Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

Go on, Bill,” his father said. His voice was muffled and shaking. His back went up and down. Bill badly wanted to touch his father’s back, to see if perhaps his hand might be able to still that restless heaving. He did not quite dare. “Go on, buzz off.” He left and went creeping along the upstairs hall, hearing his mother doing her own crying down in the kitchen. The sound was shrill and helpless. Bill thought, Why are they crying so far apart? and then he shoved the though away.

Gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go. I'd wanted to slip across the borders of this world into that wood and bring back the hawk White lost. Some part of me that was very small and old had known this, some part of me that didn't work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams. And that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father. His death had been so sudden. there had been no time to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all. He could only be lost. He was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead. I know now what those dreams in spring had meant, the ones of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world. I'd wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.

Grace and grief, glory and the Cross... they are inseparably linked from the start. It's something hidden deep in the mystery of God, that these opposites can coexist and be redemptive.

Great grief isn't made to fit inside your body. It's why your heart breaks.

Great memories really can help overwhelm grief.

Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.

Grief and rage--you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.

Grief, as in everything, should be experienced in moderation. There is a time to grieve heavily but then there is a time to set it aside and become happy in life again.

Grief came in waves, sometimes big, sometimes small, but even on the calmest days, the grief remained. The tide still came ashore.

Grief can destroy you—or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. “And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.

Grief does not change you it reveals you, Hazel.

Grief {..} eschews avoidance and requires endurance, and forces us to accept that there are some things in this world that simply cannot be fixed.

Grief felt like it mixed up her brain and her heart, put them back in the wrong places. She wasn’t sure how she’s set that right ever again.

Grief, I began to see, is gratitude turned inside out.

Grief is an ocean, fathomless and wide, and on the surface its most impelling forces arrive in waves

Grief is like an ocean. It comes in waves - some waves are bigger than others and you cannot prepare for it.

Grief is like a splinter deep into every fingertip; to touch anything is torture.

Grief is NOT a mental illness or an emotional disorder. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never experienced it for themselves.

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing, loss to become whoever they are "meant" to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen.

Grief isn't like a map you can follow. It's not a simple route with a destination. Sometimes you loop back and find yourself in the exact same place you left.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.

Grief lets you indulge in it, so that it can feed itself.

Grief makes gravity heavier and air molecules denser, so breathing is accomplished in a shallow, half-hearted way.

Grief strikes where love struck first.

GRIEF TAUGHT ME TO LIVE NUMB. Death takes more than just the one life. It thieves tiny particles from the ones left behind until you feel only half alive.

Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.

Grief can be an incredible source of energy. For good.

Grief could be like a wolf tearing your insides, and you would do anything to make it stop.

Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.

Grief gives you a hundred reasons to cry; hope gives you a thousand reasons to smile, joy gives you a million reasons to laugh, and love gives you billion reasons to rejoice.

...grief had no mercy, time limit, or expiration date.

Grief is an impossible meal, so we cut it up into little pieces, dress it in ritual, and take it like a pill.

...grief is as much about regret for what you've never had as sadness for what you've lost.

Grief is better than happiness, because in grief a person draws close to God. Your wings open. A tent is set up in the desert where God can visit you. Wealth that arrives in grief is what we spend in joy. The soul is greater than anything you ever lost.

Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.

Grief is like a roller coaster. Somedays we feel up and other days we feel down.

Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.

Grief is like the ocean. The waves ebb and flow. Sometimes the water is calm. Other times it's turbulent. In order to survive, I had to learn to swim. In moments when I struggled with massive waves of grief, I rode it out.

Grief is not necessarily any prettier than death, and the grief-stricken do not wander like lambs grateful for the shepherd's guidance. They can be more like wounded wolves, snapping at those who would help them.

Grief isn't always a knife-sharp twist in your heart or a dull bludgeon in your stomach, sometimes it's a net, cast suddenly and silently over your soul so that you feel trapped and suffocated by its grasp. I feel the loss in the deepest recesses of myself, hidden parts of my mind and my matter, united in missing someone I will never see again.

Grief is times bailiff sent to evict you from your old life. Its black warrant demands of you hard labour. There can be no escape of reprieve. You must toil laying down the foundation stones of acceptance, stone by stone, until you have paved your way to your new life.

Grief is what we add on to loss. It is a learned response, specific to some cultures only. It is not universal and it is not unavoidable. ... Grief is seeing only what has been taken away from you. The celebration of a life is recognizing all that we were blessed with, and feeling so very grateful.

grief never leaves, it just mutates

Grief resets the clock of life to before & after.

Grief rises and falls with every breath, clings to the chambers of the heart and makes each step we take a challenge. It is a dense space, filled with sensations that carry our tears and our palpable aching. We cannot escape these times; we cannot outrun what is intimately entangled in our moment-to-moment world. It is now that our apprenticeship is most called upon. We are asked to stand alongside these difficult and painful visitations, these epiphanies of lamentation.

Grief seems to create losses within us that reach beyond our awareness--we feel as if we're missing something that was invisible and unknown to us while we had it, but is now painfully gone...Longing is not conscious wanting; it's an involuntary yearning for wholeness, for understanding, for meaning, for the opportunity to regain or even simply touch what we've lost.

Grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.

Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter’s death and to that sorrow she’d added a long life of entitlement and disappointment, of privilege and pride. And the dagger she’d fashioned was taking a brief break from slashing her insides, and was now pointed outward.

Grief works its way on people differently. Some sulk, or become morose, or weep and scream a vengeance at the gods.

Grieving is not a race, nor is it a predictable experience - it is as unique as each and every one of us. Therefore by creating your own path you will find your own way through.