Grief Quotes - Page 2

A brave action is often followed by grief. Do not let my resistance to grief stop the brave action.

Alanis Morissette

I turned to face Audrey, and everything I loved was right there in her eyes, the memories tangible: the schooldays and sleepovers, the cheap bottles of wine and sappy chick flicks. She was there for my mother’s drunken relapses, there to hold me until I fell asleep the first time the ex from Seattle hit me. It was all there, and my God, each memory was suddenly sacred and the sun rose and set upon it.

It is through the tender austerity of our troubles that the Son of Man comes knocking. In every event He seeks an entrance to my heart, yes, even in my most helpless, futile, fruitless moments. The very cracks and empty crannies of my life, my perplexities and hurts and botched-up jobs, He wants to fill with Himself, His joy, His life...He urges me to learn of Him: 'I am gentle and humble in heart.

Elisabeth Elliot

Who but my mother held those small pieces of my childhood? Where would they go when she was gone?

But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Man is more himself, more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing and grief superficial.

G.K. Chesterton

I'd much rather be hold up with a ball of yarn, tucked inside the safety of the house with my mother. Out there, you must come to grips with the rot and bone, bloom and disintegration. It's part of the world, this ruthlessness, this severed leg, this sun-bleached skull. I can't really stand it. All the signs point toward change, and all that means is death. - 140-141

It's not that I am not moved by these things, that I don't them in my life. But lately, their power has diminished." - 140

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Memories begin to creep forward from hidden corners of your mind. Passing disappointments. Lost chances and lost causes. Heartbreaks and pain and desolate, horrible loneliness. Sorrows you thought long forgotten mingle with still-fresh wounds.

Erin Morgenstern

Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls — meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.

Your whole world ceases to exist and you're nothing but a shell of a person you once were. Your mom has dealt with it her way, me in mine, and you in yours," he said, lifting his hand off of John's gravestone and rising. "Your mom hates the world, I avoid it, and you try to save it.

Nicole Williams

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

If suddenly you do not exist,if suddenly you no longer live,I shall live on.I do not dare,I do not dare to write it,if you die.I shall live on.For where a man has no voice,there, my voice.Where blacks are beaten,I cannot be dead.When my brothers go to prisonI shall go with them.When victory,not my victory,but the great victory comes,even though I am mute I must speak;I shall see it come even though I am blind.No, forgive me.If you no longer live,if you, beloved, my love,if you have died,all the leaves will fall in my breast,it will rain on my soul night and day,the snow will burn my heart,I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, butI shall stay alive,because above all things you wanted me indomitable,and, my love, because you know that I am not only a manbut all mankind.

When other people are grieving, the newspaperman turns efficient.

I thought about how the past can become so small. An entire day, 24 separate, heavy hours, becomes the size of a tiny brown leaf falling from a tree. Before you know it, a whole year is just a pile of dead leaves on the ground. The year or so I’d spent in love with Chad was starting to feel so long ago, swept away by the wind. I knew that this year would soon feel far away too.

Kimberly Novosel

...nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.

All the tears in the world can't bring back the dead or wash away your fears and grief. I want you to put up your chin and tell yourself you are strong. And if you begin to weaken, hold on to me. That's what I am here for.

You think when someone you love passes away, everything becomes clearer, that your priorities and perspectives align in a way they’ve never aligned before because of the sobriety of it all. But it doesn’t. Those revelations just become skewed and distorted until you’re forced to rewrite them entirely. You can’t walk straight on a new path when you have too much luggage on your back. You just keep swerving, trying to find a way to accommodate the weight, but it’s all dead and you know it’s going to take you down. The only answer is to reroute.-Emma

These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath.

It is the heart that has been pierced that feels the most.

He was beneath the waves, a creature crawling the ocean bottom.

It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain.

Barbara Taylor Bradford

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)

Barbara Blatner

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

Barbara Blatner

If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you’d think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour.

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.

Sometimes I guess it just feels better to know that you have someone to help you when you can’t even help yourself. ~ Willow Mosby (Exposing ELE)

My grief has burrowed into me like a dark thing that eats away at my life.

Sometimes what a person expresses in their eyes is more than all the books you could read on suffering.

Shannon L. Alder

This rose of pearl-coated infinity transformsthe diseased slums of a broken heartinto a palace made of psalms and gold.

Aberjhani

People were freaked out, but they showed it in weird ways. Back home, people would have been weeping and doing a lot of very public group hugs. At Wexford people just aggressively pretended nothing had happened.

Maureen Johnson

Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.

Colson Whitehead

Grief shared was grief lessened.

Karen Marie Moning

The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.

By standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of another’s solitude, we may mediate the love of God to a person who needs something deeper than any human being can give.

Parker J. Palmer

The ticking of the clock has gotten so loud." - 74

And then I feel guilty, because I know all these offers are made in vain. I know I cannot get my mother back healthy for a day. ... My mom is sick, sick and dying, and no bargaining will change that. And it's in all the books, bargaining, which makes me embarrassed. Look at me grieving my textbook grief. - 150

Pain and grief have been kept buried for ages, bred in secrecy and shame, wrapped by an ongoing conspiracy of smiles and well-being. Pain and grief are most healing and ecstatic emotions. Yes, sure, they can be hard, yet what makes them most devastating is the perverted idea that they are wrong, that they need to be hidden and fixed. The greatest perversion I can conceive is the idea that illness and pain are a sign that there is something wrong in our life, that we have unresolved issues, that we have made mistakes. In this world everyone is bound to get ill, experience pain and die. The greatest gift I can give to myself and the world is the joyful acceptance of this. Today I want to be real, I will not hide my pain as well as my happiness. I will not care if my gloomy face or desperate words cause concern or embarrassment in others. I do not need be fed with reassuring words about the beauty of life. The beauty of life resides in the full acceptance of All That Is.

I would have been glad if it had been the Lord's will to let one of my children live.

Karen Cecil Smith

Apart from my father, this house if filled with women. Women stop their lives; they're programmed that way. A child comes into the world and suddenly the choices grow fewer. The women seem to understand the payoff. You sacrifice, yes. You don't get to the gym, to the shrink, to the office, but you get this fragment of a moment with a person who is momentary, who will not be like this again." - 74

She could almost feel him prodding her; urging her to go on. As the wails of pain and torment assulted her ears, she knew that's exactly what she would do until the war was over and she could crawl into a quiet, dark corner and mourn for the part of her that had died with him.

Jaclyn A. Wilson

In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on.

What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind.

What is love for, if not to intensify our affections—both in life and death? But, O, do not be bitter. It is tragically self-destructiveto be bitter.

At that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes.

Don't lick your wounds unless you care to taste the sting a second time.

Richelle E. Goodrich

My life has become a dismal sigh fettered by pangs of grief and anguished weeping.

Richelle E. Goodrich

I wish I believed him. He's looking at me like he can see where I begin.

I have discovered that sitting still leaves little spaces for the grief to get in, so I stay busy.

My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was pain no words can render.

Charlotte Brontë

An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

Rosamund Lupton

When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is 'acquainted with Grief', we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.

Emily Dickinson

What Karen wants to do - needs to do - is cry, but she can't. Here, alone, when she could howl, beat the sofa cushions, scream; now, somehow, she is unable. It's for fear that if she gives in to it, she'll lose all sense of who she is. She is afraid that if she falls apart in private, then she'll fall apart completely. That if she crumbles, like a house in an earthquake, she will disappear down some deep, dark crevasse, and never be able to pull herself out and put herself back together again.

Well, it is a particular sin to permit grief for what is gone to poison the praise for what blessings remain to us.

Lois McMaster Bujold

Gonzo's father told his son to grieve without reservation or embarrassment until he could grieve solemnly and inwardly, and then finally to hang up his tears and wear them only occasionally, as befits the true men of the heart. Grief is not a thing to be ashamed of or suppressed, he told Gonzo. Nor yet is it a thing to cherish. Feel it, inhabit it and leave it behind. It is right, but it is not the end.

Larkin gets it, got it, the lies we live just to tread through time.

Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazardfrom the shelf, but with Nabokov's firstsentence I knew it wasn't the thingto read to a dying man:The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,and common sense tells us that our existenceis but a brief crack of lightbetween two eternities of darkness.The words disturbed both of us immediately,and I stopped. With music it was the same --Chopin's Piano Concerto — he asked meto turn it off. He ceased eating, and dranklittle, while the tumors briskly appropriatedwhat was left of him.But to return to the cradle rocking. I thinkNabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.That's why babies howl at birth,and why the dying so often reachfor something only they can apprehend.At the end they don't want their handsto be under the covers, and if you should putyour hand on theirs in a tentative gestureof solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;and you must honor that desire,and let them pull it free.

Sorrow spoken lends a little courage to the speaker.

Walter Wangerin Jr.

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