Widower Quotes & Sayings

This story is about Howard Beale, who was the news anchorman on UBS TV. In his time, Howard Beale had been a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news, with a HUT rating of 16 and a 28 audience share. In 1969, however, his fortunes began to decline. He fell to a 22 share. The following year, his wife died, and he was left a childless widower with an 8 rating and a 12 share. He became morose and isolated, began to drink heavily, and on September 22, 1975, he was fired, effective in two weeks. — Paddy Chayefsky

They will try to ascribe a purpose to my death, as though it were a punishment, but don't you do so, in order that I continue to live in all the shadows of your longing. I will always be in your sleep and your wakefulness. I will be with you praying, propitiating and yearning for you, in sadness, in sorrow, in dismay and in the most profound happiness. — Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

The widower reviewed his past in a sunless light which was intensified by the greyness of the November twilight, whilst the bells subtly impregnated the surrounding atmosphere with the melody of sounds that faded like the ashes of dead years. — Georges Rodenbach

Warren had a most unusual household. A recent widower with four children between the ages of two and eight, he was not only a leading patriot but also had one of the busiest medical practices in Boston. He had two apprentices living with him on Hanover Street, and he sometimes saw as many as twenty patients a day. His practice ran the gamut, from little boys with broken bones, like John Quincy Adams, to prostitutes on aptly named Damnation Alley, — Nathaniel Philbrick

Whoever marries the spirit of the times must soon become a widower. — Peter Kreeft

He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower. — Helen Keller

You lost your wife, Douglas. My heartbreaks for you, it really does. But I lose my husband every day, all over again. And I don't even get to mourn. — Jonathan Tropper

Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died. — M.L. Stedman

It may have been characteristic of Mr. Dombey's pride, that he pitied himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower, confiding by constraint in the wife of an ignorant Hind* who has been working "mostly underground" all his life, and yet at whose door Death had never knocked, and at whose poor table four sons daily sit - but poor little fellow! — Charles Dickens

Why do any of us act the way we do? Is it our beliefs or our biology that shapes us? Lauren Grodstein considers this eternal question through the story of Andrew Waite, scientist, father, widower, struggling to raise two daughters, living with the ghost of his wife, facing a test of his faith in science. There are no easy answers here, just the honest complexity of human beings trying their best to be good people. The Explanation for Everything is moving, beautiful, and wonderfully funny. — Victor LaValle

My wife of more than forty-years shot herself yesterday afternoon.

At least that is what the police assume, and I am playing the part of grieving widower with enthusiasm and success. Life with Sarah has schooled me in self-deception, which I find--as she did--to be an excellent training in the deceiving of others. Of course I know that she did nothing of the kind. My wife was far too sane, far too rooted in the present to think of harming herself. In my opinion she never gave a thought to what she had done. She was incapable of guilt.

It was I who killed her. — Richard Mason

When a child loses his parent, they are called an orphan. When a spouse loses her or his partner, they are called a widow or widower. When parents lose their child, their isn't a word to describe them. This month recognizes the loss so many parents experience across the United States and around the world. It is also meant to inform and provide resources for parents who have lost children due to miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, molar pregnancy, stillbirths, birth defects, SIDS, and other causes. — Ronald Reagan

The death of a man's wife is like cutting down an ancient oak that has long shaded the family mansion. Henceforth the glare of the world, with its cares and vicissitudes falls upon the old widower's heart, and there is nothing to break their force, or shield him from the full weight of misfortune. It is as if his right hand were withered; as if one wing of his angel was broken, and every movement that he made brought him to the ground. — Alphonse De Lamartine

A woman who loses a husband is called a widow, a man who loses his wife is called a widower, and a child who loses his/her parents is called an orphan, but there is no word in the English language for a parent who loses a child (Jay Neugeboren). — David Asay

He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depress the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too real chest, making his widower's remembrances that much more convincing and the pain that much more real. — Jonathan Safran Foer

He who weds the spirit of the times quickly becomes a widower. — G.K. Chesterton

Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don't even realise that what you're choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won't pan out till you're sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun. — Catherynne M Valente

Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next. — William Ralph Inge

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

We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence. — Joseph Roux

Oh, I forgot to tell you the rest of it
- he's a widower now, so they can ride off together into the sunset, their wedding rings glinting. — Brenda Joyce

I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts. — Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

When a husband loses his wife, they call him a widower. When a wife loses her husband, they call her a widow. And when somebody's parents die, they call them an orphan. But there is no name for a parent, a grieving mother, or a devastated father who have lost their child. Because the pain behind the loss is so immeasurable and unbearable, that it cannot be described in a single word. It just cannot be described. — Bhavya Kaushik

I'm a widower with three sons and seven grandchildren. One of my sons is my partner on the ranch. — Wilford Brimley

Becky ... " Luke looks at me carefully. "Have you ever been on a horse in your life?"
"Yes! Of course I have!"
Once. When I was ten. And I fell off.
But I probably wasn't concentrating or something.
"Just be careful, won't you?" he says. "I'm not quite ready to become a widower. — Sophie Kinsella

Personally, I would imagine that to be the sole advantage of marrying a widower. That someone else would have removed the rough edges; broken him in, if you will. Also, I would imagine that by that age his lusts would long since have been sated, and abated, which would free one from a number of indignities. — Neil Gaiman

There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom. — Dean Koontz

It was inevitable: Yankel fell in love with his never-wife. He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too-real chest, making his widower's rememberences that much more convincing and his pain that much more real. — Jonathan Safran Foer

Being a widower is not that groovy when you lose someone you really love, and you have to go out and date again. — Pierce Brosnan

In a feverish fantasy, I imagined that there had been a time, when the world was young, that stars filled the sky - made a solid sheet of light arching over the earth. But one by one, the stars began to die - and Man, having a poor memory, began to believe that the sky had always been black.
I am a widower. I am the black spot left in the sky when a star has guttered out. — Megan Arkenberg

What fewer people know but many suspect is that it hasn't been the happiest of circumstances. Very few people in town know that Gabe is a fairly recent widower, and he's had a difficult time dealing with his grief. The pregnancy happened before he was ready. However, I am happy to say that he has made great strides toward moving on in the past few weeks." "By striding right into your bed?" Nic grinned. "That's part of it. — Emily March

You say you are an orpahn, or a widow or a widower, but when you have lost two sons on the same day, two brothers on the same day, what are you? What word is there to say what you have become? — Nathacha Appanah

Where I'm going, anything may happen. Nothing may happen. Maybe I will marry a middle-aged widower, or a longshoreman, or a cattle-hoof-trimmer, or a barrister or a thief. And have my children in time. Or maybe not. Most of the chances are against it. But not, I think, quite all. What will happen? What will happen. It may be that my children will always be temporary, never to be held. But so are everyone's.
I may become, in time, slightly more eccentric all the time. I may begin to wear outlandish hats, feathered and sequinned and rosetted, and dangling necklaces made from coy and tiny seashells which I've gathered myself along the beach and painted coral-pink with nail polish. And all the kids will laugh, and I'll laugh, too, in time. I will be light and straight as any feather. The wind will bear me, and I will drift and settle, and drift and settle. Anything may happen, where I'm going. — Margaret Laurence

I drift off for a while. I don't know how long, but when I open my eyes, the Oscars are still on and Alex tells me that Sid has gone and this makes me a little sad. Whatever the four of us had is over. He is my daughter's boyfriend now, and I am a father. A widower. No pot, no cigarettes, no sleeping over. They'll have to find inventive ways to conduct their business, most likely in uncomfortable places, just like the rest of them. I let him and my old ways go. We all let him go, as well as who we were before this, and now it's really just the three of us. I glance over at the girls, taking a good look at what's left. — Kaui Hart Hemmings

When he wasn't cutting the pitiful figure of a mourning widower, he was being a downright prick. — Tessa Dare

I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart. — Joyce Carol Oates

Each season, my balance gets worse, and sometimes I fall. I no longer cook for myself but microwave widower food, mostly Stouffer's. My fingers are clumsy and slow with buttons. — Donald Hall

Why a widow should raise an attractive or pathetic image in one's mind, or at the worst something rather bold and dashing, while widower seemed to have a vague connection with the word mother-in-law cannot be explained. Brightness falls from even Clive Newcome when we have to envisage him as a young widower in mourning. As for David Copperfield, his creator most wisely sent him abroad almost at once, and while he was still in England surrounded him with events so overwhelming that we never have time to think of his widowerhood. She — Angela Thirkell

I'm fine," she said. "I'm just hiding from the Queen General and her latest poster boy."
"The Queen General?" Which one of his sisters fit that description?
More like which one didn't.
"Queen General Marilyn," his visitor said. "Supreme ruler of Bliss and chairperson of Knot Festival."
The words 'Knot Festival' twisted CJ's stomach, and the room seemed to climb ten degrees hotter. He tugged at his bow tie. The woman kept talking...
Marilyn rewrote the Golden Husband Games rules so her Exalted Widower is eligible to be named Husband of the Half Century. And you know what? He's the reason my husband left me. — Jamie Farrell

As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent lost a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or a daughter. That seemed odd. As — M.L. Stedman

I think a lover, when broken, is given a gift
not a scar, not a poem, not a rhyme
(unless it fits.)
I think as humans, we see a set of hues
but when wounded, we see something more:
deeper shades of hurt and worry,
colors never seen before.
Because I can't imagine a child
could see the same black as a widower,
and I don't think healthy hearts
know the true meaning of blue.
When children close their eyes,
they see a color they call empty.
But in the eyelids of the bruised,
the empty black's a crowded room. — Katya Polo

Though sympathy tugged at her, Sophie's imagination made fearsome leaps. The grieving widower. The destitute governess. A motherless child. It had all the makings of a scintillating novel. — Laura Frantz

I have been a widower for nigh fifty years, but I am never alone. We had eight good years together, and they've lasted me the entire eighty. It's like that, you see, when you can marry where your heart lies. — Grace Burrowes

A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That's how awful the loss is. — Jay Neugeboren