Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

I've found a connection in his music I've never felt before, and it keeps stabbing me in the heart.

… I've got to believe My grief will end. I can’t see myself, I speak in panic outside a Malibu fish Counter, Pacific slippery as bed silk. My friend says she sees me anyway, Feeds me cold tinned juice. You’re right Here. She's laughing as motorcycles roar Past as chrome American hog dazzlers. I’ll sing the worlds ‘til you remember them.

I've heard you say so many a time That I know just the right words to say, just the right lines to rhyme... Today it's been 7 years since we last met I have learnt to say just the wrong words, just the lines you hate....

I've missed you so much it's felt like missing you is all I am. Like if someone looked inside me, there wouldn't be a skeleton and muscles and blood and nerves. There'd just be memories of you and all the things I've tried to say and ripped out of this notebook, all the things I want to say but can't because I don't have the words.

I've made a discovery, and it's that grief isn't like sadness at all. Sadness is only something that's part of you. Grief becomes you, it wraps you up and changes you and makes everything--every little thing--different than it was before. I remember the me before we got the telegram saying he was gone, but it's like I'm remembering someone else. It feels like an earthquake has gone through me...

I've never seen grief like it. Grief like that, it's like an animal. She's not eating. She's not sleeping. She's whimpering. She's sluggish. She's not herself

I’ve seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly… they can’t kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I’ve seen humans die from smoking them… if I were you I would stop smoking them.” “Why should I? You smoke ‘em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes,” Mandy pointed out. “Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties… for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes… but I’m not a person, I’m Pollution, things like that aren’t dangerous to me but they are to you,” Alecto told her. “It’s not a good idea.

I've since learned that when you lose your same sex parent as a child, it's very common to believe that you, too, will die at the same age as your parent, or when your child is the same age you were. It's a kind of 'instinctive' knowledge, like knowing if you jump into your bed from far enough away, the monsters aren't allowed to grab your ankles.

I’ve seen a lot of stuff… maybe I’ve seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I’ve seen what they can do, how evil they can be… I’ve seen the Holocaust and I’ve seen Jonestown, I’ve seen the Vietnam War and I’ve seen Hiroshima… I’ve seen the Chernobyl disaster… I’ve seen the World Trade Center attack… I’ve been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive,” Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding.

I wait and pray and hope I will look forward to each brand new day thankful for all that I've had and will always have thankful for the sun that shines again believing and hanging on believing that life will go on it can't help but go on it shall go on and in so going there really is no end only mornings and evenings and life that never ever ends.

I walked in the garden of life, caressing soft petals here and there. And lo! After a while they were no more, and my heart bled for each fragrant petal that fell. If every flower withers, never to return to its full blossom, then what good indeed is passing by in the garden of life? Herein lies my hope: That for every flower that withers, another one blooms, one that will remain forever fragrant and fresh, never ever to pass away…

I wanted to forgive my mom and my dad so badly for the deep hurt they caused, the fear their broken marriage invoked in me, but I also didn’t want to pretend anymore. Pretending is exhausting.

I wanted to peel myself off of me.

I want to tell him that I don't know what i feel. I want him but i'm frightened to want him. I don;t want my happiness to be entirely dependent on somebody else's to be a hostage to fortunes I cannot control.

I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for happy couples. I would see or hear about people, usually people I hardly knew or didn't even like, getting together, finding each other after so much groping, and I would feel bliss. I was blindsided by familiar things.

I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother's death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren't there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he'd spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?

I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid. Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts.

I was no soldier, only girl without a mother or the sense to understand this world without her.

I was only able to move forward once I let go of my fear of leaving him behind.

I wasn't prepared to feel anything again. I wasn't supposed to. When hearts are broken so utterly beyond repair, they're not supposed to beat again, right?

I was raised to believe that God speaks in the language of sacrifice," he told me, "You are expected to sacrifice because it is the measure of the depth of your belief...

I was sprawled out in my usual position on the couch, half asleep but entirely drunk, torturing myself by tearing memories out of my mind at random like matches from a book, striking them one at a time and drowsily setting myself on fire.

I was terrified that tomorrow the truth would start.

I was tired of well-meaning folks, telling me it was time I got over being heartbroke. When somebody tells you that, a little bell ought to ding in your mind. Some people don't know grief from garlic grits. There's somethings a body ain't meant to get over. No I'm not suggesting you wallow in sorrow, or let it drag on; no I am just saying it never really goes away. (A death in the family) is like having a pile of rocks dumped in your front yard. Every day you walk out and see them rocks. They're sharp and ugly and heavy. You just learn to live around them the best way you can. Some people plant moss or ivy; some leave it be. Some folks take the rocks one by one, and build a wall.

I was very young when I was cracked open. Some things you should let go of Others you shouldn't Views differ as to which I keep hold of everything, just in case

I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she'd been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason that sentence came fully formed into my head just then, temporarily blotting out the Fuck them prayer. I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother.

What's this? This mourning is mine forever.

I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn't made my life wonderful, its made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify "book" by peeling open my hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms, them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.

I will always wear this scar. It's called love.

I will bear this grief, I will endure it. I will reach a point where it doesn't kick me down an abyss whenever I turn my back on it.

I will die kissing your mad cold mouth, embracing the lost bouquet of your body, and searching for the light of your closed eyes

I will not speak falsely and say to you: 'Do not grieve for me when I go.' I have loved my children and tried to be a good mother and it is right that my children grieve for me. But let your grief be gentle and brief. And let resignation creep into it. Know that I shall be happy. I shall see face to face the great saints I have loved all my life.

I wished that my own bones were unbound, I wished they were mingling, picked clean by fish, with the bones of another body, a body my bones and heart and soul had loved with unfathomable certainty for decades, and both of us down deep now, lost to everything but the fact of bare bones on a dark seabed.

I wish I could hold time in my hands. I wish I could talk to it. Oh, how I would ask it to give me just a few more increments of its elusive power. How can something we can’t touch or see have so much control over our lives. It was time that took you too soon, too young, before I got to say all of the things I wanted to, needed to. Things you will never know. And I carry them like a weight, these words, these sentences, right in the middle of my chest, because they have nowhere else to go. If only time had allowed me to understand the things I would want to say after you were gone. That’s the thing. They told me “don’t leave anything unsaid.” But I didn’t know what I wanted to say until it was too late, until you were gone. It was the time afterward that held all the wisdom.

I wish I could have shown you that engineheart- the system of pieces and parts that moved us forward, that moves us forward still. One day, a few weeks after my son’s death, I took the bolt off the casing and opened it up. Just to see how it worked. Opening that heart was like the opening the first page of a book- there were characters (me, the Memory of My Father), there was rhythm and chronology, I saw, in the images, old roads I’d forgotten- and scenes from stories where the VW was just a newborn. I do know that it held a true translation: miles to words, words to notes, notes to time. It was the HEART that converted the pedestrian song of Northampton to something meaningful, and it did so via some sort of fusion: the turtle that howls a bluegrass tune at the edge of Bow Lake becomes a warning in the VW heart…and that’s just the beginning- the first heart layer. It will take years and years of study, and the energy of every single living thing, to understand the tiny minds and roads in the subsequent layers, the mechanics at work to make every single heartmoment turn together… The point is, this WAS always the way it was supposed to be. Even I could see that the Volkswagen heart was wired for travel-genetically coded. His pages were already written-as are mine and yours. Yes, yours too! I am looking into your eyes right now and I am reading your life, and I am excited/sorry for what the road holds for you. It’s going to be amazing/really difficult. You’ll love/loathe every minute of it!

I wondered what those mountains behind them might tell me, what advice they would give, if they could talk. What they would tell me about love, and about loss, and about how this wild place could heal as naturally as it could kill.

I wish I could take my brain and put it inside your head,” Winslow said. “Just for a moment. Then you’d know what all I can’t find how to say.

I wish the Ganges could wash the grief from my heart, but it can't.

I wished for someone to hold me up. Suddenly someone was there.

I wish I believed him. He's looking at me like he can see where I begin.

I woke up to an ache in my chest, the smell of chocolate, and the sound of the ghost making a racket in the kitchen. Now, I'm not the sort to dwell on doom and sorrow. Life is too short for that. But I should at least try to describe the ache briefly: It is not the kind that comes from eating tacos too late at night. It's the kind that comes from being left behind. I think my heart is smart enough to know there's a place I should be filling with new memories, new jokes, and wondrous adventures with the one person I loved most of all. But that person is gone now. And so, my heart has a giant hole. I call it The Big Empty.

I wonder, if I keep faking it, will I eventually believe it? A part of me worries that I’ll keep faking it and completely forget what’s real at all.

I wonder where it all comes from--this need to go to the place where the body has been laid to rest. It's the need to reconfirm how precious someone was and how irreplaceable, and the desire to reconnect with them on a different plane.

I wonder if my first breath was as soul-stirring to my mother as her last breath was to me

I wonder how long he’ll be sad. I wonder if his sadness will last forever, stretching on like an ocean. Drowning everyone he cares about. Drowning people he doesn’t even know. He won’t be able to control it. Oceans ebb and flow as they wish. They cover everything. They make everything blue.

I wonder if I were to have an X-ray at the little hospital, would the machine see my grief? Is it like rust, arheum about the heart?

I wonder if there is a person on Earth who is consoled by a casserole.

Just as when clouds are full they pour out rain, so when men are full of grief, they pour out tears.

Lessons, not blood, pour out of our deepest wounds.