Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it.

so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.

So pointless to play over how our years might have been put to better use. They can't be recovered now. We do well not to grieve on and on. Ancient voices may have much to tell, but no one's listening.

Sorrowers tend to avoid what they are most fond of and try to give vent to their grief.

Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.

Sorry doesn’t make anything better. It’s just a word to fill the space of a loss of words.

Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

Sorrow fades," he muttered as he retrieved the last fragment, "grief dies, but Art lives forever.

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.

So strange that David Drucker of all people was the only one who said the exact right thing: Your dad shouldn't have died. That's really unfair.

So this, Harriet thought, gazing at her black-clad reflection, was what bearing up looked like. The eyes in the mirror stared at her, somehow, while fixing themselves far away. Bearing up, then, must be this: the feeling of perfect frozen stillness, so that to raise your hand was a wrenching and unnatural event. It was not being able to sleep or eat, and the small placid tone in which she heard herself decline the food. It was the presentiment that there must be a crack or a hole somewhere at hand down which she was to throw and extinguish herself, since there must surely be something provided to make this bearable.

Spiritual practices in any tradition, including mindfulness in its many forms, are meant to help you live what is yours to live, not make you rise above it. These tools are meant to help you feel companioned inside your grief. They're meant to give you a tiny bit of breathing room inside what is wholly unbearable. That's not at all the same thing as making your pain go away.

Steve's laugh was brittle. “Sarah, we all have our own wounds. We’re all broken in our own way. Mine might look different than yours, but they were deep enough to enlarge my heart.

Stella crossed to the sink beneath the window to fill the kettle. "Would you like lavender tea?

Still waters run deepest, they used to tell me.

Stop punishing yourself for being someone with a heart. You cannot protect yourself from suffering. To live is to grieve. You are not protecting yourself by shutting yourself off from the world. You are limiting yourself.

Strange how knowing our story had no happy ending had freed us to live in the moment. We weren’t guy and girl. We weren’t damaged and terminal. We were just now.

Stories aren't facts, Cait, they're not details. Stories are feelings. You've got your feelings, haven't you?" "Too many," I said. "Well, that's all you need." He put his hand on mine. "Cry yourself a story, love. It works. Believe me." So that's what I did, I cried myself a story. And this is it.

Strange, what the heart can bear. It can carry grief beyond measure. It can bear a weight that is too great to speak of. But a heart can't bear the world. It has its limits...

Stress and loss have made us all phantoms of ourselves.

Stuart Diver has had years of extensive professional counselling to retrain his brain so that he can replace the thought of how helpless he was when Sally dies with the truth that he tried everything he could to save her, showing how much he cared. He has learned to substitute memories of Sally's last moments with thoughts of wonderful times from their lives together- a great trip, a fun birthday, some other special occasion. In the corner of his living room is a bicycle that he rides every night, and he likens keeping his mental health on track to keeping physically fit. It's hard. It requires patience and it takes discipline.

Stubbornness is the bearer of disaster…

Such a funny thing death is for mortals. You cry. You morn. You grieve. You get angry. But death is not always tragic, dear one. Sometimes death is the ultimate expression of love.

Suddenly the birds become silent. I look up and they all flush out of the tree at the same time. The dogs feel the overbearing silence too, and they are trying to fill it with barking. I want to cry more than ever now.

Suffering; impossibility of being comfortable anywhere; oppression, irritations and remorse one after the next, everything under the sign "wretchedness of man," used by Pascal.

Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy.

Suffering is so real & I walk amongst so many who have no idea how much my soul is aching to be healed.

SUICIDE... Is to have the freedom to choose; when, where and how to die. ― John Zea

Suffering is a jealous and lonely state. It can't abide the company of anything else. It is greedy; it demands all of one's energies.

Surprised by joy- impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport-- Oh! with whom But thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find? Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind-- But how could I forget thee? Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss? -- That thought's return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more; That neither present time, nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

Surrender in the Land of Loss is a matter of allowing our heart, mind, and body to come into alignment with one another and with life all around us. We stop resisting our feelings and let them be heard and felt. When we can do that in an intentional, mindful way, we courageously move toward healing.

Sure we all need money but what do you really focus on? It is a matter of the heart. If your thoughts are on material and worldly things, no good fruits can come out of it. Seek the kingdom of God first and the other things shall be added unto you not vice versa.

Surviving makes other people’s tears unbearable. You might drown in them.

Sustained, complicated grief is hard- & yes, potentially dangerous- ANYTHING worthwhile in life holds a certain measure of risk to it- and friends who tell you grief is dangerous & caution you to short track your process- don't even get me started on that cop-out of a mentality. "Yes" friends are the unsafe ones, YEEE-IKESSS. Avoid them like the plague. Face your process head on and figure out your relationship status with your G-Friend- & I don't mean girlfriend. Grief is there to help us connect the islands, as it were, of our life. Without it, when something happens, we become wounded, detached & don't heal. We walk around with a gimp thinking we are stronger for ignoring that pesky, four-letter word of a third wheel friend.

Synthesis is the gateway to Transcendence, because once you accept that you are forever changed and that life is forever different, you have to ask, "What are you going to do about that fact? Will the change be for the better or for worse?" It's the loss itself that becomes the catalyst for meaning. (pg 273)

Suppose she never got into art school, suppose she was not a painter after all? Suppose the talents which others had persuaded her she possessed were to abandon her overnight, or turn out to have been unreal all the time? Suppose she had to take a typing course or live with a word processor? I would die, she thought, I would kill myself or make myself die of grief. Already there was one great deep grief in her life.

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed. They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car. They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.

Sweetheart, I’m telling you, you love someone like that, you love them the right way, and no time would be enough. Doesn’t matter if you had thirty years,” she tells me. “It wouldn’t be enough.

Take heart now in one true thing: You will gain traction. You will grow upwards even when you think you’ve been slammed back down into that same dark hole. It will start looking like a different hole, one that might still have you curled up and crying, but that crying will be more transformative than only desperate screams of despair. Your pain can be turned to good account. You’re not alone. You’ve got this handbook. Keep us with you.

Take it from me. Now is always the answer. Besides, do you have anything better to do? Mope around for a decade or two?" Casiopea drummed her fingers against her skirt and chewed her lip. The dramatic poetry she'd read would have called for this and more. There was sadness in her, of course, but she didn't wish to crack like fine china either. She could not wither away. In the world of the living, one must live. And had this not been her wish? To live. Truly live.

Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment’.

Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border.

Tears of grief are unique. They contain chemicals that aren't found in the more mundane droplets of moisture that bathe the eyes, as if our tears wash us free of some noxious cause of sorrow. And tonight, after crying until I am empty, I have a rare glimpse of my own interior landscape - wounds piled like tiny skeletons into the reef of conscious adult life. I am aground amid my conquered traumas, stranded as a consequence of my achievements.

Tears of joy are lighter than smiles of sorrow.

Tears are the sound the heart makes when it breaks.

Tears are not the only proofs of distress, nor the best ones.

Tears have always been easier to shed than explain.

Ten years from now, her mother might not even recognize her. Already she was different, but the day would come when she'd be this person her mother had never seen. There would be other people - someone like Carolyn or Alan, or even Violet - who had known her longer than her mother ever did.

Tears are a wonderful thing; they wash, they warm, they are the rivers that run through our minds, seeking release. In their salinity they remind us that we came from the sea. Our cells know this, and go about their machinations, ceaselessly recreating the primordial brine. We are water, whether or not the Spirit of God once hovered formless and magnificent above the idea of us, in some ancient place before the Singularity uncoiled itself into space and time.

Tears of grief and tears of joy are the same tears.