The Art of Losing Quotes

“I think it is in grief that we need some reminder of our humanity--and sometimes, someone to say it for us. Poetry steps in at those moments when ordinary words fail: poetry as ceremony, as closure to what cannot be closed.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“To lose someone close to you is to enter an experience no amount of forethought or hindsight can free you from. You must live through grief. You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone's being gone, and forever. You must survive the sorrow.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“I have begun to believe in, and even to preach, a poetry of necessity. This is a recognition not just of the necessity of poetry to our lives, but also the fact that necessity is what drives most of the poetry that matters, or the way that it matters.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don’t know it. Why, after all, would you keep his crummy plaid shirts and give his good suits away? Why do material things matter at once less and more? Why, in the void, does ritual, both inherited and invented, rush in?”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“Grief might be easy
if there wasn't still
such beauty--would be far
simpler if the silver

maple didn't thrust
its leaves into flame,
trusting that spring
will find it again.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“Death brings with it a duty and devotion that cannot be explained to those who don't know it.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“Grief for the earth, accepting the grief of the flesh and the grief of our grieving forever; grief for the flesh and the body and face, for the eyes that can see only into the world, and the mind that can only think and feel what the world gives it to think and to feel; grief for the mind gone, the flesh gone, the imperfect pain that must stay for its moment; and grief for the moment, its partial beauties, its imperfect affections, all severed, all torn.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“Poetry steps in at those moments when ordinary words fail: poetry as ceremony, as closure to what cannot be closed.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“To lose someone close to you is to enter an experience no amount of forethought or hindsight can free you from. You must live through grief. You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone’s being gone, and forever. You must survive the sorrow.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing

“Often, in death, everything else fails. We are left only with the music and the meaning of poetry.”
― Kevin Young, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing