Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to get rid, of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on and on and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same.

The problem with love is this: It dies. And when it does, you die with it.

The process of recovering from addictiveness happens at a deeper level of consciousness and through feeling our pain without using old addictive fixes. There is no escaping that getting in touch with our original pain is the touchstone to mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

The quest for knowledge is what makes humans survive, even if it hurts.” I have trouble imagining that this éminence grise was once a sixteen-year-old Hungarian boy in a death camp. “There’s a troublesome verse from Ecclesiastes about this,” he tells me. “It says that the more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects.” He pauses for a moment to let this sink in. “Of course, it hurts when we see pictures of people throwing themselves out of windows, children who are orphaned, the widows,” Wiesel says. “But there is no way out of what we’ve seen.” “And how do we live with what we know?” I ask “How can we live with not knowing?

The question of desirable grief and pain or the necessity for it must also be faced. [Are] growth and self-fulfillment possible at all without pain and grief and sorrow and turmoil? If grief and pain are sometimes necessary for growth of the person, then we must learn not to protect people from them automatically as if they were always bad. Not allowing people to go through their pain, and protecting them from it, may turn out to be a kind of overprotection, which in turn implies a certain lack of respect for the integrity and the intrinsic nature and the future development of the individual.

The radiance of this beautiful scene shed a cruel light on every past horror, every insult tolerated, every unspoken retort, every gesture of rejection. Marianne was grieving, and her boundless grief made her regret every moment of cowardice in her life.

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.

The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is pain in this world that you can't be cheered out of. You don't need solutions. You don't need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.

The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire. I am saying this again because I want it to be true.

There are all sorts of losses people suffer- from the small to the large. You can lose your car keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.

The real satire starts when I’m shockingly mocked,not mockingly shocked.

There are all kinds of ways for a relationship to be tested, even broken, some, irrevocably; it’s the endings we’re unprepared for.

There are degrees of obsession, of awareness, of grief, of insanity.

There are cancers so insidious in their nature that their very pulsation is invisible. Such cancers leave the ivory whiteness of the skin untouched, and marble not the firm, fair flesh, with their blue tints; the physician who bends over the patient's chest hears not, through he listens, the insatiable teeth of the disease grinding its onward progress through the muscles, as the blood flows freely on; the knife has never been able to destroy, and rarely even, temporarily, to discern the rage of these mortal scourges; their home is in the mind, which they corrupt; they fill the whole heart until it breaks. Such, madame, are the cancers, fatal to queens; are you, too, free from their scourge?

There are lies in tears. The ones we weep most loudly are usually for ourselves, yet how easily we can pass them off as grief.

There are griefs too scared to be babbled to the world; and there may be loves, which one would forbear to whisper even to a friend.

There are no books that will do it for us and there are no magic "right" words to say. It's the trying, the sharing and the caring - the wanting to help and the willingness to listen - that says "I care about you." When we know that we do care about each other, then, together, we can talk about even the most difficult things and cope with even the most difficult times." (On helping children with grief).

There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds.

There are some griefs so loud They could bring down the sky, And there are griefs so still None knows how deep they lie, Endured, never expended. There are old griefs so proud They never speak a word; They never can be mended. And these nourish the will And keep it iron-hard.

There are places I cannot visit. Places of unbearable sadness, grief, mourning. They say places are made by people. I say places are defined by the memories they conjure—the lunge of a curse, a shared and shattered history, a loved one drowned and lost in the ocean of forgetting.

There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom.

There are some moments you won't completely heal from, those rare ones you will take torn open to the grave but throughout all the big moments that shake you up there will be countless tiny experiences that help you laugh all over again.

There are some who would vow that life isn’t fair. They believe the worst is yet to come, that evil will always conquer good, and that we have no control over our fate. It’s true, there are storms that shake our foundations and monsters that threaten to tear us limb from limb. We will make terrible mistakes. We will fall short of our expectations. No one is exempt from pain and fear. But life, and what comes after, is a beautiful mixture of darkness and light, sacrifice and salvation. There is no fine line between the two, for both are needed. Where there is grief, there will be joy. Where there is heartbreak, love will follow.

There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp.

There are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe—that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.

There are supernatural seasons that cannot be solved with physical solutions.

There are too many stars in the sky and none of them is overshadowing the other. Don't let anybody be a threat to your growth.

There are three means of refuge from the challenges of life; good music, good friends and good food.

There are times in life when we need to allow a sad memory to run its course.

[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.

There comes a point in one's life where the people whom we grew up admiring begin to die, leaving a great chasm in the world. This is awful enough to deal with without having anything so annoying as feelings getting in the way of personal equanimity. And then, possibly even more horribly, there comes a time in one's life when the people whom we grew up with or the people who are in our same age group begin to die. I have had the disagreeable business of having to watch colleagues only a few years my senior perish without warning, though premonition would not soften the blow. I am now realizing that I am entering this time, the dreadful gateway of existence, the one that leads to watching the ebb and flow of time, the great rote and sussuration of life and death, and being able to do nothing but welter in misery and pine over the dregs of hideous mortality. Death is an unaccountable business, one that robs the living of the peace we believe to be --perhaps mistakenly-- our birthright, one which asks the living to pay for the departed in the currency of feelings, leaving us to wallow in emotional debt. There is a loneliness about behind left behind as is there a thrill of horror for what lies beyond. The sum total of living is to sacrifice peace in favour of finding it, which makes little sense at all. I often wonder if the dead know we grieve for them, as the penury of pity only disconcerts ourselves. It is poor comfort, the business of mourning, for what is there really to mourn about excepting our own desire for reconciliation, something which no one, not even the dead, can furnish?

There'd always been an understanding between Havemercy and me; that we'd kill any man who came between us. I was holding up my end of the bargain now that she couldn't uphold hers.

The red sun drips its molten dusk. Wet fires embrace the barren orchards, these gardens in A city of cold slumbers. I am trapped in it.

There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief - but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.

The regret of unfinished business is particularly oppressive, even haunting in its oppressive grief.

There he died; and as thou seest me, saw I the three fall one by one, between the fifth day and the sixth: whence I betook me, already blind, to groping over each, and for three days called them, after they were dead; then fasting had more power than grief.

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

There is an old phrase, ‘hiding in plain sight.’ This is where we find the loved one we miss so much. All we need to do is open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts.

There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There's no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman's excuse was that no one told him that the concentration camps were wrong. We've all seen the pictures of the drowning polar bears. Are we so ethically numb that we need to be told this is wrong?

There is an intense desire to do the proper thing. This feels like their induction. Suddenly, here is life, cut right to its center. Here it is, dismantled to its bones.

There is a noise that is different to grief. Sadness wails and cries and lets loose a sound to the heavens like a baby calling for its mother. That kind of noisy grief is hopeful. It believes that things can be put right, or that help can come. There is a different kind of sound to that. Babies left alone too long do not even cry. They become very still and quiet. They know no one is coming.

There is an old Chinese tale about the woman whose only son had died. In her grief, she went to the holy man and said, 'What prayers, what magical incantations do you have to bring my son back to life?' Instead of sending her away or reasoning with her, he said to her, 'Fetch me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow. We will use it to drive the sorrow out of your life.' The woman set off at once in search of that magical mustard seed. She came first to a splendid mansion, knocked at the door and said, 'I am looking for a home that has never known sorrow. Is this such a place? It is very important to me.' They told her 'You've certainly come to the wrong place,' and began to describe all the tragic things that had recently befallen them. The woman said to herself, 'Who is better able to help these poor unfortunate people than I, who have had misfortune of my own?' She stayed to comfort them, then went on in her search for a home that had never known sorrow. But wherever she turned, hovels and in palaces, she found one tale after another of sadness and misfortune. Ultimately, she became so involved in ministering to other people's grief that she forgot about her quest for the magical mustard seed, never realizing that it had in fact drive the sorrow out of her life.

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...]

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love.

There is a realm in which miracles are possible and do take place. The door to this realm is the belief in all possibilities and YOU are the key.

There is much asked and only so much I think I can or should answer, and so, in this post I would like to give a few thoughts on what seemed to be the overwhelming question: “WHY?” And here is the best answer I can give: Because. Because sometimes, life is damned unfair. Because sometimes, we lose people we love and it hurts deeply. Because sometimes, as the writer, you have to put your characters in harm’s way and be willing to go there if it is the right thing for your book, even if it grieves you to do it. Because sometimes there aren’t really answers to our questions except for what we discover, the meaning we assign them over time. Because acceptance is yet another of life’s “here’s a side of hurt” lessons and it is never truly acceptance unless it has cost us something to arrive there. Why, you ask? Because, I answer. Inadequate yet true.

There is never a guarantee of survival, no matter your strength or skill or wit. There is only the day you are conceived and the day you die, and all else is a series of moments you either embrace or endure.

There is greater clarity in the still waters of sadness, something not found in the babbling brooks of more sought after emotions.

There is never a reason good enough to be out of alignment with peace.

There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.