Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

There is an old phrase, ‘hiding in plain sight.’ This is where we find the loved one we miss so much. All we need to do is open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts.

There is an intense desire to do the proper thing. This feels like their induction. Suddenly, here is life, cut right to its center. Here it is, dismantled to its bones.

There is a noise that is different to grief. Sadness wails and cries and lets loose a sound to the heavens like a baby calling for its mother. That kind of noisy grief is hopeful. It believes that things can be put right, or that help can come. There is a different kind of sound to that. Babies left alone too long do not even cry. They become very still and quiet. They know no one is coming.

There is an old Chinese tale about the woman whose only son had died. In her grief, she went to the holy man and said, 'What prayers, what magical incantations do you have to bring my son back to life?' Instead of sending her away or reasoning with her, he said to her, 'Fetch me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow. We will use it to drive the sorrow out of your life.' The woman set off at once in search of that magical mustard seed. She came first to a splendid mansion, knocked at the door and said, 'I am looking for a home that has never known sorrow. Is this such a place? It is very important to me.' They told her 'You've certainly come to the wrong place,' and began to describe all the tragic things that had recently befallen them. The woman said to herself, 'Who is better able to help these poor unfortunate people than I, who have had misfortune of my own?' She stayed to comfort them, then went on in her search for a home that had never known sorrow. But wherever she turned, hovels and in palaces, she found one tale after another of sadness and misfortune. Ultimately, she became so involved in ministering to other people's grief that she forgot about her quest for the magical mustard seed, never realizing that it had in fact drive the sorrow out of her life.

There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There's no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman's excuse was that no one told him that the concentration camps were wrong. We've all seen the pictures of the drowning polar bears. Are we so ethically numb that we need to be told this is wrong?

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love.

There is a realm in which miracles are possible and do take place. The door to this realm is the belief in all possibilities and YOU are the key.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...]

There is greater clarity in the still waters of sadness, something not found in the babbling brooks of more sought after emotions.

There is much asked and only so much I think I can or should answer, and so, in this post I would like to give a few thoughts on what seemed to be the overwhelming question: “WHY?” And here is the best answer I can give: Because. Because sometimes, life is damned unfair. Because sometimes, we lose people we love and it hurts deeply. Because sometimes, as the writer, you have to put your characters in harm’s way and be willing to go there if it is the right thing for your book, even if it grieves you to do it. Because sometimes there aren’t really answers to our questions except for what we discover, the meaning we assign them over time. Because acceptance is yet another of life’s “here’s a side of hurt” lessons and it is never truly acceptance unless it has cost us something to arrive there. Why, you ask? Because, I answer. Inadequate yet true.

There is never a reason good enough to be out of alignment with peace.

There is never a guarantee of survival, no matter your strength or skill or wit. There is only the day you are conceived and the day you die, and all else is a series of moments you either embrace or endure.

There is no fear in letting tears come. Sadness is a gift to avoid the nothingness of numbness, and all the hard places need water. Grief is a gift, and after a rain of tears, there is always more of you than before. Rain always brings growth.

There is no gift of principles, you must apply them if you want to move forward.

There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.

There is no greater intimacy than sitting with someone traversing that tenuous boundary between worlds, sitting vigil with a spirit trembling on the border, reaching toward the new and releasing the old.

There is no panacea for this kind of loss. Just know that every day it gets the tiniest bit better-- suddenly one day you can put it in a different perspective.

There is no path set for this kind of shock, and for the grief that attends such terrible news.

… there is no permanence or guarantee in this life.

There is no right or wrong way to experience grief. Everyone is different. There can be interruptions and delays, depending on how we cope. In addition, we may bounce between denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, there's no rhyme or reason for the order or the length of time.

There is no right or wrong way to grief. There is only one way - your way!

There is nothing I can do to keep time from wedging more of itself between us.

There is nothing to fear. Nothing to worry about. Grieve nothing in this transitory world," he says softly.

There is nothing like feeling truly "awake" and aware of my life and what it means to me. So I look ahead and think, "There is still so much to be done, and I will continue to make the most of it.

…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can’t know, is kind. I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly…I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored. I suspect that the ease of Wally’s death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he’s all right now. And yet. And yet he’s gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily hourly presence. My experience of being with Wally… brought me to another sort of perception, but I can’t stay in that place, can’t sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he’s all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he’s gone. And doubt. And the fact that we can’t understand, that it’s our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing? We need our doubt so as to not settle for easy answers. Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves…Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see. Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind.

There is something embarrassing about someone else's grief. It is hard to know what to do around it. The right answer, always, is hugs.

There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both - taken and taken and taken, until there's nothing left but hope, and you've given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.

There is the scent too. Wonder follows it; wonder about how a boy can smell like that when he probably has no idea. He smells like the woods in the winter or the rain when it first falls, or maybe it’s just the way he always smells and there is no way to define it.

There need not be a purpose to a person's death, other than that they have lived the length of their days on this Earth and now begin the longer part of their existence.

There is uncertainty in hope, but even with its tenuous nature, it summons our strength and pulls us through fear and grief— and even death.

There's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.

There’s a room in my heart full of unpaid bills. We all have one. It’s useful to go in occasionally and open a few.

There's a water cycle. Water never goes away. It never dies or is destroyed. It just changed from form to form in a continuous cycle. On a hot summer day, you've drunk water that a dinosaur drank. You might have cried tears that Alexander the Great cried. So I'm returning Eli's energy - his spirit - and all that it contained. His life. His music. His memories. His loves. All the beautiful things in him. I give to the water so he can live that way now. Form to form. Energy to energy. Maybe I'll meet my son again in the rain or in the ocean. Maybe he hasn't touched my face for the last time.

There should be a limit to my suffering As I’m a sinner, not a disbeliever

There's a threshold of pain, a person loses consciousness in order not to die. And there's a threshold of grief, it suddenly stops hurting. And you feel nothing. Nothing at all.

There's no end. There's no end to this world, everlasting. We crumble to dust in its arms.

There's no expectation of some linear progression from agony to okayness. It goes in circles. It's sloppy.

There's supposed to be more value in your life than spending more than sixty hours in a week in a place you don't care about and in an environment they don't care about you.

There’s only ever been one person I’ve looked at and thought… ‘I could quite easily spend the entire rest of my life with that man’. And sooner or later I need to accept that he’s spending it with somebody else.

There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it… this place, she decided, was called Smog City.

There’s nothing you can do, Valoria. I’m not one of your inventions. I’m broken, part of me is missing, and you can’t fix me with copper wires or a piece of string.

There's too much blank sky where a tree once stood.

There was healing in the tyranny, and tyranny in the healing.

There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn’t learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart.

There was this constant urge in me to tear my insides apart, I didn't know why. By the time I made my mind that it was impossible for me to do, there alighted the fear, haunting me with the words that rang constantly in my head, "You're not brave enough". I didn't feel devastated, I felt the urge to be devastated.

There will come a time when people decide you've had enough of your grief, and they'll try to take it away from you.

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

...there was something in the texture of the weave that felt happy: the echo of a memory so far down in his soul it was all emotion, a burst of colour and warmth, adrift from time and place.

There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing. That sounds terrible, but it's true. Not that they had bad intentions, just...you always want to believe you're important in someone's life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren't.