"The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever said to me is: Your mother would be proud of you. ... The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you excperienced my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I build in my obliterated place. I'd give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. ... It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach."

Grief, Motherhood, Writing, Loss

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"The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever said to me is: Your mother would be proud of you. ... The strange and painful truth is that I'm a better person because I lost my mom young. When you say you excperienced my writing as sacred, what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I build in my obliterated place. I'd give it all back in a snap, but the fact is, my grief taught me things. ... It required me to suffer. It compelled me to reach."

Exlpore more Grief quotes

"We need never be ashamed of our tears."

Charles Dickens, English Novelist

Grief, Tears, Emotion, Shame, Truth

"Sometimes, somehow...I feel that ocean contains tears of mother earth,that mourns over terrible great sin done by men."

Toba Beta, Indonesian Author

Grief, Regret, Truth, Emotion, Today

"The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was."

John Green, American Author

Grief, Fun, Sadness, Life, Loss

"Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates."

Samuel Johnson, English Author

Grief,

"Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another pat of me into that world."

Haruki Murakami, Japanese Writer

Grief, Death, Loss, Memory

"Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love."

Jonathan Safran Foer, American Novelist

Grief, Loss, Healing, Time

"Today is the anniversary of my husband's death," Maria announced. It was a dramatic statement, but the occasion seemed to demand it. "And I am going to leave."

Sara Sheridan, Scottish Author

Grief, Death, Loss, Decision

"When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, youhave plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all the nerves are still a little raw."

Jodi Picoult, American Novelist

Grief, Loss, Memory, Pain

"Loss eventually arrives when something departs. Grief is working through both."

Craig D. Lounsbrough, American Author

Grief, Regret, Truth, Inspirational, Happiness

"We resent the thought that anything can please us when someone we love is no longer here to share the pleasure with us, and we almost feel as if we were unfaithful to our sorrow when we find out interest in life returning to us."

L. M. Montgomery, Canadian Author

Grief, Loss, Love, Guilt

Explore more quotes by Cheryl Strayed

"Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real."

Isolation

"God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch."

Divinity

"But as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn't mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again. Forgiveness means you've found a way forward that acknowledges harm done and hurt caused without letting either your anger or your pain rule your life or define your relationship with the one who did you wrong."

Forgiveness

"The only way you'll find out if you 'have it in you' is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your 'limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude' is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some way inept. This is true of every writer, and it's especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you."

Action

"The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light."

Healing

"I had problems a therapist couldn't solve, grief that no man in a room could ameliorate."

Therapy

"It was only when I rounded a bend and glimpsed the white peaks ahead that I doubled my abilities, only when I thought how far i had yet to go that i lost faith that I would get there."

Perseverance

"It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve."

Distance

"Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid."

Light

"There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course."

Fate