"There is the staircase,there is the sun.There is the kitchen,the plate with toast and strawberry jam,your subterfuge,your ordinary mirage.You stand red-handed.You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grassWhat are you supposed to dowith all this loss?In the daylight we knowwhat's gone is gone,but at night it's different.Nothing gets finished,not dying, not mourning;the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunkslurching sideways through the doorswe open to them in sleep;these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,even those we have loved the most,especially those we have loved the most,returning from where we shoved themaway too quickly:from under the ground, from under the water,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won't let go."
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Exlpore more Grief quotes

"I didn't mean to scare you. I'm not suicidal if that's what's freaking you out. I'm not fucked up in the head. I'm not deranged. I'm not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm just a brother who loved his sister more than life itself, so I get a little intense when I think about her."

"Closer, it's all right. Touch the man of grief.Do. Don't be afraid. My troubles are mine and I am the only man alive who can sustain them."

"There is no grief like the grief that does not speak."

"Grief does not change you. It reveals you."

"I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness."

"The inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him,and until I wake I believeI will die of grief, for I knowthat this boy grew into a manwho was a faithful friendwho died."
Explore more quotes by Margaret Atwood

"You always do good ones. We trust you, Mr. Duke," Says Dylan. Foolish lads, thinks Felix: never trust a professional ham."

"What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull. But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be."

"Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It's the stress, it's the adrenalin, it's a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? she thinks. Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?"

"A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?"

"His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile."

"Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time."

"Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp."
