Best 520 quotes in «grieving quotes» category

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there.

A funeral is no place for secrets.

A kiss…. ….. is just a kiss…. Until it’s all you reminisce. (Then the memory becomes your most treasured possession.)

And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to me, and think, "Poor girl!" believing they do great justice to my memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it was my single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my duty, which they are regarding; they will not feel that what to them is but a thought, easily held in those two words of pity, "Poor girl!" was a whole life to me, as full of hours, minutes, and peculiar minutes, of hopes and dreads, smiles, whisperings, tears, as theirs: that it was my world, what is to them their world, and that in that life of mine, however much I cared for them, only as the thought I seem to them to be. Nobody can enter into another's nature truly, that's what is so grievous.

And if you're diligent in the process of grieving, once it has fulfilled its purpose, the pain peters out and personal power replaces it. Grieving can be a pathway leading to self-empowerment.

...and then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate. Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't.

Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I'll walk myself home.

Anthropomorphism, I've decided, is inescapable, and though I might try to hide it I no longer fight it.

And with every step I took it became more impossible for me to turn back. And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.

As he mused on the possibilities he became aware of the odor of cigarette smoke. And the sound of muted sobs... As she tried to stifle her anguish, what came out of her was utterly mournful, the saddest thing Luke had ever heard. He wanted to scramble out of the tree house, climb back into his room, and shut the window. But he was afraid to move. She would hear him. So he just sat there, hearing the agony of thousands of failed days bleed out of Nell. He put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes. he didn't want to hear her sobbing, didn't want to acknowledge she felt pain - nor that he knew she'd lived through more pain than anyone else he'd ever known. That maybe she had sent Norah and Kieran away because she knew Eleanor's home had to be happier than hers. He didn't want to acknowledge that. He wouldn't be able to hate her then.

A sensible girl would not have been crying, grieving for the boy with the magic in his voice and the blues in his eyes, mourning the loss of something that was a lie-a lie-from beginning to end.

As the fresh air brought warm blood to my cheeks, I realised that I had lived through a kind of death. I was alive. I would continue to live. But time and my mother were gone, and my life would now be defined, not by their absence, but by their absolute and irrevocable loss.

A teraz, już po wszystkim, coś nowego się zaczęło, nowego dla mnie - trudna sztuka życia po śmierci.

Behind every death lay a set of questions. To move on was to agree to not disturb these questions, to let them settle with the body under the earth. Yet some questions so thoroughly dismantled the terms of your own life, turning away was gravitationally impossible. So she would not be moving on. She would keep disturbing and disturbing. She imagined herself standing over a grave with a shovel and hacking away at the soil.

A thought struck me: maybe I wouldn't ever be the real me again. Because the only thing that would snap things back to the way they were, would be if he had't died.

Ava turned to the side, staring out into the dark. In profile, her face was suddenly tired and sad, and Cole felt the urge to wrap himself around her. To protect her from whatever was dragging her down.

Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.

But in all of the sadness, when you’re feeling that your heart is empty, and lacking, You’ve got to remember that grief isn’t the absence of love. Grief is the proof that love is still there.

But I guess death is like that. It takes away from you in an instant the people you've cherished for a whole lifetime. Just like that. As simple as that. And you are suddenly left with two things: anger for having been deprived of your beloved for no reason at all; and emptiness, a vacuum that gnaws right at your heart where all the joyful moments once had been.

But perhaps it's that Grey is dead. It still feels like the moon fell out of the sky.

Certainly she could never have exchanged pleasantries with anyone. What would there be for them to say anyway? Sorry? Sorry your daughter is dead, Sorry your daughter jumped off the roof of her school when you were on your way to pick her up. Sorry you were late. Too bad you'll be reliving that failure for the rest of your miserable life.

But we are not going to talk about that right now, because to talk about it I'll have to think about it, and I've thought it to death over the last year. There are parts of my brain that are still tirelessly thinking about it, about her, an entire research and development department wholly dedicated to finding new ways to grieve and mourn and feel sorry for myself. And let me tell you, they're good at what they do down there. So I'll leave them to it.

Chronic illness is hard. Pain is hard. Isolation is hard. The financial cost is hard. Grieving is hard and necessary and sometimes takes far longer than we ever imagined.

As he watches the sun rise, what grieves him is that he failed her. He thinks of the terror she felt. They tell him it was quick, as if that will somehow confine the horror.

Death doesn't happen instantly. For a little while, you hover around your body, confused. What you want more than anything is to go home, to be safe, to know you're okay. But my life was over.

Death could make a person feel righteous in a way they had no right to be. Nothing in the world was less personal and nothing felt more like a poison arrow sent straight for your heart.

Death is harder on those who are left behind.

Death will paint everything a different shade of remorse. You’ll feel guilty that you’re still breathing. But you can’t stop. You’ll feel guilty for wanting to laugh again. And it will be awful the first time that you do. You’ll feel guilty for just about everything at first. And someday, at some point, you’ll start to feel guilty . . . for forgetting to feel guilty. But of all Heaven’s lessons, guilt isn’t one of them. You don’t need to hold on to it. It doesn’t need to be a practice and it shouldn’t be your life. Heaven would never approve of your guilt. Because Heaven has no regrets.

Eby wanted to say so much to her. She wanted to say that waking up is the most important part of grieving, that so many women in their family failed to do it, and she was proud of Kate for fighting her way back. But Eby didn't say anything. She could fix a lot of things, but family wasn't one of them. It was one of the hardest things she'd ever had to come to terms with.

Fear manifested itself as a physical presence that seemed to dominate the public sphere. Time almost stopped. Even without confirmation I could sense that something had gone terribly wrong.

Electra, grieving for death, for her father, as a nightingale grieving always.

Everyone was eating, talking softly, glancing at me, hugging me, eating. It was as if someone had turned the volume down. Everything looked normal, but the sound was muted. Death did this, set all this weirdness in motion, made people appear out of nowhere carrying casseroles, saying 'I'm sorry' over and over, death muffled their voices.

For no soul can ever be replaced, and death claims a beauty and a magnificence that will always be missed.

from under the ground, from under the waters, they clutch at us, they clutch at us, we won’t let go.

For the rest of the morning they worked quietly ad steadily, realizing that their contentment here at Uncle Monty's house did not erase their parents' death, not at all, but at least it made them feel better after feeling so sad, for so long.

For those struggling with grief, there’s no timetable. It can last months, years, or longer. There is no rush. Give yourself permission to take however long it may be to fully heal from your loss.

From a medical standpoint, the third and the most probable explanation is that Jesus was indeed dead, and what his disciples experienced were mere hallucinations evoked by the grief over the loss of their beloved teacher. It is clinically known as “Post-Bereavement Hallucinations Experiences” or PBHE.

...grieving needs space, and it needs so much time. And it needs to be done; it cannot be trodden round or not looked in the eye.

Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.

Grief is such a lonely thing. There is no-one in it with you - others may grieve for the same soul, but they do not grieve exactly for what you also grieve. No-one has lost precisely what you have lost. Not exactly, never exactly. We are in it alone.

Grief makes gravity heavier and air molecules denser, so breathing is accomplished in a shallow, half-hearted way.

...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

Grief came in waves, sometimes big, sometimes small, but even on the calmest days, the grief remained. The tide still came ashore.

Grief could take the form of violence too, could give a false sense of permission, erase the world around, and that was what frightened Clare most about violence, how transferable it was.

He wept bitter tears over the death of his enemy. It was his enemy, after all, who knew him best and kept him up at night.

He did not enjoy the sorrow, but he would not have missed the years that he and Joseph were friends, either. Such joy was worth a little sorrow.

He means to make his subjects merciful and wise; sorrow and struggle bringeth both. We will, he tells me, grow by grieving, live by dying, love by losing. The heart itself is the field of battle and the garden green.

... he wasn't crying for the woman who had died. He was crying for the woman she had been.

He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.

Her death...brought me as nothing else could do to know and end my jealousy of God. It saved her faith from assault.