Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

A star's light still shines even if there's no one to see it, but without someone to remember Jesse, his light will disappear.

As the body gets weaker, the spirit gets stronger.

As the sky faded to night, her anger dissipated—but not in a healing way, just dulled, like forged iron sizzling in a cold pail of water.

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.

As tree shapes from mist / Her young death / Loose / In you.

A storm is an artist who passes by on her way to paint your rainbow.

A sword held in vengeance only leads to grief.

At Abraham's burial, his two most prominent sons, rivals since before they were born, estranged since childhood, scions of rival nations, come together for the first time since they were rent apart nearly three-quarters of a century earlier. The text reports their union nearly without comment. "His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre, in the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites." But the meaning of this moment cannot be diminished. Abraham achieves in death what he could never achieve in life: a moment of reconciliation between his two sons, a peaceful, communal, side-by-side flicker of possibility in which they are not rivals, scions, warriors, adversaries, children, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. They are brothers. They are mourners. In a sense they are us, forever weeping for the loss of our common father, shuffling through our bitter memories, reclaiming our childlike expectations, laughing, sobbing, furious and full of dreams, wondering about our orphaned future, and demanding the answers we all crave to hear: What did you want from me, Father? What did you leave me with, Father? And what do I do now?

At 10:37pm she took her last breath. Her last breath of life was a very long exhale and then she never took another breath again.

At first I thought he was laughing because his shoulders were shaking, but then he put his palms on his eyes and I realized he was crying. It was the quietest crying I've ever heard. Like a whisper. I was going to go over to him, but then I thought maybe he was whisper-crying because he didn't want me or anyone else to hear him.

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

At her lowest point she found her greatest strength. Not because she alone was strong, but because she held onto faith with all her might

At her words, words of forgiveness from Rose, an honest and just woman, something broke inside of Wince. His tears began to flow. Age seemed to drift from his face like misty ghosts from a morning field. Katie lifted his chin and, holding back her own tears, looked into his eyes. "Thank you, Wince." Eve placed her free hand on his shoulder. "May we hold her now?" Wince nodded and gently released the baby into the waiting arms of her sisters. "You did the right thing, Wince." Rose gave Wince a hug. "And you can help us bury her after Wilson and the Tar Ponds City Police see if they can find anybody to lay charges against after all this time.

At least I rescued your poor hot dog.

At night, with only the bedside lamp on, I would pretend to sleep and listened to Dad’s muffled crying in the semi-darkness, wishing that I could cry like him, that I could bring Stevan back from the dead by the strength of my tears. But they were regular tears carving the same slicing-hot trails down my cheeks, and in the end, I could not summon a distinct kind of grief for Stevan. Just the same grief that has gripped mankind for centuries, which time would inevitably ebb into a notch in one’s skin or a small limp in the way one walks or a bottled memory that would only resurface some nights. And soon, you’d struggle to remember how that person talked or how that person used to occupy a customized space in your life. And you don’t want to forget, but you don’t want to remember either, and there seemed to be no place where you could just exist.

At Night on the High Seas At night, when the sea cradles me And the pale star gleam Lies down on its broad waves, Then I free myself wholly From all activity and all the love And stand silent and breathe purely, Alone, alone cradled by the sea That lies there, cold and silent, with a thousand lights. Then I have to think of my friends And my gaze sinks into their eyes, And I ask each one, silent and alone: "Are you still mine? Is my sorrow a sorrow to you, my death a death? Do you feel from my love, my grief, Just a breath, just an echo?" And the sea peacefully gazes back, silent, And smiles: NO And no greetings and no answers come from anywhere.

At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, "the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter." We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, "what was once man's confident expectations for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, 'I am all right,' there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.

At the end of every dark storm is a bright rainbow.

At the last minute, he broke the rule and he looked. He was so rapt in his view of the light at the end of the tunnel, he got excited, tuned up, he got crazy nervous and for a second he wavered in his confidence and he looked! To confirm or affirm or just firm up,’ students laughing ‘his manly love for her and in that motion of divine stupidity, he killed her dead forever with a glance. Hades ripped her back into his den and that was, proverbially, that.’ A girl across from me says bitterly, ‘No second, second chance for Orpheus.’ ‘He was fucked,’ D continues, nodding. ‘Not because the gods were heartless, but because he fucked up. The guilt of that. Can you imagine? Spent the rest of his pathetic days wallowing, lamenting, composing (or was it decomposing?) heartbreaking tunes upon his lyre, dissolving in grief and music and art, never being the least bit happy or lovable. The saddest sap of all. How do we tell a story like that without being sappy? Oh woe! How do we shape into lines our most harrowing mistakes and losses without drenching them in sticky poetic sap?

At which point I grew old and it was like ripping open the beehive with my hands again. At which point I conceived a realm more real than life. At which point there was at least some possibility. Some possibility, in which I didn’t believe, of being with her once more.

At which point my grief-sounds ricocheted outside of language. Something like a drifting swarm of bees. At which point in the tetric silence that followed I was swarmed by those bees and lost consciousness. At which point there was no way out for me either.

Aunt-Sister would’ve said, ‘Let her go, it’s past the time,’ but I wanted the pain of mauma’s face and hands more than the peace of being without them.

Aurora, you're a child, live like one, don't act like one. Enjoy the innocence, dump the immaturity.

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.

A walk is a walk and must be taken; breakfast and dinner come when they are due. The routines of the living are inviolable, no hiatus called on account of misery, spiritual crisis, or awful weather.

A whole Gothic world had come to grief...there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled...

Baby, don't build a monument for me of your sadness. You wouldn't have wasted your tears when I was alive. Why make an ocean of them now when it's over? The future you dreamed is a dream. Dream something else.

Because how could he have done this? How could he have chosen to leave me here all alone?

Because honor still matters. Honor is what echoes." His father's words. But they are as empty on his lips as they feel in my ears. This was has taken everything from him. I see in his eyes how broken he is. how terribly hard he is trying to be his father's son. If he could, he would choose to be back by the campfire we made in the highlands of the Institute. He would return to the days of glory when life was simple, when friends seemed true. But wishing for the past doesn't clean the blood from either of our hands.

Because Dad told you he'd be here forever. Because I thought forever was like Mars -- far away.

Because in our pain we must find each other – mirror to mirror the grace of our shared humanity, the stunningly broken beauty of our shared grief. And you can let your grief see my grief and let our tears mingle into some kind of healing alchemy, and you’ll know what i know. That we are never alone. I promise. You and me? We are never, ever alone.

Before I could catch it, my heart slammed straight down to my feet, leaving me with a massive hole in my chest. It was amazing how I could just be going along, doing okay, and then suddenly-wham-I missed her so much even my fingernails hurt.

Because of Jesus, we can walk the path of loss knowing He is always in front, lighting the way.

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.

Before I lost my father, I never understood the rituals surrounding funerals: the wake, the service itself, the reception afterward,the dinners prepared by well-meaning friends and delivered in plastic containers, even the popular habit of making poster boards filled with photos of the dear departed. But now I know why we do those things. It's busywork, all of it. I had so much to take care of, so many arrangements to make, so many people to inform, I didn't have a moment to be engulfed by the ocean of grief that was lapping at my heels. Instead, I waded through the shallows, performing task after task, grateful to have duties to propel me forward.

Before my dad died I saw the world as a place. By "place" I mean space. Fixed. Space did not move, but people moved in space. People and space could touch each other, but not very deeply. After he died, I saw that people and space are permeable to each other in a way that people and people are not. I saw that space is like water. People can go inside it.

Before they can grin there fake smiles, I mumble something about a toilet, laugh a second too late at some joke, and then, without looking back, I speed-walk to the house like someone whose heart isn't shaking, whose eyes aren't filling up, someone who doesn't feel so sad.

Before and after the funeral I never ceased to cry and be miserable, but it makes me ashamed when I think back on that sadness of mine, seeing that always in it was an element of self-love - now a desire to show that I prayed more than any one else, now concern about the impression I was producing on others, now an aimless curiosity which caused me to observe Mimi's cap or the faces of those around me. I despised myself for not experiencing sorrow to the exclusion of everything else, and I tried to conceal all other feelings: this made my grief insincere and unnatural. Moreover, I felt a kind of enjoyment in knowing that I was unhappy and I tried to stimulate my sense of unhappiness, and this interest in myself did more than anything else to stifle real sorrow in me.

Behind the glass, underneath the cellophane, remains your final summer – sweet And meaningless, and not to come again.

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.

Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness.

Bereavement seemed to work on him as a kind of blanket allergy, making him edgy and irritable to all the outside world. And of course it was reciprocal; the world receded on him.

...beneath torrents of spring rain, buds come to life - and we do too, beneath torments of tears...

... being with people who don't understand is worse than being alone with her grief.

Ben was taking her through the storm of grief. He was singing her through the rage and despair. He was singing her through the terrible loneliness, because there was no way to shut off grief, no way to cast it aside or fight against it. The only way to end grief was to go through it. As she realized that, his song began to change. It grew softer, sweeter, like the morning after a long cry, when your head still hurt but your heart was no longer broken.

Bereavement, despair, ache, yearning happen to all. We all bear the pain of grief. We all take them in our own ways. And we are all blessed with the grace to transcend. (Page xii)

be strange to yourself in your love, your grief

Besides a burial service is rather lovely. Makes you feel uplifted, the grief is real. It makes you feel awful but it does something to you. I mean, it works it out like perspiration.

Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.

Beware! Balance rules the cosmos. It is not concerned with good or bad. You can be struck by misfortune and be buried in grief if that is what it takes to restore the imbalance you have wrought unto the world.