Anna Quindlen Quotes

Whenever you give up something, you must replace it with something.

We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.

Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.

But your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn't a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you'll forgive my saying so, anywhere.

Never take away anything if you have nothing better to offer

She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek.

There’s a hollow where he used to be, and it echoes with self-imposed loss.

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

Dream that you died It takes you out of your mind The black walls of space Take me all the way

i felt her absence. it was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. you wouldn't need to run to the mirror to know they were gone

I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.

The loss of enemies does not compensate for the loss of friends.

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.

You are... you're like a beating heart. A glowing lamp. I've never met anyone like you before.

The longer one lives in this hard world motherless, the more a mother's loss makes itself felt.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

If hers are the stars in the nighttime sky, mine are the haunted empty spaces in between.

The cup was emptied and would never be filled again.

The void Papa's death left in me became a kind of cavity, into which later experiences were to be laid.

Not everything," he said. "Not the important things. My kids are safe. You're safe. That's all I really care about. This" - he said motioning - "is just stuff. Most of it can be replaced. It just takes time.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

Nothing stings us so bitterly as the loss of money

You lose somebody you've possibly known for years and on top of that you lose a character that you love seeing on TV so I think that kind of makes it cool that we pay a price too. That it is painful on many levels and its amazing to be writing that moment and crossing that line right on the page and seeing the ugliness of it and having to deal with it. It's a very weird thing.

That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?