Grieving Quotes

Looking back, my greatest regret is not that I didn't love them enough (to the brink of insanity and back again), but that I couldn't save them from themselves.

Bailey Vincent

Eby wanted to say so much to her. She wanted to say that waking up is the most important part of grieving, that so many women in their family failed to do it, and she was proud of Kate for fighting her way back. But Eby didn't say anything. She could fix a lot of things, but family wasn't one of them. It was one of the hardest things she'd ever had to come to terms with.

Sarah Addison Allen

I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you.And I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you.No, I don't want to fall in love (This world is only gonna break your heart)No, I don't want to fall in love (This world is only gonna break your heart)With you (This world is only gonna break your heart)What a wicked game to play, to make me feel this way.What a wicked thing to do, to let me dream of you.What a wicked thing to say, you never felt this way.What a wicked thing to do, to make me dream of you and,I want to fall in love (This world is only gonna break your heart)No, I want to fall in love (This world is only gonna break your heart)With you.

Chris Isaak

But grieving people are selfish. They won’t let you comfort them and they say you don’t understand and they make you feel useless when all your life you’ve been functional to them.

Melina Marchetta

To confront death, in any guise, is to identify with the victim and face what is unsettling and sobering

E B White

A dog's good for filling a grief-dug hole.""In the Shape of Shep

Eileen Granfors

He was a son of the revolutionary movement when he and the revolutionary movement were still pristine. It was a special time for Filipino activists—a time when a hundred flowers bloomed and a thousand thoughts contended in a movement that did not know yet the price of betrayal from within. But flowers wilt and thoughts give way to rancor with the passing of years. And so some may grieve not his passing, while others fall to the ground in tears./FOR HORACIO BOY MORALES, JR. (September 11, 1943 – February 29, 2012)

Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.

John Green

It is regret for the absence of his loved one which causes a mourner to grieve: yet it is clear that this in itself is bearable enough; for we do not weep at their being absent or intending to be absent during their lifetime, although when they leave our sight we have no more pleasure in them. What tortures us, therefore, is an idea.

Seneca

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

Ursula K Le Guin

Remembering our loved ones is breathing life into their fading images, that we might once more see their faces and pass along a tearful “I miss you.

Richelle E. Goodrich

You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me.... You'll be all right.

Cormac McCarthy

Death doesn't happen instantly. For a little while, you hover around your body, confused. What you want more than anything is to go home, to be safe, to know you're okay. But my life was over.

Caroline Flohr

Nothing you did could have changed anything. And that being angry and blaming yourself for not being able to control the past or the future is only going to hurt worse. If you keep thinking like this, you will only be re-inventing pain.Heaven would tell you that it’s just a little rain. And it’s not the rain that kills you, it’s the pain of wanting to control the sun.

Tessa Shaffer

Like my loved one, I am convinced that we all have critical conditions. Battles that we undertake behind the hospitals, in lonely alleys, secret locations and sometimes public places that are out of reach to those who seem to care.

Phindiwe Nkosi

He means to make his subjects merciful and wise; sorrow and struggle bringeth both. We will, he tells me, grow by grieving, live by dying, love by losing. The heart itself is the field of battle and the garden green.

Andrew Peterson

You’ve got to trust yourself. Be gentle with yourself. And listen to yourself. You’re the only person who can get you through this now. You’re the only one who can survive your story, the only one who can write your future.All you’ve got to do, when you’re ready, is stand up, {and begin again.}

Tessa Shaffer

He was a practical man: give him a sensitive technical instrument, and he could maintain it; something broken, and he could mend it, meditatively, efficiently. But confronted by his grieving wife, he felt useless.

M.L Stedman

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

Arthur Golden

...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

Barbara Blatner

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

He was like the other half of myself,' says Boris...Ulrich says, 'You haven't lost {him}, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinons, or your hair has turned like his.'There are no more facts about him -- that part is over. Now is the time for essential things...Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son.'You'll live astride the line that separates life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them; you'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgment falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.

Rana Dasgupta

The train blows, just when I was forgetting. Forgetting that I am here alone. And I wonder if those cars got held up by its passing, just as I have yours.

Kellie Elmore

The dirty secret she’d learned about grief was that nobody wanted to hear about your loss a week after the funeral. People you’d once considered friends would turn their heads in church or cross to another side of a shopping mall to avoid the contamination of your suffering. “You might imagine I’m coping day by day,” she murmured. “But it’s more a case of hour by hour, and during my worst times, minute by minute.

Susan Dormady Eisenberg

She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.

Gillian Flynn

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.

Donna Tartt

He wept bitter tears over the death of his enemy. It was his enemy, after all, who knew him best and kept him up at night.

Donna Lynn Hope

I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.

Shannon Celebi

…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can’t know, is kind.tI shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly…I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored.tI suspect that the ease of Wally’s death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he’s all right now.And yet.tAnd yet he’s gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily hourly presence. tMy experience of being with Wally… brought me to another sort of perception, but I can’t stay in that place, can’t sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he’s all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he’s gone.tAnd doubt. And the fact that we can’t understand, that it’s our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing?tWe need our doubt so as to not settle for easy answers. Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves…Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see.t Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind.

Mark Doty

I am not alive if I am only a wispy memory in someone’s fickle brain . . .

Brian M. Holmes

Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in the stars but rather closer to the earth her boots stand upon.

Larry Watson

There need not be a purpose to a person's death, other than that they have lived the length of their days on this Earth and now begin the longer part of their existence.

Brian M. Holmes

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there.

Larry Watson

There's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.

Jonathan Tropper

Sometimes all you can do is hug a friend tightly and wish that their pain could be transferred by touch to your own emotional hard drive.

Richelle E. Goodrich

It is not as if an 'I' exists independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is part of what composes who 'I' am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who 'am' I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost 'you' only to discover that 'I' have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost 'in' you, that for which I have no vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as *the tie* by which those terms are differentiated and related.

Judith Butler

Grief is such a lonely thing. There is no-one in it with you - others may grieve for the same soul, but they do not grieve exactly for what you also grieve. No-one has lost precisely what you have lost. Not exactly, never exactly. We are in it alone.

Susan Fletcher

Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.

Siri Hustvedt

I miss you so much in these wee morning hours,when the depth of the night sets my spirit free.When the forest is dark, and there doesn’t have to be anything in the worldbut the beauty I pull out of it.I miss you throughout the day,as I come across glories and wonders that could easily overwhelm me,but just dull because you’re not here to enjoy them.

Edward Fahey

...and then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate. Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't.

Mordecai Richler

In the chain of events, it is arbitrary to be sentimental about the passing of any one link.

Johnny Rich

But in all of the sadness, when you’re feeling that your heart is empty, and lacking, You’ve got to remember that grief isn’t the absence of love. Grief is the proof that love is still there.

Tessa Shaffer

Death will paint everything a different shade of remorse. You’ll feel guilty that you’re still breathing.tBut you can’t stop.You’ll feel guilty for wanting to laugh again. tAnd it will be awful the first time that you do. You’ll feel guilty for just about everything at first.And someday, at some point, you’ll start to feel guilty . . . for forgetting to feel guilty.But of all Heaven’s lessons, guilt isn’t one of them. You don’t need to hold on to it. It doesn’t need to be a practice and it shouldn’t be your life. tHeaven would never approve of your guilt.Because Heaven has no regrets.

Tessa Shaffer

She scanned the Starveil posts, her mood darkening. Spartan had been a part of her life since elementary school. Losing him felt like having a piece of herself torn away. No amount of fix-it fics or alternate universes could change the fact her one true character had died.

Danika Stone

The truth of it was he didn't want her. He wanted Mary Kate with every cell of his body. He missed everything about her. The feel of her sleeping at his side. Her gentle snores. Her soft brown curls tickling his nose enough to wake him from a sound sleep even on nights when he needed it most. Her smile. The smell of her. At odd moments he thought he had heard her laughter, or he'd catch a glimpse of her in the corner of an eye, but all of it was a lie, and every time it happened it was as if someone had ripped a deep wound in his chest. The pain was raw enough to make him want to take a razor to his wrist, but each time he considered acting upon the idea something stopped him, and so, he stumbled on barely alive and wishing for an end. At times he couldn't breathe, couldn't move without wanting to scream.

Stina Leicht

In the grief that comes with recognizing what happened to us, we often feel there is nowhere to turn for solace…We do things to keep it away, such as becoming overly busy or using drugs or alcohol to numb our feelings. When we are caught up in resistance, we do not feel hope, but when we surrender to our sadness fully, hope trickles in.

Maureen Brady

When I could find something to laugh about for 30 minutes, my grief lightened just enough to make the day bearable.

Sharon E. Rainey

Grief makes gravity heavier and air molecules denser, so breathing is accomplished in a shallow, half-hearted way.

Dee-Williams

Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.

Sherman Alexie

. . . I understand that I was writing (recording) as well as seeking to right (to rectify) the wrong, and now, as I retell the tale, I realize that ‘I am still at the same subject’ still engaged in the same fearful and fierce activity–writing and seeking to right a mortal wrong. (86-87)

Sandra M. Gilbert

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

Alexandra Fuller

I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it.

Rachel Joyce

I wish I could take my brain and put it inside your head,” Winslow said. “Just for a moment. Then you’d know what all I can’t find how to say.

Alan Heathcock

Wandering is better than place sometimes, than home, than destination. Sometimes she can eke out the idea that wandering is possibility, chance, serendipity--he might be there, that place she didn't think to look, hadn't worked hard enough to find....

Michelle Latiolais

...she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk's bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs, flooding across the rough wooden floor, down the narrow wooden stairs and out into the old soil of the garden. No roses, no, she does not even ask to make roses, just dissolution; most any night she asks just for that.

Michelle Latiolais

Verily, a man should not cling to those who have passed, for he will likely neglect service to the living.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you.

Kellie Elmore

The pain of your loss will return. Less, but still considerable. I know you've worked hard to release it, but it can still take hold of you. I will help you sing away the fury, but I will not bear it for you.

Alex Bledsoe

Do you think that God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn’t God understand that I just want to be with him?

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

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Grieving Quotes

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