"I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water."

Loss, Grief, Acceptance, Memory, Reflection

36

Create Your Own Wallpaper

Standard

Customized

"I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water."

Exlpore more Loss quotes

"As they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow."

Anne Rice, American Novelist

Loss, Death, Love, Witness, Memory

"It had been in their hands then; he was quite sure of it. But kids lose everything, kids have slippery fingers and holes in their pockets and they lose everything."

Stephen King, American Author

Loss, Regret, Truth, Today, Wisdom

"Well, finally, once you become an orphan, you're an orphan till the day you die. I keep having the same dream. I'm seven years old and an orphan again. All alone, with no adults around to take care of me. It's evening, and the light is fading, and night is pressing in. It's always the same. In the dream I always go back to being seven years old. Software like that you can't exchange once it's contaminated."

Haruki Murakami, Japanese Writer

Loss, Memory, Dream, Childhood

"Then Thalia Grace became their leader and started recruiting even more young women to their cause, which grated on Nico " as if Bianca's death could be forgotten. As if she could be replaced."

Rick Riordan, American Novelist

Loss, Truth, Regret, Life, Power

"Beckendorf closed eyes tight and brought his hand up to his watch.from that distance, the explosion shook the world. Heat seared the back of my head. The Princess Andromeda blew up from both sides, a massive fireball ofgreen flame roiling into the dark sky, consuming everything....I stared out the window into deep blue water. Beckendorf was supposed to go to college in the fall. He had a girlfriend, lots of friends, his whole life ahead of him. He couldn't be gone."

Rick Riordan, American Novelist

Loss, Truth, Regret, Life

"I don't really like this song," Emma had said."You told me it was your favourite.""It's beautiful. But it always makes me sad.""Why, love?" he'd asked gently. "It's about finding each other again. About someone coming home."Emma had lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at him earnestly. "It's about losing someone, and having to wait until you're together in heaven.""There's nothing in the lyrics about heaven," he'd said."But that's what it means. I can't bear the idea of being separated from you, for a lifetime or a year or even a day. So you mustn't go to heaven without me.""Of course not," he had whispered. "It wouldn't be heaven without you."

Lisa Kleypas, American Novelist

Loss, Sadness, Love, Heaven

"Tiffany found her mind filling up with an invisible gray mist, and in that thought there was nothing but grief. She could feel herself trying to push back time, but even the best witchcraft could not do that."

Terry Pratchett, English Author

Loss, Truth, Grief, Power, Wisdom

"We myopically stare at the gaping hole left in our lives and see nothing but the hole, not realizing a hole is defined by everything around it that is not a hole."

Craig D. Lounsbrough, American Author

Loss, Truth, Perception, Wisdom, Future

"Suddenly, as Avis clung to her father's neck and ear while, with a casual arm, the man enveloped his lumpy and large offspring, I saw Lolita's smile lose all its light and become a frozen little shadow of itself, and the fruit knife slipped off the table and struck her with its silver handle a freak blow on the ankle which made her gasp, and crouch head forward, and then, jumping on one leg, her face awful with the preparatory grimace which children hold till the tears gush, she was gone - to be followed at once and consoled in the kitchen by Avis who had such a wonderful fat pink dad and a small chubby brother, and a brand-new baby sister, and a home, and two grinning dogs, and Lolita had nothing."

Vladimir Nabokov, American Novelist

Loss, Family, Pain, Emotion

"Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house."

C. S. Lewis, British Author

Loss, Absence, Love, Body, Memory

Explore more quotes by Joan Didion

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

Literature

"The child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult."

Growth

"He meant doing things not because we were expected to do them or had always done them or should do them but because we wanted to do them."

Life

"I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car.I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give."

Identity

"There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

Authorship

"Carter and Helene still ask questions. I used to ask questions, and I got the answer: nothing. The answer is 'nothing."

Inquiry

"Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it."

Learning

"It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come-was anyone ever so young?"

Reflection

"Medicine, I have reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art."

Health

"It is hard for me to believe that Cornelius Vanderbilt did not sense, at some point in time, in some dim billiard room of his unconscious, that when he built 'The Breakers he damned himself."

Reflection