yet given no indication of their presence. I am like an infant which has not yet smiled. I look dejected and forlorn, as if I had no home to go to. The multitude of men all have enough and to spare. I alone seem to have lost everything. My mind is that of a stupid man; I am in a state of chaos.
Ordinary men look bright and intelligent, while I alone seem to be benighted. They look full of discrimination, while I alone am dull and confused. I seem to be carried about as on the sea, drifting as if I had nowhere to rest. All men have their spheres of action, while I alone seem dull and incapable, like a rude borderer.
(Thus) I alone am different from other men, but I value the nursing-mother (the Tao). — Lao-Tzu

Now she could look back down the long years and see herself in green flowered dimity, standing in the sunshine at Tara, thrilled by the young horseman with his blond hair shining like a silver helmet. She could see so clearly now that he was only a childish fancy, no more important really than her spoiled desire for the aquamarine earbobs she had coaxed out of Gerald. For, once she owned the earbobs, they had lost their value, as everything except money lost its value once it was hers. And so he, too, would have become cheap if, in those first far-away days, she had ever had the satisfaction of refusing to marry him. If she had ever had him at her mercy, seen him grown passionate, importunate, jealous, sulky, pleading, like the other boys, the wild infatuation which had possessed her would have passed, blowing away as lightly as mist before sunshine and light wind when she met a new man. — Margaret Mitchell

When you're Singapore's leader and your existence depends on performance - extraordinary performance, better than your competitors - when that performance disappears because the system on which it's been based becomes eroded, then you've lost everything... I try to tell the younger generation that and they say the old man is playing the same record, we've heard it all before. I happen to know how we got here and I know how we can unscramble it." - On one freak election result ruining Singapore — Lee Kuan Yew

Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point in space, the poet sees everything that happens in one point in time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-grey sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur - all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus. — Vladimir Nabokov

A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing. — Thomas Wolfe

I feel strongly that from my being a little lost boy with no family to becoming a man with two, everything was meant to happen just the way it happened. And I am profoundly humbled by that thought. — Saroo Brierley

Bashere shrugged, grinning brhind his grey-streaked moustaches, "When I first slept in a saddle, Muad Cheade was Marshal-General. The man was as mad as a hare in spring thaw. Twice every day he searched his bodyservant for poison, and he drank nothing but vinegar and water which he claimed was sovereign against the poison the fellow fed him, but he ate everything the man prepared for as long as I knew him. Once he had a grove of oaks chopped down because they were looking at him. And then insisted they be given decent funerals; he gave the oration. Do you have any idea how long it takes to dig graves for twenty-three oak trees?" "Why didn't somebody do something? His Family?" "Those not as mad as him, or madder, were afraid to look at him sideways. Tenobia's father wouldn't have let anyone touch Cheade anyway. He might have been insane, but he could outgeneral anyone I ever saw. He never lost a battle. He never even came close to losing. — Robert Jordan

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky. — Gustave Flaubert

Kumar was a man who felt in the end he had lost everything, even his Englishness, and could then only meet every situation - even the most painful - in silence, in the hope that out of it he would dredge back up some self-respect. — Paul Scott

By his disobedience of God's law, before man had exercised his power to bring children into the earth, not only Adam lost everything for himself, but his children were born as sinners, imperfect, and without the right to live. — Joseph Franklin Rutherford

General theories are everywhere condemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: 'The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.' We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters
except everything. — G.K. Chesterton

A cop lost his temper and rushed into the crowd to seize an agitator ... and that was the last we saw of him for about three minutes. When he emerged, after a dozen others had rushed in to save him, he looked like some ragged hippie ... the mob had stripped him of everything except his pants, one boot, and part of his coat. His hat was gone, his gun and gunbelt, all his badges and police decorations ... he was a beaten man and his name was Lennox. I know this because I was standing beside the big plainclothes police boss who was shouting, Get Lennox in the van! — Hunter S. Thompson

He hates for hate's sake. There are people like that. People who have everything. Money, power, sex. When they have everything they play for more sophisticated stakes than the rest of us. There are no thrills left to that man. The sun will never rise and delight him. he will never be lost in a strange town and forced to ask his way. I can't buy him. I can't tempt him. He wants a life for a life. — Jeanette Winterson

If a man has lost everything he has but his dreams, it means that he has still everything! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

He's a sick old man who's lost everything and everyone. You have a huge heart, Gabriel - find room in it to be kind. — Nalini Singh

That one you have tried to kill many times, Rand said, that one who lost his kingdom, that one from whom you took everything ...
Lurching, bloodied from the sword strike to his side, the last king of the Malkieri stumbled to his feet. Lan thrust his hand into the air, holding by its hair the head of Demandred, general of the Shadow's armies.
That man, Rand shouted. That man still fights! — Robert Jordan

She had been ready to love this man from the moment she first saw him. In all these years, that had never changed. They'd hurt each other, let each other down, and yet, here they were after everything, together. She needed him now, needed him to remind her that she was live, that she wasn't alone, that she hadn't lost everything. — Kristin Hannah

But a day later, it was 'Prof Tim says low fat is a fraud,' when he was eating a tub of yoghurt at his desk for breakfast. He let that slide too. Until the following morning, when he and a packet of Simba salt-and-vinegar crisps walked out of the morning parade, and Mbali said, 'Prof Tim says it's the carbs that make you fat, you know,' and he couldn't take it any more and snapped: 'Prof Tim who?' And so she told him. Everything. About this Prof Tim Noakes who once got the whole fokken world eating pasta, and then he did an about face and said, no, carbs are what's making everyone obese, and he wrote a book of recipes, and now he was Mbali's big hero, 'Because it takes a great man to admit that he was wrong', and she had already lost so much weight and she had so much more energy, and it wasn't all that hard, she didn't miss the carbs because now she ate cauliflower rice and cauliflower mash and flax seed bread. Flax seed bread, for fuck's sake. — Deon Meyer

When I came it was in the face of everything decent, white sperm dripping down over the heads and souls of my dead parents. If I had been born a woman I would certainly have been a prostitute. Since I had been born a man, I craved women constantly, the lower the better. And yet women - good women - frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Nothing was lost when they left. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price. Either way I was lost. A strong man would give up both. I wasn't strong. So I continued to struggle with women, with the idea of women. — Charles Bukowski

He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind; to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything. — Graham Greene

Suzanne had a room on a waterfront street in the port of Montreal. Everything happened just as it was put down. She was the wife of a man I knew. Her hospitality was immaculate. Some months later I sang it for Judy Collins over the telephone. The publishing rights were lost in New York City, but it is probably appropriate that I don't own this song. Just the other day I heard some people singing it on a ship in the Caspian Sea. — Leonard Cohen

His tender tone turned her heart over. She obliged, tilting her head back slightly and looking up at him in the firelit darkness. When he bent his head and his mouth met hers, she gave a little sigh, her lips parting slightly in surprise and expectation. He kissed her with the same sure decisiveness with which he did everything else, his mouth trailing to her cheek and chin and ear, returning again and again to her mouth and lingering there, his breath mingling with her own.
She felt adrift in small, sharp bursts of pleasure. Was this how a man was suppose to kiss a woman? Tenderly ... firmly ... repeatedly? His fingers fanned through her hair till the pins gave way and wayward locks spilled like black ribbon to the small of her back. In answer, her arms circled his neck, bringing him nearer, every kiss sweeter and surer than the one before. Soon they were lost in a haze of sighs and murmurs and caresses. — Laura Frantz

My mum died of leukemia when I was in high school - she lost her life at 40. It was very hard, and I didn't do that much in Chicago after that. I actually sat around and didn't do anything for three years. I didn't know what I wanted to do anymore because my everything was gone. I was a mama's boy, and I had to turn into a man real quick. — Cory Hardrict

And if you'd been healthy and happy, you wouldn't have come home?"
"When everything is lost a man seeks refuge, as if he were returning to his mother's womb."
"And after that?"
"After that he forgets. He's driven to it by his restlessness. He wants to be what he was not, or what he was. He runs away from his fortune and looks for another. — Mesa Selimovic

You should know there is nothing more dangerous than a man who is not afraid to die. i have lost everything, but that frees me. — Julie Kagawa

The worst bankrupt in the world is the man who has lost his enthusiasm. Let a man lose everything else in the world, but his enthusiasm and he will come through again to success. — William Howard Arnold

What has that to do with love?"
"A great deal. It takes care of its continuance. Otherwise we would love once only and reject everything else later. But as it is, the remnant of desire for the man one leaves behind, or by whom one is left behind, becomes the halo around the head of the new one. To have lost someone before in itself gives the new one a certain romantic glamour. The hallowed old illusion. — Erich Maria Remarque

Meditate but one hour upon the self's nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man, said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect to a Western visitor.
Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over the world's unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything. — Emil Cioran

The next day I was driven down to New York City to take the physical. It was one of the strangest things I'd ever seen. Several hundred young men, maybe even a thousand, in their skivvies, walking around an enormous room, all of us lost, dazed, and confused.
Some of these guys had dodged the draft and were there under the watchful eyes of dozens of federal marshals lined up against one of the walls. After eight hours of being poked, prodded, stuck, and poked again, I was given a large red envelope. I had been rejected. I had the respiratory problems of an old man, high blood pressure, partial loss of hearing, very bad teeth, very flat, very wide feet and I tested positive for tuberculosis.
"Frankly," the doctor said, "I don't know how the hell you're even standing up," and that was when the sergeant told me that if they bottled everything that was wrong with me "we could take over the world without a shot. — John William Tuohy

In point of fact, he was not afraid to die, not anymore. He now understood with a faith that he had never before possessed that he would see those he had lost when he died, that everything would be made whole, that he would talk to Boukman, and his mother and father and sister, again. It was true that there was no need on earth that could not be slaked and satisfied. When you are thirsty there is water. When you are hungry there is food. It is impossible to need a thing without that thing being available for the having. A man may want a green horse that flies, but he canot need one, for there is no such thing.
At this precise moment, Toussaint felt that he needed Boukman, that he could not bear it if he never saw him again, and he knew, because this need existed, that it would be met. — Nick Lake

You take a shower, your head is up, far away from everything, lost in the clouds, but down in the tub, man, you know who you are. — Toby Barlow

Man's true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good. — Blaise Pascal

Who the hell are you?" "It doesn't matter who I am. It just matters who you are. Years ago... before you were born... you were my mother." His mother? "I'm taking down your license plate and calling the police." "Kate, is everything okay?" It was Mr. Niles, their neighbor, still in a suit, his tie undone as he walked across his own lawn. Kate sized the old man. "Go." "Does the name Daniel Weaver mean something to you?" Daniel fucking what? "I said go." "Your friend Kev. Do you know who he really is?" Another chill. This one making her quiver. "He's not my friend." She searched the man's eyes. They remained kind. "Get lost." The man entered his car, and Kate watched as he started his engine, making sure he drove off. — Eric Marier

She smiled thoughtfully. "I think Jackson was like a lost puppy. He needed purpose, someone to believe in him and love him despite his bullshit. But he didn't have that, so he just went around humping everyone's leg and peeing everywhere. Then you came along and he thought he found that owner that would give him that purpose - something that would make him feel needed - but you chose the fancy pet store puppy instead, so he went back to peeing on everything and destroying all the furniture."
"Um, Whit ... is there a point to this?"
"We all need someone to believe in us. It helps us see our full potential. You were that someone to believe in him. I think he'll be a new man because of it."
"So you're saying I rescued a lost puppy, and now he'll become a topnotch show dog because I'm just so amazing?"
"Exactly."
"You have such an eloquent way with words."
"No shit, right?"
"Precisely."
-Emma and Whitney — Rachael Wade

We look around us and we find ourselves confused as to why the world has fallen into such deep darkness. And standing in this descending darkness, what we need to realize is that the farther we move from God, the darker everything gets. And no light of man can illuminate that kind of darkness. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Right, but you know, what would any of us lose by losing our possessions. Maybe we would gain something, like relationships, like the beauty of good friends, intimacy, you know what I mean, man? Like we wouldn't be losing anything if we lost our stuff, we'd be gaining everything. — Donald Miller

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

For the value of everything exists for man only so long as he does not understand it. When he has fully understood, the value is lost, be it the lowest thing or the highest thing. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

The continent is full of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful - or not at all. The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it's the same story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people - healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up. — Henry Miller

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms, them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready. — Wendell Berry

First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the "wilderness of upper Egypt" to "wander in dry places." Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence
lost because he has immured himself in it and closed out everything else. So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage. — Thomas Merton

Neither man spoke, both lost in thought. Lucien was visited by the awful memory of the day when Cedric's parents died.
Lucien knew that Cedric had been watching over Audrey at the Sheridan townhouse on Curzon Street when a footman had come running. Cedric once told him that everything seemed to slow from that moment on. The footman was flushed and sputtered about a carriage accident and finally blurted out, "Dead, sir. Both Lord and Lady Sheridan are dead. Your sister suffered a broken arm, but is alive. Lord Rochester was nearby and helped in rescuing your sister."
Lucien would never forget that moment when he'd brought Horatia home after the accident. Cedric had taken two steps towards the door and his legs gave out, sinking to his knees.

-His Wicked Seduction — Lauren Smith

Strangely enough, he didn't feel any guilt for separating himself from his past. Five years ago, he clearly heard in his dream a message brought to him by Archangel Michael from the God Almighty, telling him he should get up and leave everything behind; that his place was not there; that it was time to go in search for his true self and for his true destiny.
Now, five years after, he was sitting in the Bowery chapel, a broken and homeless man, still trying to find that which he was looking for. But he didn't regret anything he had done in those five years. In his mind, it wasn't his doing. He sincerely believed that he surrendered his own will to the will of God and that everything that happened to him, good or bad, had to happen for some reason. It was God's doing. It was his destiny. He just had to figure out why. — Stevan V. Nikolic

I tried, Tess. I really did. I did everything you asked of me. I did everything a man in love would do for his woman. But you don't want me and my beast no longer wants to hurt you. Whatever we had ... it's lost. — Pepper Winters

How do you teach a man who has lost everything, not to fear it happening again? How do you teach a person to trust in something none of us can guarantee? — Mia Sheridan

In a universe where all values have been shattered, where religions and histories and literatures and social structures have lost their meaning, man has to stand up again, accept his condition, accept that he is alone, and has no protection, and proceed to create his own world, his own values, his own decisions, his own actions - and be willing to pay the consequences, to be responsible for everything he thinks says, and does. — Jud Newborn

He could find out if Tasev was guilty, then make him wish he'd never been born. A quick death for Tasev would be too easy.
No way in hell would that happen. The man would suffer for a long time before he took his last breath. That part of Levi had changed and he knew it. He'd never relished death or suffering before. Then he'd lost everything that mattered. — Katie Reus

The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason ... — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Not one fuckin' thing gentlemanly about protecting what's yours. Looks like you're gonna lose it, you do everything you can to stop that from happening." Max looked back to Niles. "And you didn't do that. She was a week away from me, she walked into a room I was in holdin' another man's hand, I'd lose my fuckin' mind. Not at her. Wonderin' where I lost my way and I'd talk to her about how to find my way back. — Kristen Ashley

Do you know I've been sitting here thinking to myself: that if I didn't believe in life, if I lost faith in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man's disillusionment
still I should want to live. Having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn away from it till I had drained it! At thirty though, I shall be sure to leave the cup even if I've not emptied it, and turn away
where I don't know. But till I am thirty I know that my youth will triumph over everything
every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I've asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that could overcome this frantic thirst for life. And I've come to the conclusion that there isn't, that is until I am thirty. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky