Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

I picture Cully tromping through that high, deep snow. That's how I feel physically from all of this. Moving through grief like it's a thick drift, exhausting but enlivening. It makes your muscles ache. It makes you feel you've inhabited your body completely.

I plucked one feather from my hood and left it on his forehead, for, his, head. For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning. For a little break in the mourning.

I rarely have a pet tell me their human ended their life too soon. It's far more common to hear that their humans waited too long to help them leave their body.

I realized that it was not Ko-san, now safely ditched for ever, but Ko-san's mother who stood in need of pity and consideration. She must still live on in this hard unpitying world, but he, once he had jumped [in battle], had jumped beyond such things. The case could well have been different, had he never jumped; but he did jump; and that, as they say, is that. Whether this world's weather turns out fine or cloudy no more worries him; but it matters to his mother. It rains, so she sits alone indoors thinking about Ko-san. And now it's fine, so she potters out and meets a friend of Ko-san's. She hangs out the national flag to welcome the returned soliders, but her joy is made querulous with wishing that Ko-san were alive. At the public bath-house, some young girl of marriageable age helps her to carry a bucket of hot water: but her pleasure from that kindness is soured as she thinks if only I had a daughter-in-law like this girl. To live under such conditions is to live in agonies. Had she lost one out of many children, there would be consolation and comfort in the mere fact of the survivors. But when loss halves a family of just one parent and one child, the damage is as irreparable as when a gourd is broken clean across its middle. There's nothing left to hang on to. Like the sergeant's mother, she too had waited for her son's return, counting on shriveled fingers the passing of the days and nights before that special day when she would be able once more to hang on him. But Ko-san with the flag jumped resolutely down into the ditch and still has not climbed back.

I realized that whilst crying over the loss, the living did not seem adequate because they were not my loved one. The room full of strangers hurt me profusely. Even as I saw thousands of young people; I felt incomplete and more saddened because the one I wanted to see was buried.

I recognized exactly where she was—that state where you’re able to hold it together as long as absolutely no one talks to you or touches you with any amount of sympathy.

I realize in this moment that all my life I've felt that I deserve to be punished, for wanting so much, for taking so much from this world, from the people who love me.

I realize many wonderful things about language - "realize" in the sense of feeling or understanding intuitively: I realize such things most often when I am greatly concerned with another person's feelings. I think such realization is one gift which human beings may give each other. I'm not much good at analysis or scholarly efforts with language, probably because I don't value them as much as I value understanding, which is informed by that which is deeply felt before it is examined.

I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.

I respect the hell out of her for how hard she’s working to be okay. I just wish she’d let me show her how to let go, how to let herself hurt. I want to take her pain.

Isaac gives his grief to the concrete. It makes sense. But Jackson can’t help but wonder: what happens when the concrete is gone? What happens when the grief digs itself out of the darkness?

I said that my mother is mad. I said that. But you might not see it. I mean, you might not think that anything I've told you proves she is mad. But there are different kinds of madness. Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow. Then one day, maybe many months after your decision to take your son out of school and isolate him in a house for reasons that got lost in your grief, one day that madness will stir in the chair, and it will say to him, 'You look pale.

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.

I said it grieved me to part from anything that mattered to me, yet I welcomed the grief because it meant I had felt deeply and needed to express it. 'I even had trouble leaving the Parthenon,' I told him ... 'because it was so beautiful and I knew I'd never see it again.

I sat quiet, silent, angry, refusing to grieve, because it seemed like to do so would be giving everyone what the wanted.

I saw through a black veil of misery and remorse and indecision and fear; and there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart.

I see so many women here,” she says, “and they are holding, all of them. Holding on to their sons or their lovers or their husbands, or their fathers, just as surely as they are holding on to the photographs that they keep or the fragments of childhood they bring with them and out on the table here.” She gestures with her hand. “They’re all different but all the same. All of them are afraid to let them go. And I’d we feel guilt, we find it even harder to release the dead. We keep them close to us; we guard them jealously. They were OURS. We want them to remain ours.” There’s a silence. “But they’re not ours,” she says. “And I’m a sense, they never were. They belong to themselves, only. Just as we belong to ourselves. And this is terrible in some ways, and I’m others...it might set us free.

I saw the world in black and white instead of the vibrant colours and shades I knew existed.

I see so many women here,” she says, “and they are holding, all of them. Holding on to their sons or their lovers or their husbands, or their fathers, just as surely as they are holding on to the photographs that they keep or the fragments of childhood they bring with them and out on the table here.” She gestures with her hand. “They’re all different but all the same. All of them are afraid to let them go. And if we feel guilt, we find it even harder to release the dead. We keep them close to us; we guard them jealously. They were OURS. We want them to remain ours.” There’s a silence. “But they’re not ours,” she says. “And in a sense, they never were. They belong to themselves, only. Just as we belong to ourselves. And this is terrible in some ways, and in others...it might set us free.

I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying.

I see it as symbolic. The label no longer fits. His emotional parsimoniousness just got sucked away by the beautiful blue sky. I lean forward and reach my hand behind my back, then take my sign off, and I toss it out the window, too. I am no longer an ex-stripper's daughter, either. I have gone from invisible Vera Dietz to invincible Vera Dietz.

Is everything all right?” They were going to be asking each other that constantly for quite some time, he guessed. And it never would really be okay, but they would reassure each other anyway about the small things, the measure of tiny victories: yes, Dru slept a little; yes, Ty is eating a bit; yes, we’re all still breathing.

I should have told you long ago how much I love you, but those fleeting moments of opportunity passed all too quickly. Before I knew it, you had gone to your eternity. Nevertheless, I want to tell you now that I love you . . . still!

Is nausea always a manifestation of grief? Who am I to know? I have never been thus before. Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

I smile when I want to cry. I laugh when I want to die.

I slept and I woke. She gave me a ring made from a leaf, a cluster of golden berries, a flower that opened and closed at the stroking of a finger.... And once, when I startled awake with my face wet and my chest aching, she reached out to lay her hand on top of mine. The gesture was so tentative, her expression so anxious, you would think she had never touched a man before. As if she was worried I might break or burn or bite. Her cool hand lay on mine for a moment, gentle as a moth. She squeezed my hand softly, waited, then pulled away. It struck me as odd at the time. But I was too clouded with confusion and grief to think clearly. Only now, looking back, do I realize the truth of things. With all the awkwardness of a young lover, she was trying to comfort me, and she didn't have the slightest idea how.

Isn’t it complicated to be human, though?” she said. “Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally…And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn’t make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance…” “The one thing,” Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, “the thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won’t ever see her grow up. She’ll have to do it without whatever I could have given her.” “Time, too, time and everything that one could do in it, and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It’s so important to us because we see it so close. We’re individuals, we’re full of ourselves, and so we’re bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of sudden there’s so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we’d always been and always intended to be…do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there’s so much to feel and I’m greedy?

Isn’t it tragic that sometimes it takes grief to understand what we have held so dear?

Isn't it weird," I said, "the way you remember things, when someone's gone?" What do you mean?" I ate another piece of waffle. "When my dad first died, all I could think about was that day. It's taken me so long to be able to think back to before that, to everything else." Wes was nodding before I even finished. "It's even worse when someone's sick for a long time," he said. "You forget they were ever healthy, ever okay. It's like there was never a time when you weren't waiting for something awful to happen." But there was," I said. "I mean, it's only been in the last few months that I've started remembering all this good stuff, funny stuff about my dad. I can't believe I ever forgot it in the first place." You didn't forget," Wes said, taking a sip of his water. "You just couldn't remember right then. But now you're ready to, so you can." I thought about this as I finished off my waffle.

I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.

So much ice. She thumbed a drying tear away. How much water can the weight of ice carry?

I squeezed his hand, so tight it likely pained him. But sometimes comfort needed to sting more than the sorrow for it to break into the grief.

I started to understand the spasm of grief. Once someone close to you dies, you feel loss more plainly, as it is a part of your everyday experience. It feels crushing as the wave hits you, but then you can see the tide begin to drift in and out again after the storm.

I steer clear of telling. I can't come out with it. The outlandish truth of me. How can I reveal this to someone innocent and unsuspecting? With those who know my story I talk freely about us.... But with others I keep it hidden, the truth. I keep it under wraps because I don't want to shock or make anyone distressed. But it's not like me to be cagey in my interactions.... But now I try to keep a distance from those who are innocent of my reality. At best I am vague. I feel deceitful at times. But I can't just drop it on someone, I feel--it's too horrifying, too huge. It's not that I should be honest with everyone, the white lies I tell strangers I don't mind. But there are those I see time and again, have drinks with, share jokes, and even they don't know. They see my cheery side. And I kick myself for being a fraud.... I can see, though, that my secrecy does me no favors. It probably makes worse my sense of being outlandish. It confirms to me that it might be abhorrent, my story, or that few can relate to it.

Is the air okay?" I texted. "It hurts a little to breathe," my sister texted back. "But we're okay." Jesus, I thought, is there a better and more succinct definition of grief than It hurts a little to breathe, but we're okay?

Is this truth too potent for me to hold? If I keep it close, will I tumble? At times, I don't know.

I struggled to find my words in all that black space. It took all my strength to keep my eyes from closing and the darkness from absorbing me. I had no hope. I felt no joy. I saw no future that didn't fill me with anguish, so I didn't think at all. I didn't make words or cast spells. I just was. And that was all I could manage.

I still think of you every day. But I’m trying not to let it hurt me with the same intensity that it used to.

I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it.

I stood staring to heaven and nothing came from there, no mercy or redemption. Whatever had come had come already and it was not sent by God. I stood, arms outstretched and empty, like a man praying but I was not praying, I was crying, because it had come to this and I had come to this place, and they were not with me... they were gone for ever.

I stood there feeling the lightness of my bones, knowing now this was not only lack of sleep that had transformed my bones into feathers, but my body's recognition that soon I would be leaving this place I had inhabited for one year, this place made entirely of grief.

It could be the sound of each name he knows/curling to ash in his chest’s aortic furnace one after another, year after year instructing him/in the patient work of letting go. Even still/there are things it is reluctant to unclasp./How the Osage orange trunks and bare limbs/glow in the scattered light like veins of fire.

It began with the Christmas tree lights. They were candy-bright, mouth-size. She wanted to feel the lightness of them on her tongue, the spark on her tastebuds. Without him life was so dark, and all the holiday debris only made it worse. She promised herself she wouldn't bite down.

It doesn't get better," I said. "The pain. The wounds scab over and you don't always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you'll never be the same.

I suffer from chronic nostalgia. Looking back makes me dizzy, queasy, and I yearn for it, ache for it. I want it back; maybe the homesickness will leave then. But it’s not the way I remember it. I long for a past that I didn’t have, for the same experiences with different emotions, without the pain, without the ambivalence, without the fear. My heart remembers two different lives and I long for the one I can only see now, in retrospect.

It feels like I’m stuck in one spot. It’s been this way for a long time. I know you understand, but now you’re moving on without me. And I—I’m not ready to be alone.

It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like--how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you--how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another--and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.

It feels weird, being out in the real world again. Around people just living their lives like normal. Their presence is oppressive. The very fact that the world is going on as usual, like nothing ever happened, makes me want to scream. I know it's irrational to expect everything to grind to a halt because of June, but still. A wave of anxiety builds in my chest, my head pounding so loud it drowns out the noise of people talking and tapping away on their laptops.

It had been many months since I'd shed tears for Tomaso, but grief is like that. It's not a continuous process; it comes in waves. You can keep it at bay for a time, like a dam holding back a lake, but them something triggers an explosion inside of you, shattering the wall and letting loose a flood.

It had come to me that I was protecting only the dead when I could not even protect the living. That morning we continued on our way, listlessly. In the following days, we fed, we traveled, we went to watering places, we continued with our lives. I sometimes longed to go on my own way as I had in the past. But to where? It was a longing that happened only in my mind. Sometimes, my tired, aching body just wanted to lie down somewhere and stay put. Sometimes, I didn’t dream and but just wished I could be in another place at another time. Awake, I always felt lonely.