Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

Seal the borders of my body to pain, seal my eyes, mouth, belly to any hunger not my own. I rename myself America. No love no grief in the world but mine.

Scott is gone. I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward.

Secret, smug believers! God never gives you more than you can bear, they like to say, as if the strong should be punished for their strength: We can bear it. So we got it. But what about my baby? How weak does a newborn have to be to escape God's burdens?

Secrets are festering parasites to a relationship, devouring their hosts from within, leaving behind a empty hollow husk of what once was.

Seeing his daughter slowly die, coupled with his infinite sadness and misery, the clockmaker becomes a recluse to the tower of the castle and begins to build something behind closed doors, not even his daughter knows what he’s up to. For five years, she only sees him briefly at meal-times before locking himself up in the tower once again..." "...Did he have a bathroom in the tower?" "Yes, Jack. A big one! En-suite! Power-shower and spa! Where was I!?

See that's exactly why I don't want a dog." "Why?" "Because it'll just die." "Everybody dies, Brooklyn." Like that makes it okay or something.

See, you’ve got to understand, son. There’s two types of guys in this world. There’s guys . . . who think they’re in control, and guys like us who live in the moment. Who accept life as it is.

Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random.... If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.

Shattered thoughts cut through her mind like a chain lightning that zapped her heart, knotted her stomach and riveted her feet to the earth.

She always used to suspect that the price for happiness, the price for enjoying the company of a person you loved, was the steadily increasing risk of losing them, and at times, when she considered the possibility that she might lose Isabel or Clancy or, in the early days, Todd, Bernice didn't think she could stand it, didn't think she could go on living in a universe whose laws forced her to submit to such a terrible fear. Now she sees what a small price it is to pay, what staggering joy she received in return. You should be willing to pay that price for as little as a few days or hours with a person you love, she thinks, rubbing her fingers across a patch of linoleum the years have worn down to a cloudy smear.

She closes her eyes, and I can see the moisture. She’s deep-breathing again, and I notice her hands are clutched around the opposing wrists, nails digging in deep, hard, scratching. Pain to replace pain.

She could almost feel him prodding her; urging her to go on. As the wails of pain and torment assulted her ears, she knew that's exactly what she would do until the war was over and she could crawl into a quiet, dark corner and mourn for the part of her that had died with him.

She could always walk somewhere without him. Of course this somewhere had to be somewhere "safe." She could walk to her office. But she didn't want to go to her office. She felt bored, ignored, and alienated in her office. She felt ridiculous there. She didn't belong there anymore. In all the expansive grandeur that was Harvard, there wasn't room there for a cognitive psychology professor with a broken cognitive psyche.

She closed her eyes, silently continuing the pleas that she be given words that might soothe, words that would begin the healing of bereaved parents. She had seen, when she entered the kitchen, the chasm of sorrow that divided man and wife already, each deep in their own wretched suffering, neither knowing what to say to the other. She knew that to begin to talk about what had happened was a key to acknowledging their loss, and that such acceptance would in turn be a means to enduring the days and months ahead.

She closed her eyes, trying to remember the photos that had hung on the walls. She had passed these pictures every day, but now she only remembered them vaguely--her parents on their wedding day, her mother in a garden, her family at Knott's Berry Farm. How had she not memorized them? Or maybe she had once but she was beginning to forget. Did the house smell different because her mother's scent was gone? Or had she just forgotten how her mother smelled?

{She} considered mentioning...how she, to, was all alone. But it didn't matter. So many stupid ways to live and die. She felt a shift inside herself at the thought, a letting go...she had reached a limit now and was moving into something new.

She did not even have words, only a feeling, a terrible hollow feeling, as if everything inside her had been scooped out raw.

She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?

She'd not known grief would come in waves, brought on by the smallest of things. Nor had she realized that ordinary acts of living would continue even after the loss of a love and that it would remain possible to get caught up in the moment of a simple pleasure before remembering.

She dove, plunging fully beneath the surface and came up again in tears. Rivulets ran from her face, and the sun ignited them each, transforming them, even amid her sorrow, into gilded runnels set with a diamond shine.

She’d felt more pain from Nico in their brief connection than she had from her entire legion during the battle against the giant Polybotes.

She did not know how to grieve in the context of her life.

She did not belong to the healthy group of widows and widowers who, after mourning, would nurture the seed of their grief into growing from loss—perhaps continuing the dreams of the lost, or learning to cherish alone the things they’d cherished together. She belonged instead to the sad lot who clung to grief, who nurtured it by never moving beyond it. They’d shelter it deep inside where the years padded it in saudade layers like some malignant pearl.

She did not like seeing her loved ones like this, bent over with sorrow; everything in her wanted to cry out, to thrash and scream at the sight of it. But she knew that great grief came from great love, and that their grief was an honor to her. And she did love them so very much.

She'd never been religious. She hadn't allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.

She'd survived on wine and sugar for months because, fuck it, she never really got a childhood, and what was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy?

She feels a bit lighter, like she has been carrying around a heavy pocketful of precious stones, and she has just given one away.

She fit her head under his chin, and he could feel her weight settle into him. He held her tight and words spilled out of him without prior composition. And this time he made no effort to clamp them off. He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you are. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her on the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.

She felt damned. As though she were marching to her death. She felt like had been sentenced. And yet she felt eerily free.

She felt like someone had carved her heart out of her chest and then turned her loose to stumble through a dark forest on a frigid night.

She felt the depth of her losses before they were realized, and she wondered, Is there still hope? Did she even dare hold on to such a tenuous thing as hope?

She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.

She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief.

She had learned, long ago and in the intervening years when she was apart from all she loved, that to endure the most troubling times she had to break down time itself--one carefully crafted stitch after the other. If consideration of what the next hour might hold had been too difficult, then she thought only of another half and hour.

...she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk's bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs, flooding across the rough wooden floor, down the narrow wooden stairs and out into the old soil of the garden. No roses, no, she does not even ask to make roses, just dissolution; most any night she asks just for that.

She has been surprised by grief, its constancy, its immediacy, its unrelenting physical pain.

she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison. No wonder they gave them out free to the soliders. Lucky Strikes.

She has never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James. He thought of pushing open the half-closed door and kneeling before his wife, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and helping her upstairs. He raised his hand, stroking the wood of the door, planning to say something to calm her. But what wisdom could he offer Gus, when he could not even heed it himself? James walked upstairs again, got into bed, covered his head with a pillow. And hours later, when Gus crept beneath the sheets, he tried to pretend that he did not feel the weight of her grief, lying between them like a fitful child, so solid that he could not reach past it to touch her.

She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible threat.....The counselor couldn't prove otherwise.

She is his living mausoleum.

She looked around for a place to be. A small place. The closet? No. Too dark. The bathroom. It was both small and bright, an 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.

She loved your mother', Taliesin said gently. 'This is her farewell.' As he spoke, a chanted melody began inside the chamber, a song without words. Yet it spoke of the beauty in the heart of the flame, of the passing glory of the white bird on the wing, and the blossom of the sea spray under the shining prow. It sang of a mother with her baby, of the hard love between men and women, and the gentle rest that comes at last to all.

She laughed a bit at the simple beauty of it all - the white paper, the elegant arc, the soft green grass; and, beside her, the purple backpack, Grandad's golden straw hat, the sky a pale-blue umbrella embracing the whole town

She might do what the mortals did, and strain to convince herself that the death of her Boy and the loss of her husband had happened for some reason, that some restitution would be made for her, that she would be paid for her suffering with a truer and more tolerable understanding of the world, but she didn't think she had the muscles for it.

She pulls her hand away and Damian feels the sensation of falling, a somersault into a foreign abyss where a girl with eggplant hair and a hoop in her brow waits in the darkness.

She looked around for a place to be. A small place. The closet? No. Too dark. The bathroom. 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.

She meant well. But knew nothing about children and the anguish they suffered.

She put her head in her hands and began to cry softly. He felt confused and bitterly unhappy. A part of him wanted to go to her, to hold and comfort her, but he wasn’t prepared to be pushed away in cold anger all over again. He waited in his chair and felt the room expand until there was an emptiness the size of the desert between them.

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

She sleeps and sometimes she dreams him, and it is wrenching to wake up. There is no talk in these dreams, no actual words, but she knows what he wants; he wants her to follow him. How awful. Death has made him selfish. [...] When she wakes up she is full of guilt because she decided to stay. Something rigid and life-loving and unwilling to cave in takes over. She betrays him in this way, every single night of her life, and it's exhausting. She denies him, she forgets him. Every time she says no to him in a dream, she forgets him a little bit more.