Selected loss quotes

1. If they had said that the sun or the moon had gone out of the heavens, it could not have struck me with the idea of a more awful and dreary blank in creation than the words: 'Byron is dead!'

2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

3. How blessings brighten as they take their flight!

4. His folly has not fellow Beneath the blue of day That gives to man or woman His heart and soul away.

5. I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

6. Holy shadows of the dead, I'm not to blame for your cruel and bitter fate, but the accursed rivalry which brought sister nations and brother people, to fight one another. I do not feel happy for this victory of mine. On the contrary, I would be glad, brothers, if I had all of you standing here next to me, since we are united by the same language, the same blood and the same visions.

7. Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.

8. Heaven will be no heaven to me if I do not meet my wife there.

9. Now that I'm out and I'm shouting in doorways Freed from a love more like murder I should be singing but in liberation Feel like a ship with no rudder.

10. So fades a summer cloud away; So sinks the gale when storms are o'er; So gently shuts the eye of day; So dies a wave along the shore.

11. My wind is turned to bitter north, That was so soft a south before; My sky, that shone so sunny bright, With foggy gloom is clouded o'er My gay green leaves are yellow-black, Upon the dank autumnal floor; For love, departed once, comes back No more again, no more.

12. Dance on, dance on, we see, we see Youth goes, alack, and with it glee, A boy the old man ne'er can be; Maternal thirty scarce can find The sweet sixteen long left behind.

13. I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.

14. Victory is for them, not for us. We have not made profit out of our country's misfortune. Victory does not bring us luck.

15. That old bald cheater, Time.

16. I play honestly and I play to win. If I lose, I take my medicine.

17. If you don't win, it's not a great tragedy - the worst that happens is that you lose a game.

18. If the angels are unkind or the season is dark Or if in the end Love just falls apart Well then here's to our destruction Baby let me be your soul driver.

19. We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.

20. What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead.

21. The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.

22. When you can't have anything else, you can have virtue.

23. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!

24. The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood This Eastertide call into mind the men, Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should Have gathered them and will do never again.

25. The bell strikes one. We take no note of time But from its loss.

26. If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?

27. The only way to prove that you're a good sport is to lose.

28. They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.

29. Religions get lost as people do.

30. For of fortunes sharp adversitee The worst kynde of infortune is this, A man to han ben in prosperitee, And it remembren, whan it passed is.

31. Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

32. War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

33. I left Cuba when I was two years old. They took away my country, they stole the most intimate thing a human being can have. How could I forget that Fidel Castro was the person who did me so much harm?

34. You see, I have no real complaints of how you've left your past behind I guess what gets me worried is you've erased him from your mind.

35. So far as the personal side is concerned, the victory was to him who lost and the defeat to him who won. I can say that never in the last fifteen years have I had the peace of mind that I have since the election. I have almost a feeling of elation.

36. You will expect me to discuss the late election. Well, as nearly as I can learn, we did not have enough votes on our side.

37. It's like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it.

38. The time I burned my guitar it was like a sacrifice. You sacrifice the things you love. I love my guitar.

39. There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

40. The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.

41. Dear Madam, I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom. Yours, very sincerely and respectfully, Abraham Lincoln

42. Good friends we have had, oh good friends we've lost along the way In this bright future you can't forget your past So dry your tears I say No woman, no cry No woman, no cry Little darlin' don't shed no tears No woman, no cry

43. The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom we are anaesthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.

44. Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed, chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. During a man's life only saplings can be grown, in place of old trees- tens of centuries old- that have been destroyed. It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods,- trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time - and long before that - God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods, but he cannot save them from fools - only Uncle Sam can do that.

45. You spend you're whole life grieving for those who haven't died yet

46. Then [she] wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again

47. If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars. ~ 6

48. I didn't know the full dimensions of forever, but I knew it was longer than waiting for Christmas to come. --So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, p.38

49. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger - anything that can blow your candles out! - for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles Laura - and so goodbye:

50. The news came to the village - the dire news which spread across the land, filling men's hearts with consternation - that Byron was dead. Tennyson was then about a boy of fifteen. 'Byron was dead! I thought the whole world was at an end,' he once said, speaking of those bygone days. 'I thought everything was over and finished for everyone - that nothing else mattered. I remembered I walked out alone, and carved 'Byron is dead' into the sandstone.'

51. Sweet April-time - O cruel April-time! Year after year returning, with a brow Of promise, and red lips with longing paled, And backward-hidden hands that clutch the joys Of vanished springs, like flowers.

52. Elvis are you out there somewhere Looking like a happy man? In the snow with Rosebud And King of the Mountain.

53. A lost love. Deny it who will, ridicule it, treat it as mere imagination and sentiment, the thing is and will be; and women do suffer therefrom, in all its infinite varieties: loss by death, by faithlessness or unworthiness, and by mistaken or unrequited affection. ~ Ch. 10

54. To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love - namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness - this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear. ~ Ch. 10

55. Alexander Beetle I found a little beetle, so that beetle was his name, And I called him Alexander and he answered just the same. I put him in a matchbox, and I kept him all the day... And Nanny let my beetle out Yes, Nanny let my beetle out She went and let my beetle out- And beetle ran away. She said she didn't mean it, and I never said she did, She said she wanted matches, and she just took off the lid She said that she was sorry, but it's difficult to catch An excited sort of beetle you've mistaken for a match. She said that she was sorry, and I really mustn't mind As there's lots and lots of beetles which she's certain we could find If we looked about the garden for the holes where beetles hid- And we'd get another matchbox, and write BEETLE on the lid. We went to all the places which a beetle might be near, And we made the sort of noises which a beetle likes to hear, And I saw a kind of something, and I gave a sort of shout: 'A beetle-house and Alexander Beetle coming out!' It was Alexander Beetle I'm as certain as can be And he had a sort of look as if he thought it might be ME, And he had a kind of look as if he thought he ought to say: 'I'm very, very sorry that I tried to run away.' And Nanny's very sorry too, for you know what she did, And she's writing ALEXANDER very blackly on the lid, So Nan and me are friends, because it's difficult to catch An excited Alexander you've mistaken for a match.

56. true wars are never won

57. 'Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!' Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'

58. Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand Henceforward in thy shadow.

59. There are some similarities, of course [between Iraq and Vietnam]...Death is terrible.

60. More than anything I want to be able to go back to Cuba, to have a house to visit there, to know my roots. I lost my father as a little girl, and I want to be able to find him again in my heritage.

61. Tar De livslognen fra et gennemsnitsmenneske, sa tar De lykken fra ham med det samme.

62. The view... from my apartment... was the World Trade Center... Now it's gone. They attacked it. This symbol of... of American ingenuity and strength... and labor and imagination and commerce and it's gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is the Statue of Liberty. You can't beat that.

63. My eyes were running because there were piieces of zombie all over my toys, Jesus.

64. The news came to the village - the dire news which spread across the land, filling men's hearts with consternation - that Byron was dead. Tennyson was then about a boy of fifteen. 'Byron was dead! I thought the whole world was at an end,' he once said, speaking of those bygone days. 'I thought everything was over and finished for everyone - that nothing else mattered. I remembered I walked out alone, and carved 'Byron is dead' into the sandstone.'

65. And she said 'losing love is like a window in your heart.'

66. Before you, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars, points of light and reason. And then you shot across the sky, like a meteor. Suddenly, everything was on fire. There was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, nothing had changed. But my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn't see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything.

67. Everlasting farewells! and again, and yet again reverberated-everlasting farewells!

68. And for one desperate moment there he crept back in her memory. God it's so painful, something that's so close is still so far out of reach.

69. Our unborn never got to grow, never got to see what's next/In this world full of countless threats

70. The death of one god is the death of all.

71. When have I last looked on The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies Of the dark leopards of the moon? All the wild witches, those most noble ladies, For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.

72. Toll for the brave - The brave! that are no more; All sunk beneath the wave, Fast by their native shore!

73. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.- I cannot paint What then I was.

74. Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling From glen to glen, and down the mountain side, The summer's gone, and all the roses falling, It's you, it's you must go, and I must bide.

75. For they could not love you, but still your love was true And when no hope was left in sight, on that starry starry night You took your life as lovers often do, But I could have told you, Vincent, This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

76. Starry, starry night, portraits hung in empty halls Frameless heads on nameless walls with eyes that watch the world and can't forget. Like the stranger that you've met, the ragged man in ragged clothes The silver thorn of bloody rose, lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

77. Accept loss forever

78. Oh tarnish late on Wenlock Edge, Gold that I never see; Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge That will not shower on me.

79. The god of war has gone over to the other side.

80. Shaken and broken, our people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Fuhrer, we thank you!

81. We have nothing to lose except everything.

82. Break, break, break At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.

83. 'If all be dark, vague voice,' I said, 'These things are wrapt in doubt and dread, Nor canst thou show the dead are dead. 'The sap dries up: the plant declines. A deeper tale my heart divines. Know I not Death? the outward signs? 'I found him when my years were few; A shadow on the graves I knew, And darkness in the village yew.

84. Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld, Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

85. Dear as remembered kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

86. Lead out the pageant: sad and slow, As fits an universal woe, Let the long, long procession go, And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow, And let the mournful martial music blow; The last great Englishman is low.

87. For a breeze of morning moves, And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves On a bed of daffodil sky, To faint in the light of the sun she loves, To faint in his light, and to die.

88. A shadow flits before me, Not thou, but like to thee: Ah Christ, that it were possible For one short hour to see The souls we loved, that they might tell us What and where they be.

89. the little death. What would or could be left of a human being after such an experience?

90. Love alone was left, as a great image of a dream that was erased.

91. I was surprised by the resources they find. They are amazing. It doesn't get any worse than losing a Champions League game the way we did, but I felt the way they responded was absolutely magnificent.

92. I have given two cousins to war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother.

93. Audrey was meek, gentle and ethereal, understated both in her life and in her work. She walked among us with a light pace, as if she didn't want to be noticed. I regret losing her as a friend, as a role model, and as a companion to my youthful dreams.

94. Errantes silva in magna et sub luce maligna inter harundineasque comas gravidumque papaver et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos, quorum per ripas nebuloso lumine marcent fleti, olim regum et puerorum nomina, flores.

95. His loss is impossible to quantify. Everyone who has ever met him, in whatever capacity, feels they have lost something very special.

96. I always had a good relationship with him in our brief encounters. Senna was very good to us. He was very supportive of Michael. In fact, his was one of the first congratulatory messages Michael got after winning in Australia. I don't know what else to say. It comes as a tremendous shock to all of us. It's a devastating loss.

97. The life of Ayrton Senna was an example in dedication and the love of the sports few athletes have had at international level. The world has lost the greatest athlete in the history of motor racing and I have lost a great friend. Grand Prix racing will never be the same without Ayrton.

98. Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears: Yet, slower, yet; O faintly, gentle springs: List to the heavy part the music bears, Woe weeps out her division, when she sings. Droop herbs, and flowers, Fall grief in showers, Our beauties are not ours; O, I could still, Like melting snow upon some craggy hill, Drop, drop, drop, drop, Since nature's pride is now, a withered daffodil.

99. That house, whatever it was, was the embodiment of all the coldness in his mind. Harley said to himself: 'Whatever has been done to me, I've been cheated. Someone has robbed me of something so thoroughly I don't even know what it is. It's been a cheat, a cheat.:'

100. I met her in a Kingstown bar. We fell in love, I knew it had to end. We took what we had and we ripped it apart. Now here I am down in Kingstown again.