Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

One of my pa...friends... isn't doing very well." "...Is your friend dying?" "...Yes honey, he is." "That's sad.

One of the skills of grief that Lusa had learned was to hold on tight to the last moments between sleep and waking. Sometimes, then, in the early morning, taking care not to open her eyes or rouse her mind through its warm drowse to the surface where pain broke clear and could, she found she could choose her dreams. She could call a memory and patiently follow it backward into flesh, sound, and scents. It would be come her life once again and she was held and safe. Everything undecided. Everything still new.

One thing I’ve learned about grief: it’s like a creditor’s bill. You can put off paying, but it eventually falls due, and exacts usurious interest.

On grief. We know where we've been. We know where we want to be.

On her own, Grace could be effervescent, illuminating the entire room with her intelligence and wit. Around others she seemed to lose her luster.

Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live. Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence. The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know—all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is meant to function. This sense of anxiety is something I have become unsettlingly accustomed to. The familiar knot in my stomach. The tightness in my chest. But becoming accustomed to something does not mean that it does not take a toll. Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.

Only I know what my road has been for the last year and a half: the economy of this motionless and anything but spectacular mourning that has kept me unceasingly separate by its demands; a separation that I have ultimately always projected to bring to a close by a book--Stubbornness, secrecy.

Only by the shuddering of the bed did Toby realize the girl was sobbing. Molly herself made no sound; it was as though her grief was trapped in a jar, her cries inaudible to anyone but her.

Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.

Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life--both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections--have all vanished.

Only the words cannot reflect the real feelings of one. However, with vision and heart, one may see and feel anyone's grief and the pain.

On the way home I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much.

On the first occasion Mrs Papagay had met her, there had been a discussion of the process of grief, and Mrs Jesse had nodded sagely, "I know that. I have felt that,' like a kind of tragic chorus. 'I have felt everything; I know everything. I don’t want any new emotion. I know what it is to feel like a stoan.

On War – At the end, here is the only real statement either side can use: It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Ordinary days deliver joy easily again & I can’t take it. If I could tell you how her eyes laughed or describe the rage of her suffering, I must admit that lately my memories are sometimes like a color warping in my blue mind. Metal abandoned in rain. My mother will not move. Which is to say that sometimes the true color of her casket jumps from my head like something burnt down in the genesis of a struck flame. Which is to say that I miss the mind I had when I had my mother. I own what is yet. Which means I am already holding my own absence in faith. I still carry a faded slip of paper where she once wrote a word with a pencil & crossed it out. From tree to tree, around her grave I have walked, & turned back if only to remind myself that there are some kinds of peace, which will not be moved. How awful to have such wonder. The final way wonder itself opened beneath my mother’s face at the last moment. As if she was a small girl kneeling in a puddle & looking at her face for the first time, her fingers gripping the loud, wet rim of the universe.

Orpheus never got the memo that loss is a ticket to resilience, not some sewer of revenge in which to wallow, marinating selfish, hellbent purpose for centuries on end.

Oscar did not know what he was supposed to be feeling right now, what all the adults behind him would be expecting him to feel. He did not even know what he was, in fact, feeling. Except, whatever it was, it was a lot. Too much. More than bodies could hold.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two: So excellent a king; that was, to this, Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother That he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth! Must I remember? why, she would hang on him, As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on: and yet, within a month-- Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!-- A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she follow'd my poor father's body, Like Niobe, all tears:--why she, even she-- O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle, My father's brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules: within a month: Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married. O, most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not nor it cannot come to good: But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.

Our dead become the photographs and words we hang on the walls, but they also hang on the walls of our hearts, the windows of our lips, and the sobs in our voices.

Our divorce was an optical illusion, surely, because I am often still there, in my old home with my family. I can so easily fool myself, even without a scope, a lens, a patch of sky to measure my trauma, my blues, my perspective or my period of mourning. Suspension of disbelief can be a very real kind of haunting.

Our life is not in stuff, focus your attention on Christ where it should be. Prosperity and wealth has damaged the body of Christ. God takes pleasure in the prosperity of his children but don't replace him with material.

Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time. So we keep them in our memories. And when we regret that we don’t have more memories of them, maybe our minds give us more gifts; gradually we find ourselves remembering them being with us in times and places that they couldn’t have been, and gradually we stop correcting ourselves because, well, we want them to have been there.

...our loves ones truly are ever-present. We may bury their bodies or scatter their ashes, but their spirits are boundless and do not accompany them to the grave. The terms 'letting go' and 'closure' are just empty words. They mean nothing to someone who has suffered through the death of a loved one. Instead of insisting on figuratively burying our dead, why not keep them close to us? Love doesn't die when we do.

Our loved ones, however they might have died, are not constrained to their last moments on earth. They simply aren’t. So we should not keep them there either.

Our parting was like a stalemate…. Neither of us won. Yet both of us lost. And worse still … that unshakable feeling that nothing was ever really finished.

Our relationship had been doomed form the start, because it was based on grief, and unlike love, grief eventually passed.

Our real last time has come & gone. It wasn't bittersweet. Instead it was laughter. It was laughter because we thought we had more time.

Our silence about grief serves no one. We can't heal if we can't grieve; we can't forgive if we can't grieve. We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend.

Our spirits are embroidered with silver threads stitching us to our loved ones. They are adorned with the jewels of every moment shared and all that we cherished about them. By our choosing to live on, they can live on. If we dissolve into the darkness of despair, they cannot shine. Our loved ones do not want us to stop living because they have died; they want us to live. They want us to bring them with us into each new day so that a part of them can remain on earth through the stories we share. After a time, however long that is (and it is different for different people), sorrow ceases to be a tribute to the deceased. It distracts from their stories and puts the focus on us, on our pain, on our lives. They have not moved on from us; they are living within and beyond us. And we have not moved on from them when we take a step toward happiness, acceptance, and peace. We live on together when we live on in love.

Our throats closed over our grief; open them, and what shrill, animal keening would have issued forth, what primitive howl of pain?

Outdoors next day, I was dizzy from a sense Of being ejected with some violence From vigil in a white and distant spot Where I was numb, into this garden plot Too warm, too close, and not enough like pain.

Our relationships, in life and in memories, have gifted us with experiences of love... as long as we live, love lives on in us.

Outside, I clicked the padlock back in place, sealing the butterflies within. It seemed remarkable that they'd survived in there for so long in such fruitless and insubstantial conditions. But as I walked back up the drive to the front of the house, I thought about Jake and me, and I realized that was just what happens. The butterflies didn't have a choice, after all. That's what things do. Even in the toughest of circumstances, they keep living.

Pain in the wilderness is an investment in pleasure in the Promised Land.

Pain can make us lash out in unexpected ways. Pain can make us hurt those we care about. Pain can build walls between two human souls.

Pain and grief have been kept buried for ages, bred in secrecy and shame, wrapped by an ongoing conspiracy of smiles and well-being. Pain and grief are most healing and ecstatic emotions. Yes, sure, they can be hard, yet what makes them most devastating is the perverted idea that they are wrong, that they need to be hidden and fixed. The greatest perversion I can conceive is the idea that illness and pain are a sign that there is something wrong in our life, that we have unresolved issues, that we have made mistakes. In this world everyone is bound to get ill, experience pain and die. The greatest gift I can give to myself and the world is the joyful acceptance of this. Today I want to be real, I will not hide my pain as well as my happiness. I will not care if my gloomy face or desperate words cause concern or embarrassment in others. I do not need be fed with reassuring words about the beauty of life. The beauty of life resides in the full acceptance of All That Is.

O who will give me tears? Come, all ye springs, Dwell in my head and eyes; come, clouds and rain; My grief hath need of all the watery things That nature hath produced: let every vein Suck up a river to supply mine eyes, My weary weeping eyes, too dry for me, Unless they get new conduits, new supplies, To bear them out, and with my state agree.

Pak Karman hugged his wife’s gravestone tightly. “You left without saying farewell!” The whole of the graveyard was ablaze with light.

Pain only shows us we've lost something that was intimately involved in our lives. Why on earth would we do anything other than grieve, when something that was apart of us, is ripped away?

Pain too much to handle also comes with exquisite beauty, as common as dirt, as unexpected as grace.

Part of love is preparing for death... Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness... [People say] you'll come out of it... And you do come out of it, that's true. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.

Past relationships are a loss, so we have to deal with them like loss. We must fully grieve. We must feel the depth of our pain so that our pain doesn't become the home where we learn to live.

Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter. the Tai Chi instructor

Part of dealing with the sense of being cut off - for both the one dying and the one bereaved - is acknowledging that though a vital part of life has changed dramatically, all relationships (with friends, even with you, perhaps) have not.

Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.

Pattie saw grief. Her eyes focused on a version of her own young self, and so many other children in Vietnam who grew up without parents, some abandoned because of their ethnicity, others because of tragedy. And her arms reached out wide.

[Peggotty] gave me one piece of intelligence which affected me very much, namely, that there had been a sale of the furniture at our old home, and that Mr. and Miss Murdstone were gone away, and the house was shut up, to be let or sold. I had no part in it while they remained there, but it pained me to think of the dear old place as altogether abandoned; of the weeds growing tall in the garden, and the fallen leaves lying thick and wet upon the paths. I imagined how the winds of winter would howl round it, how the cold rain would beat upon the window-glass, how the moon would make ghosts on the walls of the empty rooms, watching their solitude all night. I thought afresh of the grave in the churchyard, underneath the tree: and it seemed as if the house were dead, too [...].

...People are not one-dimensional. People do not live on one plane...

People do what they can to get through another day.