pages quit and i lost the document i was working on

If you did not manually save your Pages document once and give it a practical name other than Untitled, the Pages autosave was not active, and quitting Pages, by intention or otherwise, would lose all of the temporary work in progress content. It would not be on a Time Machine backup either.

If you had manually saved that document, Pages remembers the last document save location, and the document would be the first item on the Pages open recents sub-menu.