"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."

Grief, Loss, Healing, Time

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"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."

Exlpore more Grief quotes

"Sing through your grief. Don't let your thoughts weigh you down."

Marty Rubin, American Author

Grief, Emotion, Expression, Healing

"Misery is a river of tears that whispers my name in a constant hiss."

Richelle E. Goodrich, American Poet

Grief, Sadness, Truth, Regret, Inspirational

"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

Grief, Love, Loss, Family

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

Veronica Roth, American Author

Grief, Guilt, Pain, Emotion

"Hell was not a pit of fire and brimstone. Hell was waking up alone, the sheets wet with your tears and your seed, knowing the woman you had dreamed of would never come back to you."

Lisa Kleypas, American Novelist

Grief, Heartbreak, Loneliness, Desire

"Have you ever walked along a beach? You walk towards something in the distance. For the longest while it never seems to get any closer even though you are walking and walking. Then all of a sudden, you are there. You've arrived at last. That's what grief is like. Meanwhile we are running with you in the spray of the surf at the edge of the shore where the sand meets the sea. We are cheering you on."

Kate McGahan, American Author

Grief, Beach, Distance, Running

"I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What."

John Green, American Author

Grief, Memory, Death, Loss, Love

"Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of..."

Jonathan Safran Foer, American Novelist

Grief, Love, Pain, Emotion

"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!"

Orson Scott Card, American Writer

Grief, Family, Death, Emotion

"I beg you, alight and join your sorrow with mine: misfortune wanders everywhere, and settles now upon one and now upon another."

Aeschylus, Greek Poet

Grief, Sorrow, Hope, Love, Loss

Explore more quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer

"With writing, we have second chances."

Art

"What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?"

Life

"She died in my arms, saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore."

War

"You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of."

Motivation

"It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty."

Emotions

"I have tutored Little Igor to be a man of this world. For example, I exhibited him a smutty magazine three days yore, so that he should be appraised of the many positions in which I am carnal. 'This is sixty-nine,' I told him, presenting the magazine in front of him. I put my fingers--two of them--on the action, so that he would not overlook it. 'Why is it dubbed sixty-nine?' he asked, because he is a person hot on fire with curiosity. 'It was invented in 1969. My friend Gregory knows a friend of the nephew of the inventor.' 'What did people do before 1969?' 'Merely blowjobs and masticating box, but never in chorus."

Humor

"She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop."

Memory

"We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."

Morality

"Nine out of ten significant people have to do with money or war!"

Society

"Let's go to bed. Those four words differentiate a marriage from every other kind of relationship. We aren't going to find a way to agree, but let's go to bed. Not because we want to, but because we have to. We hate each other right now, but let's go to bed. It's the only one we have. Let's go to our sides, but the sides of the same bed. Let's retreat into ourselves, but together. How many conversations had ended with those four words? How many fights?"

Relationship