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It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.
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Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)
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What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.
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Suzanne Collins (Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3))
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Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
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Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
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Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.
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John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
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Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
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Winston S. Churchill
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I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.
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Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1))
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The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
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Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
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...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.
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Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
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The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.
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John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
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People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.
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Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)
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Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.
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José N. Harris (MI VIDA: A Story of Faith, Hope and Love)
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If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.
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Charles Bukowski (What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire)
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Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.
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Mitch Albom (For One More Day)
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You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.
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Anne Lamott
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Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
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Edna St. Vincent Millay
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From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.
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Edgar Allan Poe
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If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?
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Jodi Picoult (My Sister's Keeper)
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It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.
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John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)
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You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
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Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)
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When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.
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John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)