"There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise."

Loss, Grief, Transformation, Identity

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"There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise."

Exlpore more Loss quotes

"Let me talk to my mother. She is listening from above."

Debasish Mridha, American Author

Loss, Mother, Heart, Talk

"Let me talk to my mother. She is listening from the above."

Debasish Mridha, American Author

Loss, Mother, Heart, Talk

"We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it."

Jorge Luis Borges, Argentinian Poet

Loss, Uncertainty, Change, Future

"I remembered the pain as clearly as if I were shifting - the pain of loss. I felt the agony of the single moment that I lost myself. Lost what made me Sam. The part of me that could remember Grace's name."

Maggie Stiefvater, American Author

Loss, Pain, Memory, Identity

"Usually it is through loss that things come to be of value."

Steven Redhead, British Author

Loss, Values, Life, Appreciation

"Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence."

Jodi Picoult, American Novelist

Loss, Absence, Presence, Awareness, Truth

"Rejection is one of the worse forms of pain. Loss is the worst. Grief haunts until you allow yourself to move on."

Angelica Hopes, Swiss Author

Loss, Rejection, Grief, Healing

"American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?"

Zadie Smith, British Novelist

Loss, Memory, Home, Reflection

"Sometimes losses in life are not losses at all. They are simply the evidence God provides, in order to build a story so profound, that it will cause social change."

Shannon L. Alder, American Author

Loss, Truth, Life, Faith

"She had died, I just never told her. So still, we walk, eat and sleep together, in fear one day she'll come to realize it."

Anthony Liccione, American Author

Loss, Death, Fear, Truth

Explore more quotes by Cheryl Strayed

"Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real."

Isolation

"God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch."

Divinity

"But as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn't mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again. Forgiveness means you've found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong."

Forgiveness

"The only way you'll find out if you 'have it in you' is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your 'limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude' is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some way inept. This is true of every writer, and it's especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you."

Action

"If, as a culture, we don't bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don't - if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live - well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease.We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help."

Success

"The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light."

Healing

"I had problems a therapist couldn't solve, grief that no man in a room could ameliorate."

Therapy

"It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubled my abilities, only when I thought how far i had yet to go that i lost faith that I would get there."

Perseverance

"It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve."

Distance

"Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid."

Light