"I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I'd surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn't have imagined and wouldn't have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me."

Grief, Acceptance, Memory, Motherhood

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"I lay down in the mother ash dirt among the crocuses and told her it was okay. That I'd surrendered. That since she died, everything had changed. Things she couldn't have imagined and wouldn't have guessed. My words came out low and steadfast. I was so sad it felt as if someone were choking me, and yet it seemed my whole life depended on my getting those words out. She would always be my mother, I told her, but I had to go. She wasn't there for me in that flowerbed anymore anyway, I explained. I'd put her somewhere else. The only place I could reach her. In me."

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"Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind, And makes it fearful and degenerate; Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep."

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"Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you."

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"My grief lies all within, and these external manner of laments are merely shadows of the unseen grief that swells with silence in the tortur'd soul."

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"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."

Colleen Hoover, American Celebrity

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"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."

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

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

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

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"O my son Absalom,' Bean said softly, knowing for the first time the kind of anguish that could tear such words from a man's mouth. 'my son, my son Absalom. Would God I could die for thee, O Absalom, my son. My sons!"

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Explore more quotes by Cheryl Strayed

"I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal lives-those fountains of inconvenient feeling-and toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market. We're hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time we're falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure won't stick."

Loneliness

"When you're speaking in the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you are speaking with the universal voice."

Authenticity

"Real change happens on the level of the gesture. It's one person doing one thing differently than he or she did before."

Ambition

"You've earned the right to grow. You're going to have to carry the water yourself."

Growth

"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."

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"In the mornings, my pain was magnified by about a thousand. In the morning there weren't only those sad facts about my life. Now there was also the additional fact that I was a pile of shit."

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"I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole."

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"But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got."

Compassion

"In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story."

Story

"When you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them?THE WORD FOR THAT IS HEALING."

Consciousness