Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul.

Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.

He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.

He may take long walks in the raining dark almost aimlessly to a spot of soaked grass in a neighbor’s open field. He’s decided this is the place for you and him to meet again.

...he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world, so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope....

He put an arm around me, "I know," he said. "I know." He didn't know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

He never talked about his mother--and I had learned never to ask--but I sometimes sensed her absence in his reactions to certain events, as if he knew even then that there existed under everything a universal grief.

He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands,

He pondered his turmoil, wondering which he feared most—losing his father or being alone in the world. Both were inevitable. Neither could be stopped or slowed down. All he could do now was brace for impact.

Her bed felt huge and empty now, and when she slept, she did so with her arm around a pillow. She dreamed of him almost every night, sometimes good dreams of happy days and joyful times; often they were terrible dreams of abandonment, loss and sorrow. She didn't know which was worse: every morning she woke afresh to the knowledge that he was gone and he would never come back. It would never be all right again.

Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.

Here’s what I know: death abducts the dying, but grief steals from those left behind.

Her gaze wavered towards one of the books on the sales counter beside the register, a hardcover copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with many of the pages dog-eared and stained with coffee and tea. The store owner caught her looking at it and slid it across the counter towards her. “You ever read Hamlet?” he questioned. “I tried to when I was in high school,” said Mandy, picking up the book and flipping it over to read the back. “I mean, it’s expected that everyone should like Shakespeare’s books and plays, but I just….” her words faltered when she noticed him laughing to himself. “What’s so funny, Sir?” she added, slightly offended. “…Oh, I’m not laughing at you, just with you,” said the store owner. “Most people who say they love Shakespeare only pretend to love his work. You’re honest Ma’am, that’s all. You see, the reason you and so many others are put-off by reading Shakespeare is because reading his words on paper, and seeing his words in action, in a play as they were meant to be seen, are two separate things… and if you can find a way to relate his plays to yourself, you’ll enjoy them so much more because you’ll feel connected to them. Take Hamlet for example – Hamlet himself is grieving over a loss in his life, and everyone is telling him to move on but no matter how hard he tries to, in the end all he can do is to get even with the ones who betrayed him.” “…Wow, when you put it that way… sure, I think I’ll buy a copy just to try reading, why not?” Mandy replied with a smile.

Her grief still burdened her, and she knew she would bear it the rest of her days.

Her heart checked for him. That night after Josh's funeral, he'd been the consummate listener. Just watching, taking her cues, waiting for her to open up about her pain, and not indulging in what must have been his own. Then she took advantage by eating his face off.

Her mother’s quiet disapproval and withdrawal was a death in itself, and Franckline’s despair at it was transmitted, she was sure of it, to the child. She transgressed twice, first by making the child, then by giving it her despair, the despair that left it unable to live.

Her grief was a burden so heavy, he came close to collapsing under it, and yet he couldn't lay it down.

Her grief is constant & irreparable

Her marble tears run down her marble face. A stranger is someone who has no handkerchief. Who has no words to say. Whose shadow mind is burning as he sits watching her hands and thinks how rare! to see a Roman talk with no gestures at all.

Her grief was a storm, a driving rain falling too fast to be absorbed

Her only weapons were her tears.

He saw her red eyes filled with tears of anger. "Tell me why this rage?" He asked holding her in his arms. "Why do you fence for yourself so much? She sighed and muttered, "Because all I really want is nothing but to be proved wrong.

He saw a woman, her face awash with misery, standing in front of him. She was holding a child in her arms and as soon as he looked up at her, she placed the child on his lap. Grief must have withheld her speech. Without saying a word she spread an open palm in front of him.

He's everywhere, Wing. Everything I do makes me think of him. And the thing is, I don't want to make new memories without him. I want to hold onto everything that makes me think of him.

He saw so many emotions mingled on her face: anger disappointment, fear – and defiance. Like her daughter, thought Fenoglio again. So uncompromising, so strong. Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn’t break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out, very slowly.

He's gone now. He did something terrible, but...he did good things, too. And he kept us well. And it's all right if you are sad.

He sought...to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars.

He thinks he can see all her grief in her face, all her love and empty days.

He stroked her back and kept a fierce grip on her like she’d fade away into one of the thousands of ghosts in this cemetery.

He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her there at the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred.

He took the box but did not avail himself of a tissue. She understood. Sometimes it was comforting to feel the wetness of grief's tears on your face.

He took a deep breath in, still managing himself as if he were resisting temptation. He was a soldier, his father was in the service, too. Crying wasn't something Morell men did. They just didn't. He hadn't cried at Robbie Morell's funeral. So he wasn't going to now.

He wanted to cry out, longed to scream, to howl his misery to the heavens. But he couldn’t even manage a whimper. Tears streamed down his face, yet not so much as a sob left his lips.

He was never able to properly explain what happened to him that day. But he stopped being happy.

He was now working his way through the many shades of grief. Sadness made everything gray, he'd learned, but there were different types of gray, some darker than others. There were dark spots in his memories he wasn't brave enough to enter.

... he wasn't crying for the woman who had died. He was crying for the woman she had been.

He was overwhelmed by the desire to drop down to his knees and grab Ty’s hands, and hold him the way he had on the rooftop in London when Livvy had been hurt.

He was footprints in the snow. Not all loves are meant to last. Some are meant to grace you briefly, before fading, somehow leaving the impression that the world is just a little bit better because you had been touched by something so beautiful it was impossible to grasp.

He wept bitter tears over the death of his enemy. It was his enemy, after all, who knew him best and kept him up at night.

He who grieved goes out in joy.

He woke one morning tantalized by an idea: if he could catch the orchard trees motionless for one second -- for half of one second -- then none of it would have happened. The kitchen door would bang open and in his father would walk, red-faced and slapping his hands and exclaiming about some newly whelped pup. Childish, Edgar knew, but he didn't care. The trick was to not focus on any single part of any tree, but to look through them all toward a point in the air. But how insidious a bargain he'd made. Even in the quietest moment some small thing quivered and the tableau was destroyed. How many afternoons slipped away like that? How many midnights standing in the spare room, watching the trees shiver in the moonlight? Still he watched, transfixed. Then, blushing because it was futile and silly, he forced himself to walk away. When he blinked, an afterimage of perfect stillness. To think it might happen when he wasn't watching. He turned back before he reached the door. Through the window glass, a dozen trees strummed by the winter wind, skeletons dancing pair-wise, fingers raised to heaven. Stop it, he told himself. Just stop. And watched some more.

He wishes he could remember everything. Anything. He doesn’t sense a bone in his body that can feel compassion or worthiness. Self-pity hides away as well, the lowest form of emotion not even capable of resting in his wrecked mind.

He won't remember any of this, he's too young and it's too painful. Children are wonderfully self-preserving. They filter memory, cleanse and sanitise it, unless it's too awful to renounce. And this isn't. Or is it? These gummy spots of time that inextricably adhere when so much more is erased, how do we account for their tenacity?

He would be able to suffer what his son had suffered. He would be able to suffer and his suffering would for an instance displace his grief.

He wrote to his father every day. His platoon called his dad a girlfriend.

He would not live the life of his daughter by falling apart and not giving her anything but anticipated grief and collateral heartache. He wanted to imprint paternal love on her body. Maybe she would be strong and regenerated enough to stay, and maybe his intense affection would work its magic.

He would only be here one more night. And then back on deployment, whispered the dark part of my soul. He might never come back. You might be the last woman he ever has.

His absence was a presence. Who knew an empty space could take up so much room.

His absence is so big it's like he's there.

His days swelled with the monotony of hours, piling up in colossal heaps before and after him, the used the same as the new.