Grief Quotes
Roland Barthes
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
1257 Raymond Carver
They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.
1991 Haruki Murakami
For darkness terrifies. It swallows you, warps you, nullifies you. Who alive can possibly profess confidence in darkness? In the dark, you can't see.
1294 José N. Harris
Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.
1305 Nicholas Sparks
Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it's an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.
2722 Colette
It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
4363 E.A. Bucchianeri
So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.
2727 Veronica Roth
But when I do feel all the strength go out of me, and I fall to my knees beside the table and I think I cry, then, or at least I want to, and everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.
1236 Melina Marchetta
But grief makes a monster out of us sometimes . . . and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can't forgive yourself for.
3829 Omar Khayyam
This world
that was our home
for a brief spell
never brought us anything
but pain and grief;
its a shame that not one of our problems
was ever solved.
We depart
with a thousand regrets
in our hearts.
1449 Patti Smith
Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.
4782 Federico García Lorca
My head is full of fire
and grief and my tongue
runs wild, pierced
with shards of glass.
1122 Jenim Dibie
And on the days I couldn't breathe, I learned to paint air.
4506 Rebecca McNutt
People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines.
2900 Christy A. Campbell
He wishes he could remember everything. Anything. He doesn’t sense a bone in his body that can feel compassion or worthiness. Self-pity hides away as well, the lowest form of emotion not even capable of resting in his wrecked mind.
2109 Vivian Amis
Everything you experience is a blessing and pushes you toward realizing your true self.
4516 Virginia Woolf
Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.
4234 William Shakespeare
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.
2256 Jodi Picoult
words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.
3602 Sarah Dessen
That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.
1465 Horace
There are words and accents by which this grief can be assuaged, and the disease in a great measure removed.
3377 C.S. Lewis
And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.
4024 Flavia Weedn
Someday, beyond the clouds and all the world's wrongs, there will be love, compassion and justice, and we shall all understand.
3200 Emily Thorne
They say grief occurs in five stages. First there's denial followed by anger. Then comes bargaining, depression and acceptance. But grief is a merciless master. Just when you think you're free you realize you never stood a chance.
1363 Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
Beware! Balance rules the cosmos. It is not concerned with good or bad. You can be struck by misfortune and be buried in grief if that is what it takes to restore the imbalance you have wrought unto the world.
4303 Belinda Jeffrey
When I was young I wanted so much to be like her. What a blessing are those moments when there is nothing to worry about, no thought of trouble or grief in the world.
3858 Faraaz Kazi
No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn't stop for your grief.
3663 Katherine Owen
There are all kinds of ways for a relationship to be tested, even broken, some, irrevocably; it’s the endings we’re unprepared for.
4404 Maggie Stiefvater
I just looked at her, feeling utterly empty. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to her. My life is in that bed. Please let me stay.
3751 Sarah Ockler
Every morning, I wake up and forget just for a second that it happened. But once my eyes open, it buries me like a landslide of sharp, sad rocks. Once my eyes open, I'm heavy, like there's to much gravity on my heart.
2515 Nicholas Sparks
Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief.
3738 Jodi Picoult
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.
2044 Lisa Kleypas
Shock is a merciful condition. It allows you to get through disaster with a necessary distance between you and your feelings.
4240 Jodi Picoult
Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.
3795 Leo Tolstoy
Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
1272 Marcus Tullius Cicero
It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.
2164 Christina Rossetti
What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.
What are brief? today and tomorrow.
What are frail? spring blossoms and youth.
What are deep? the ocean and truth.
3516 Denise Jaden
What's even more messed up than funerals, is the way people treat you after the funeral. Like you're diseased or something.
4197 V.C. Andrews
Grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away.
4427 Rebecca McNutt
You don't understand," Alecto replied vacantly. "It isn't that I want to die... I just don't want to exist.
4786 Nicole Krauss
All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.
1112 Homer
Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.
1274 J.D. Salinger
And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.
4839 Jodi Picoult
If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can't someone be healed by happiness?
4080 Sanhita Baruah
Let it rain on some days,
Let yourself shiver on some cold nights,
So when it's Spring you'll know why it was all worth going through.
1111 Becky Chambers
No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief.
4695 Deshwal Sachin
Life has only three states-Happiness,Grief and Emptiness.
The extreme state of life is emptiness.
1567 Bahauddin
Grief is better than happiness, because in grief a person draws close to God. Your wings open. A tent is set up in the desert where God can visit you. Wealth that arrives in grief is what we spend in joy. The soul is greater than anything you ever lost.
1825 Katherine Owen
Here’s what I know: death abducts the dying, but grief steals from those left behind.
4662 Sara Sheridan
Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn’t true.
2939 Rebecca McNutt
photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself…
3294 Lemony Snicket
It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine it.
1949 Maria V. Snyder
Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears. An ember still smolders inside me. Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.
3101 Richard Adams
My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.
2259 Veronica Roth
I keep finding myself stifled by the company of others and then crippled by loneliness when I leave them. I am terrified and I don't even know of what, because I have lost everything already.
3521 Neil Gaiman
You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.
4612 Meghan O'Rourke
Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.
3544 Gwenn Wright
How many times can a heart be shattered and still be pieced back together? How many times before the damage is irreparable?
1854 Francine Prose
I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was reproof. Shouldn't I feel better than I had in the dead of night.
1527 C.S. Lewis
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.
4607 Robert Goolrick
I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.
4704 Lang Leav
Saving You
The darkness takes him over,
the sickness pulls him in;
his eyes - a blown out candle,
I wish to go with him.
Sometimes I see a flicker -
a light that shone from them;
I hold him to me tightly,
before he's gone again.
3391 Sherman Alexie
When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.
3634 Elizabeth Wein
Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?
4683 Victoria Hanley
I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.
1894 Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before.
2874 John Corey Whaley
Not only had my brother disappeared, but-and bear with me here-a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.
3581 Philip K. Dick
The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?
1904 Kristina McMorris
It’s odd, isn’t it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it’s a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you’re not alone.
1752 Nina LaCour
He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much.
3684 Mary Karr
Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.
3657 Kellie Elmore
...what happens when you return
and find nothing
but a hollowed shell,
shingles and floor,
walls and echoes
and the light that lead you here
has now burned out
and the ones who built it
have traveled afar
and you cant go to them,
no matter what shoes you wear.
1267 Franz Wright
I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)
2225 C.S. Lewis
They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?
3163 William Shakespeare
This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so, it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt.
2659 Edwin Arlington Robinson
And thus we all are nighing
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.
1175 Joan Abelove
Everyone was eating, talking softly, glancing at me, hugging me, eating. It was as if someone had turned the volume down. Everything looked normal, but the sound was muted. Death did this, set all this weirdness in motion, made people appear out of nowhere carrying casseroles, saying 'I'm sorry' over and over, death muffled their voices.
2889 Ann Patchett
Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It's a plague. It's like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it."
STATE OF WONDER
3153 William Shakespeare
Cordelia! stay a little. Ha! What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft.
3286 Kenneth L. Patton
If I could find one word
that would shudder the air
like that frightened sob,
that wordless prayer
of my newly-born,
who drew one breath,
and with unopened eyes
sank back into death;
If I could break the world's cold heart
with that cry,
then this grief would lift
and I could die.
1465 Melina Marchetta
I wish everyone would stop crying, Tom. Uncle Joe would be so angry about it." But she's crying herself now. "He'd be so angry at us, Tom, for crying so much when all he did was laugh.
1729 Lauren Oliver
Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this-the absorption of another, the carrying of it-was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.
4233 Neil Gaiman
Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?"
"Then what died? who are you mourning?"
"A point of view.
2402 Norman Doidge
Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)
4606 Carrie Jones
What I have learned lately is that people deal with death in all sorts of ways. Some of us fight against it, doing everything we can to make it not true. Some of us lose our selves to grief. Some of us lose ourselves to anger.
4597 C.S. Lewis
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.
4626 Meghan O'Rourke
Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.
4885 Neil Gaiman
Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?"
"No, Matthew. What do they say?"
"The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.
3121 Rosie Thomas
I've grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It's weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition.
2109 Patricia Briggs
I don't say goodbye very easily, Anna. Not gracefully or prettily.Goodbye tears your heart out and leaves it a feast for carrion birds who happen by.
4702 Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson
Conner hadn’t liked leaving the gravesite with his father still not buried. But he’d learned from his grandmother’s funeral that you have to go. It’s expected. Nobody hangs around the cemetary. Grief - a little or a lot - is tucked into your pocket and carried away.
4722 Vicki Harrison
Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.
2237 Kristina McBride
What if it's as simple as one moment? One tiny thing, like that kiss on the rocks? What if I'd kissed him a little longer? Would he be alive right now? Or what if I'd stayed with him Friday night, what if I'd been with him… wherever he was?
4659 C.S. Lewis
Once very near the end I said, 'If you can - if it is allowed - come to me when I too am on my death bed.' 'Allowed!' she said. 'Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I'd break it into bits.
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