Unimaginable Loss Quotes

Ask anyone where they were when they heard of Diana's death, and they won't hesitate, because nobody can forget. Along with 9/11, it remains the most poleaxeing public event, news so shocking it made me shake, and drove everything else from my mind for days.

The abduction of a child is a tragedy. No one can fully understand or appreciate what a parent goes through at such a time, unless they have faced a similar tragedy. Every parent responds differently. Each parent copes with this nightmare in the best way he or she knows how.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

Losing my mum. That was a punch-me moment.

After a life deprived of everything from romantic love to the choice of when to wake up in the morning, after 29 years without the ability to have a career or even to be alone at toilet, the Bijani sisters are not symbols but women who have had to live a shared life of constant, quotidian sacrifice.

I don't even think I was quite a year old. My mother was maybe seven months pregnant with my little brother. I was sucked out of her arms, and she landed 75 yards away from our trailer and had a ruptured disc. The tornado set me down on top of this pile of corrugated lumber and scrap metal.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

My mother passed in 2002. That was a blow like no other blow.

We live in a country where John Lennon takes eight bullets, Yoko Ono is walking right beside him and not one hits her. Explain that to me!

You're never prepared to lose anybody in your family.

My mother's death was the defining moment of my life.

I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.

I think loss of loved ones is the hardest blow in life.

It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child.

When you have kids, you never think of burying your own child.

Being told to cut off and walk away from a child - I cannot imagine it. I think I'd rather die.

Mourning never ends for those who've faced unimaginable losses.

Four months is a lot of living with that little life in you-thinking about it, eating right for it, nurturing it and all of a sudden, it dies.

It was difficult knowing one of your cousins had lost his life.

Clearly, 9/11 would have to be some of the best work that I've done because I was working without a template, and that was very difficult. Having nearly been victimized by the north tower, it was difficult to remain composed and be informative.

I was slapped down to the ground when my son Wade died in 1996, in April of 1996.

John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

There's no easy time to lose a parent.

I have never understood why it is called losing a child. No parent is that careless. We all know exactly where our sons and daughters are; we just don't necessarily want them to be there

The biggest tragedy I had was the loss of my daughter from neuromuscular disease in 2000, at age 46.