Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

In the final analysis, the question of why bad things happen to good people translates itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened. Are you capable of forgiving and accepting in love a world which has disappointed you by not being perfect, a world in which there is so much unfairness and cruelty, disease and crime, earthquake and accident? Can you forgive its imperfections and love it because it is capable of containing great beauty and goodness, and because it is the only world we have? Are you capable of forgiving and loving the people around you, even if they have hurt you and let you down by not being perfect? Can you forgive them and love them, because there aren't any perfect people around, and because the penalty for not being able to love imperfect people is condemning oneself to loneliness? Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not prefect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him despite His limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be? And if you can do these things, will you be able to recognize that the ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons God has given us to enable us to live fully, bravely and meaningfully in this less-than-perfect world?

In the grief that comes with recognizing what happened to us, we often feel there is nowhere to turn for solace…We do things to keep it away, such as becoming overly busy or using drugs or alcohol to numb our feelings. When we are caught up in resistance, we do not feel hope, but when we surrender to our sadness fully, hope trickles in.

In the first year of my grief, there were times when I felt like hiding my personal story of loss and other times when I wanted to wear a sign on my body that read "Be nice to me, I'm grieving," or "Don't tick me off; I've already got the world on my shoulders," or maybe even "BEWARE - don't upset the widow!" I needed a variety of signs that I could switch out depending on my daily mood.

In the kitchen, her family nibbled Helen’s lemon squares. Melanie urged brownies on the nurses. “Take these,” she told Lorraine. “We can’t eat them all, but Helen won’t stop baking.” “Sweetheart,” Lorraine said, “everybody mourns in her own way.” Helen mourned her sister deeply. She arrived each day with shopping bags. Her cake was tender with sliced apples, but her almond cookies crumbled at the touch. Her pecan bars were awful, sticky-sweet and hard enough to break your teeth. They remained untouched in the dining room, because Helen never threw good food away.

In the lowest of lows you can learn the highest of highs, and that often when you get to the point of wanting to die, it’s because you already have and are truly aching to live.

In the midst of the darkness of loss, I found light. Admittedly, in those first weeks, it might have been but a single small spark I sensed deep inside of me, but that spark guided me in the twisted, dark journey of grief. As I stumbled over the roots of hopelessness and despair, that light grew to illuminate my path, a path I sometimes felt very alone on. At some point in the journey I’d turned around, and there was God. That is grace.

In the library I search for a good book. We have many books, says Mrs. Rose, the librarian, and ALL of them are good. Of course she says that. It's her job. But do I want to read about Trucks Trains and Transport? Or even Horses Houses and Hyenas? In the fiction corner there are pink boks full of princesses and girls who want to be princesses and black books about bad boys and brave boys and brawny boys. Where is the book about a girl whose poems don't rhyme and whose Granny is fading? Pearl, says Mrs. Rose, the bell has rung. I go back to class empty-handed empty headed empty-hearted.

In the monotony of everyday existence grief comes as a holiday, and a fire is an entertainment. A scratch embellishes an empty face.

In the months following James' death, on thought had returned time and again as she passed others in the street. What secrets did these people hold? What had they endured? She wondered how many people rushing in and out of shops, or on their way to their work, had lost a love, or known deep disappointment or grief, fear, or want, yet summoned the resilience to go on. Those lines across foreheads, those mouths downturned --- what were the ruts on life's road that wrought such marks, those signs of scars on the soul?

In the night, in the utter silence of the nights among those little houses where old people live, she felt him leave the bed and in the pitch-black reach his dressing gown and leave the room. She let him go. How it troubled her, all this. Not much to ask, peace of mind at nights and a bit of ordinary cheerfulness in the day, some conversation, something to laugh about and doing nobody any harm. And not all this. A slit of light came on under the bedroom door.

In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me

In the quiet of the graveyard, the couple knelt together in soul-stretching silence—wishing, waiting, hoping, praying.

In the support group, the counselor had said: When you lose a loved one, you feel as if you're inside a confined space. Everyone else will seem to be careening along outside of this space. In time, you will become aware of an opening you are going to have to step through. It might be the touch of a new lover, a new job, a move--but you'll know. You will step through.

In this forest called life, sometimes there are no goodbyes, no proper sendoffs, no wishing for a next time; just the knowledge that this departure will never be set right.

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband’s death—his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently—“shrewdly” and “reasonably”—she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection—a “hospital” infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance!

In this waiting, there is witness.

In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and remind us to go all in, because life is short. The joy edges the pain and gives us a reason to rise.

In times of trouble, people need artists. We create those spaces where their own pain and worry and sadness can rest, and where their broken hearts can hope again.

In those first hours after he drowned, when the catastrophe was still confined to Calabash beach, and to Jake, Joe and me, its speed was impossible to reconcile with its scale. Nothing so big could happen this fast; it defied the laws of physics, it could not be true. Death is too much for the mind to register in a matter of minutes; the incalculable magnitude can only be absorbed by increment, day by day. As each day allows a new glimpse of its immensity, and the aftershock extends beyond the beach to reach hundreds of people all over the world, my comprehension slowly expands until its dimensions resemble a more accurate impression of the truth. But the bigger his death grows, the more inconceivable it becomes. It feels like an ambitious piece of performance art; a work of fiction, not real life. How strange that the truth of my own situation should be so much clearer to everybody else.

In time, against conscience and even will, my grief for him began to include grief for myself. Sometimes I would get the feeling that I was going to waste. It was my life calling me to itself. It was the light that shines in darkness calling me back into time.

In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn't. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say "I'm sorry" to, "I didn't mean it" to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret. It was only remembering the good times that kept you from taking the knife from the kitchen drawer and, holding it so, tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how your best moments in the world had been spent--holding it so, roll onto the blade, slowly so that it slid like love between your ribs and into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you regretting.

In truth, nothing was the same. She forgot about the stars… and taking notice of the sea. She was no longer filled with all the curiosities of the world and didn’t take much notice of anything… other than how heavy… and awkward the bottle had become.

In trying moments, you must keep trying... In grieving times, don't think of giving up! Employ your passion to work; something great to enjoy is approaching!

In writing you can always change the ending or delete a chapter that isn’t working. Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.

I often wondered after David’s death: Had they known something then? Did their very souls recognize each other? Did Jacob, closer to God than anyone else I knew, somehow sense this was the last time he would see his grandpa? Had there been a message to the little boy in David’s long-held gaze? Did these two people—the six-year-old boy and the sixty-year-old man— realize something the rest of us didn’t?

I once thought that grief was chronic, that all you could do was appreciate the good days and take them along with the bad. And then I started to think that maybe the good days aren't just days; maybe the good days can be good weeks, good months, good years. Now I wonder if grief isn't something like a shell. You wear it for a long time and then one day you realize you've outgrown it. So you put it down.

I only thought of myself, and I made you grieve. It hurts me now to think of your grief. You must not grieve anymore for me. It is better_it shall be better with me because I have known you.

I pulled a dirty black sweatshirt from the laundry basket on my son’s floor and tried to drink in his scent, to savor the essence of my sweet boy. I inhaled it long and hard, wanting to permanently implant all of him in my brain, to make him last forever.

I pulled the sheet off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn't look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty. The both of them had smiles on their faces. I thought maybe one of them had told a joke just before they died and, pain and all, they both laughed and ended up with a smile. Probably not true but but it made me feel good to think about it like that, and when the Sister came in I asked her if I could clean their faces and she said, "no, certainly not!" but I said, "ah, c'mon, it's me brother n' father, I want to," and she looked at me and looked at me, and at last she said, "of course, of course, I'll get some soap and water." When the nun came back she helped me. Not doing it, but more like showing me how, and taking to me, saying things like "this is a very handsome man" and "you must have been proud of your brother" when I told her how Charlie Dave would fight for me, and "you're lucky you have another brother"; of course I was, but he was younger and might change, but she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the grit away. The only other thing I remember a nun ever saying to me was, "Mairead, you get to your seat, this minute!

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 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 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 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.

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.

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

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 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.

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!

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 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.