Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other.

Language death is a terrible loss, to all who come into contact with it: `Facing the loss of language or culture involves the same stages of grief that one experiences in the process of death and dying.”‘ We do not have to be members of an endangered community to sense this grief, or respond to it. Anyone who has worked with these communities, even over a short period, knows that it is a genuine insight, well justifying the dramatic nature of the analogy. And it is this keen, shared sense of loss which fuels the motivation and commitment of linguists, community groups, and support organizations in many parts of the world.

To convey in any existing language how I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.

I felt that to lose my language was to lose my soul, my being, and again, it's the image of being in a void. I think to be displaced is like in a void almost like, to think of T.S. Eliot, like hollowness, a world of hollowness...I feel that language evokes emotion, intimacy, affection. And the emotions I evoke in the Spanish language in my writing or even in my own life with other people are not the same ones as in the English language.

Along with the loss of the sense of self has gone a loss of our language for communicating deeply personal meanings to each other. This is one important side of the loneliness now experienced by people in the Western world.

At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain; the language of our sense and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain.

The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety.

Next to ‘God’, ‘love’ is the word most mangled in every language.

You left ground and sky weeping,
mind and soul full of grief.

No one can take your place in existence,
or in absence. Both mourn, the angels, the prophets,
and this sadness I feel has taken from me
the taste of language, so that I cannot say
the flavor of my being apart.

Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Tears are the silent language of grief

It's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss.

You don't share a language, you think, and then you realise, grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts.

To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love — namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness — this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear.