top of page
.png){kind=small}
Grief Quotes
"No. Really. I've thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people any more. It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It's just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a whole. I don't know. It's like you become... a doughnut instead of a bun."
29
"Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter's death and to that sorrow she'd added a long life of entitlement and disappointment, of privilege and pride. And the dagger she'd fashioned was taking a brief break from slashing her insides, and was now pointed outward."
29
"Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone."
28
"Vengeance is a way of clinging to what we have lost. A wedge in the Last Door, and through the crack we can still glimpse the faces of the dead. We strain towards it with all our being, break every rule to have it, but when we clutch it, there is nothing there. Only grief."
27
"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."
26
"I have become a sour woman. I take no joy in meat nor mead, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once."
26
"In fact, since the accident, Mom doesn't love anyone. She is marble. Beautiful. Frigid. Easily stained by her family. What's left of us anyway. We are corpses.At first, we sought rebirth. But resurrection devoid of her love has made us zombies. We get up every morning, skip breakfast, hurry off to work or school. For in those other places, we are more at home.And sometimes we stagger beneath the weight of grief, the immensity of aloneness."
25
"And in an apartment on the other side of town, everyone wakes up with a start when the hound in the first-floor flat, without any warning, starts howling. Louder and more heartrendingly than anything they have ever heard coming out of the primal depths of any animal. As if it is singing with the sorrow and yearning of an eternity of ten thousand fairy tales. It howls for hours, all through the night, until dawn. And when the morning light seeps into the hospital room, Elsa wakes up in Granny's arms. But Granny is still in Miamas."
25
"They sat quietly together for a few minutes, Joe holding Fiona's hand, Fiona sniffling. No flowery words, no platitudes passed between them. Joe would have done anything to ease her suffering, but he knew nothing he might do, or say, could. Her grief would run its course, like a fever, and release her when it was spent. He would not shush her or tell her it was God's will and that her da was better off. That was rubbish and they both knew it. When something hurt as bad as this, you had to let it hurt. There were no shortcuts."
25
"In every cloud, in every tree " filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men, and women " my own features mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!"
24
"How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell."
24
"The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow."
24
"Question me now about all other matters, but do not ask who I am, for fear you may increase in my heart it's burden of sorrow as I think back; I am very full of grief, and I should not sit in the house of somebody else with my lamentation and wailing. It is not good to go on mourning forever."
24
"The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is. To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need."
23
"Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can't feel grief unless you've had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it's love lost. It's the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That's what death is, the great loneliness."
23
"They'd crossed over to that continent where grieving parents lived. It looked the same as the rest of the world, but wasn't. Colors bled pale. Music was just notes. Books no longer transported or comforted, not fully. Never again. Food was nutrition, little more. Breaths were sighs. And they knew something the rest didn't. They knew how lucky the rest of the world was."
23
"Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don't share it there's a good chance that it will drive them apart instead."
23
"And I am weary of the anguishIncreasing winters bear;Weary to watch the spirit languishThrough years of dead despair.So, if a tear, when thou art dying,Should haply fall from me,It is but that my soul is sighing,To go and rest with thee."
23
"Seems," madam? Nay, it is; I know not "seems."'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly: these indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe."
23
"She cries quietly, her shoulders heaving up and down, not the kind of loud sobbing that the women Chika knows do, the kind that screams Hold me and comfort me because I cannot deal with this alone. The woman's crying is private, as though she is carrying out a necessary ritual that involves no one else."
22
"When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.And so, laughing and crying, we said good-bye to my grandmother. And when we said goodbye to one grandmother, we said good-bye to all of them.Each funeral was a funeral for all of us.We lived and died together.All of us laughed when they lowered my grandmother into the ground.And all of us laughed when they covered her with dirt.And all of us laughed as we walked and drove and rode our way back to our lonely, lonely houses."
22
"For my part I have no joy in tears after dinnertime. There will always be a new dawn tomorrow. Yet I can have no objection to tears for any mortal who dies and goes to his destiny. And this is the only consolation we wretched mortals can give, to cut our hair and let the tears roll down our faces."
22
"She looked into the mirror, wiping the mascara that was running down her cheeks with her tears and she saw him standing behind her. With that smile he always had. She touched his reflection and turned around to hug him just to see no one there. She turned back around and looked at the mirror, there he was still standing with that smile. She fell on her knees and said in a feeble voice "come back"."
22
"She's not here," I tell him. Buttercup hisses again. "She's not here. You can hiss all you like. You won't find Prim." At her name, he perks up. Raises his flattened ears. Begins to meow hopefully. "Get out!" He dodges the pillow I throw at him. "Go away! There's nothing left for you here!" I start to shake, furious with him. "She's not coming back! She's never ever coming back here again!" I grab another pillow and get to my feet to improve my aim. Out of nowhere, the tears begin to pour down my cheeks. "She's dead, you stupid cat. She's dead."
22
"I saw her tonight. I didn't mean to and I wasn't prepared for it.I came across her sweet smiling face and I had no choice but to be confronted with all the emotions and memories I associated with her.It brought me back to this past summer when she passed from this world into the next and how I watched the minutes in the day pass and felt the sorrow of the approaching sunset knowing that darkness would soon follow.There is something profound about the first night after someone you love dies.Seeing her again and mourning the loss of her anew reminded me that we keep too much to ourselves and we let people go without them ever knowing how much they touched us, intrigued us, taught us, or moved us.I'm a firm believer in actions doing the telling, but people need to hear it as well."
21
"She looked around for a place to be. A small place. The closet? ... It was both small and bright, and she wanted to be in a very small, very bright place. Small enough to contain her grief.Bright enough to throw into relief the dark things that cluttered her.Once inside, she sank to the tile floor next to the toilet. On her knees, her hand on the cold rim of the bathtub, she waited for something to happen inside."
21
"Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows, which shows like grief itself, but is not so; or sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, divides one thing entire to many objects: like perspectives which, rightly gaz'd upon, show nothing but confusion."
21
"The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks ago. Each day, some further evidence of a task half finished, a scheme incomplete. He found a novel, with her place marked.And this is it."
20
bottom of page