Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

He closed his eyes and wanted to cry, as the reality of his situation set in.

He did touch people's lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they who really mourned him - or what they thought was him - with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

He didn't sleep. His mother was too close. He could see every crease on her face, every worry line he'd ever given her.

He did not enjoy the sorrow, but he would not have missed the years that he and Joseph were friends, either. Such joy was worth a little sorrow.

He'd wanted to - he didn't know. Break bottles. Break windows, crash cars. Burn down the world. Find solace at the bottom of countless more bottles of wine, this time consumed in solitude. In the end he did none of these things; while he knew the shapes and forms of rage and grief, he had, in truth, nothing more than gentleness inside to sustain him.

He didn't know kids, but he knew that Oriana was a fellow traveler. It scared him, it really did, but he sensed that, inexplicably, she needed something only he could provide. Winter was over, but spring had not yet come for him and Oriana. They were between uncharted seasons, at the cusp of change, but only at the cusp. He didn't know kids, but he supposed that sometimes a kid needed something she couldn't find at home, but only in the wild of the forest.

He’d passed the longest night of his life locked in mortal combat with his ghosts, calling up and then disavowing twenty years of memories. He would banish that bitch from his heart if it meant cutting her out with his own dagger. And when at last he allowed himself to grieve, he did so silently and unwillingly, his tears hidden by the darkness, his rage congealing into a core of ice.

He felt lighter than he had in weeks, and he realized that the monster he had been running from wasn’t really a monster after all. It was simply that place in the heart that holds the measure of your history, the joy and the grief, the laughter and the tears, the magic and the wonder; all the ingredients that add up to the story of a life well lived.

He felt like his own heart might stop beating just from acknowledging the concept. The sadness, the sorrow, and the loss, they were living things, funnily enough.

He felt split in two, one crazy man eating hair and one rational man watching a crazy man eat hair. He chewed and swallowed the last pieces of his father's life. He felt like he was building a museum of pain, a freak show, where he was the only visitor viewing the only mutant screaming the only prayer he knew: Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back Daddy...

He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them

He had no idea how to deal with the staggering amount of grief he felt, so he looked to the sun and blinded himself with its light.

He hadn’t saved her. He hadn’t even bothered trying.

He had pulled out of that grief, eventually – out from under the suffocating weight of it. Suffering had formed him: made him silent and deliberate, thoughtful: deep.

He knew as deeply as he knew anything that sedation was the prelude to anxiety, stimulation the prelude to exhaustion and consolation the prelude to disappointment, and so he lay on the red velvet sofa and did nothing to distract himself from the news of his mother’s death.

He is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen and it's not about his face, but the life force I can see in him. It's the smile and the pure promise of everything he has to offer. Like he's saying, 'Here I am world, are you ready for so much passion and beauty and goodness and love and every other word that should be in the dictionary under the word life?' Except this boy is dead, and the unnaturalness of it makes me want to pull my hair out with Tate and Narnie and Fitz and Jude's grief all combined. It makes me want to yell at the God that I wish I didn't believe in. For hogging him all to himself. I want to say, 'You greedy God. Give him back. I needed him here.

He laughs and hugs me and says that I shouldn't believe anyone who tells me it's gonna get better. "Ride the wave," he says. "Don't wait for it. Don't fear it. Just ride it.

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

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 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 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.