Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

The black color is much deeper than to be overwhelmed by grief… Black hides everything within itself in the argument of elegance.

The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief.

The boy in the tree sobs uncontrollably when I tell him about the Hermit and my mother, yet his eyes light up each time I mention Hannah. And every single time he asks, “Taylor, what about the Brigadier who came searching for you that day? Whatever became of him?” I try to explain that the Brigadier is of no importance to my story, but he always shakes his head as if he knows better.

The break-hard determination to be a good person, what happened to that? How is it true I have to go now? She's lost my name, but the occasion of my presence begs more. Who is my mother now I am unspoken for?

The captain’s eyes betrayed what his countenance must conceal: the anguish of an ancient being who must honour his birthright by living beyond those whom he would have given much to keep.

The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.

The child's heart beat: but she was growing in the wrong place inside her extraordinary mother, south of safe...she and her mother were rushed to the hospital, where her mother was operated on by a brisk cheerful diminutive surgeon who told me after the surgery that my wife had been perhaps an hour from death from the pressure of the child growing outside the womb, the mother from the child growing, and the child from growing awry; and so my wife did not die, but our mysterious child did...Not uncommon, an ectopic pregnancy, said the surgeon...Sometimes, continued the surgeon, sometimes people who lose children before they are born continue to imagine the child who has died, and talk about her or him, it's such an utterly human thing to do, it helps deal with the pain, it's healthy within reason, and yes, people say to their other children that they actually do, in a sense, have a sister or brother, or did have a sister or brother, and she or he is elsewhere, has gone ahead, whatever the language of your belief or faith tradition. You could do that. People do that, yes. I have patients who do that, yes... One summer morning, as I wandered by a river, I remembered an Irish word I learned long ago, and now whenever I think of the daughter I have to wait to meet, I find that word in my mouth: dunnog, little dark one, the shyest and quietest and tiniest of sparrows, the one you never see but sometimes you sense, a flash in the corner of your eye, a sweet sharp note already fading by the time it catches your ear.

The closer we try to get to God, the more we will hate to sin in our own lives, the more we are saddened by the thoughts that runs through our minds. I also think that the more we draw closer to God, the more God will honour us and will open doors for the right things to happen in our life.

The church preach so much about power in the kingdom of God but we don't talk about wisdom. Everybody goes for power forgeting that power without wisdom can be disastrous.

The closest thing I have to a spiritual experience anymore is a Mocha Frappe from McDonald's.

The clouds were gathering over Mary, too--deep and dark, but of altogether another kind from those that enveloped Letty: no troubles are for one moment to be compared with those that come of the wrongness, even if it be not wickedness, that is our own. Some clouds rise from stagnant bogs and fens; others from the wide, clean, large ocean. But either kind, thank God, will serve the angels to come down by. In the old stories of celestial visitants the clouds do much; and it is oftenest of all down the misty slope of griefs and pains and fears, that the most powerful joy slides into the hearts of men and women and children.

The crumbling under the ‘cold corpse’ The deadness of ‘mortal separation’ The moaning wails of ‘mourning’ The push to ‘perform rituals’ The spectacle of ‘sorrow’ The goriness of ‘grief’ And The ‘mercilessness’ of the ‘merciful’ Who knows … ‘what’ and ‘why’ Who would ever want to know (Page 34)

The darkness in me could not stand the light any longer. It wanted to escape, vanish without a trace to a place where it could not be seen. But I could not let it happen; I could not let it run, I’m giving it no choice. It was going to ride itself out and face the truth it doesn’t want to know. It was to face itself in the mirror of hope, of despair. I gave the darkness no choice. It was to turn back into the light.

The dark skies of despair are no match for the bright skies of hope.

The days elude them, but they are the ones who witness the sorrows of the night. The wretched, gloomy nights. How they wish they could resolve the unbound grief of the human heart. If only they know what it was looking for. If only unbound joy could be the answer.

...The day was meant for what ineffable creature we must have missed?

The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they’ll say even before I write them.

The dead should not have to answer to the claims of the living, even the sharpest grief.

The death of Robert G. Ingersoll, on July 21, 1899, was one of the most widely -- noted events of that year in the civilized world. It was also one of the most widely and profoundly regretted, -- the most deeply deplored. Everywhere, the wisest knew (and the noblest felt) that the cause of humanity had met its greatest loss. To many thousands who realized the intellectual amplitude, the moral heroism and grandeur, the boundless generosity and sympathy, the tenderness and affection, of this incomparable man, his passing was as an intimate and bitter bereavement. Ingersoll was doubtless known, personally and otherwise, to more people than any other American who had not sat in the presidential chair; and, notwithstanding either the number or the wishes of his critics, his death probably brought genuine grief to more hearts than has that of any other individual in our history. Twice before, 'a Nation bowed and wept'; this time, a people.

The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.

The death of loved ones often awakens the death inside of us.

(The death of his child) "was the first experience of his life, so far as we know, which drove him to look outside of his own mind and heart for help to endure a personal grief. It was the first time in his life when he had not been sufficient for his own experience.

The defining loss becomes the defining point of your life. In the light rising from grief, every falling teardrop of your heart turns to a pearl of wisdom.

the depth or humaneness of our love depends on the wideness of our souls.

The devil comes to steal, kill and destroy and his followers do the same. Be watchful and keep that in mind.

The desert sings of loss, always loss, and if you stand quiet with your eyes closed, it will grieve you too.

The digging continues ... Ground Zero it looks more and more like a construction site. Too much of the horror is gone. No fire. No smoke ... What was war becomes peace, becomes peaceful. But in the coil of my testicles there's an angry residue and in places I can't even name, places inside my throat and behind my chest, I'm sad, and sometimes worse than sad, less than sad, a cavity of empty.

The door slams in response, and I laugh. I'm glad she can laugh. It means she really is coping. I know she’s internalizing a lot, though. Putting on a show for me. She’ll have new scars on her wrists soon.

The earth grieves, and I grieve, and I am weary of the fight

The end of times?" said Nanny. "Look, Tiff, Esme tol' me to say, if you want to see Esmerelda Weatherwax, then just you look around. She is here. Us witches don't mourn for very long. We are satisfied with happy memories - they're there to be cherished.

The eternal challenge is to answer grief with something that resembles love.

The Estate of Solemnity By right, it reigns in its places- in long beards Of spanish moss hanging from a live oak On a windless evening, and in the chill of new Icicles rigidly, imperceptibly lengthening. Cavern Stalagmites are almost majestic with solemnity. The black morel and the tree ear mushroom Are solemn without grief, solemn without joy, Solemn without reverence, without a single Flicker of green or lift of a wing or cry. But the most solemn, most stalwart, the least Wavering are the tors and crags, the towering desert Spires and carved pinnacles, the devoted ascents And sharp, raw rims of boulders and bluffs, the maw Of a distant cave I saw yesterday and the day before, And the grave echo there of the day and the before. Mystics and divines have always sought the pure, White-rock serenity of the silent, solemn moon Bound in its flight alone far above the peaks, far Above the earth, surrounded there forever by bevies Of giddy stars, all asparkling, all aglow.

The eternal challenge is to answer grief with something that resembles love. To choose not to just sit around decrying hardship and injustice but to instead uncurl your fists and approach sorrow with grace, power, and, most incredibly, gratitude—not for the hurt itself but for the whole miraculous mess of being alive, this strange endowment of breath and blood.

The facade of grief may be indifference, preoccupation, anger, cheerfulness, or any variety of emotions. But if we try to understand it, we may learn how to cope with it.

The fairest things have fleetest end, Their scent survives their close: But the rose's scent is bitterness To her who loved the rose.

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time. From "The Mower

The first few days, I kept checking my phone, waiting for him to reply, but slowly I understood that we were going to be part of each other's past. I still missed him, though. I missed my dad, too. And Harold. I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.

The first discovery of the shipwreck is that we have a higher capacity for pain than we ever could have imagined before we lost, before we failed, before we suffered…The surprise on the other side of the shipwreck is that, while your capacity for pain improved far beyond our wildest reckoning, now you have a capacity to feel everything deeper. You are capable of a depth of empathy and compassion that would have been unthinkable before…And from this new-found capacity for pain, for sorrow, for torment, for agony, for endless waves of grief, comes the biggest surprise of them all—your new-found capacity for joy.

The dirty secret she’d learned about grief was that nobody wanted to hear about your loss a week after the funeral. People you’d once considered friends would turn their heads in church or cross to another side of a shopping mall to avoid the contamination of your suffering. “You might imagine I’m coping day by day,” she murmured. “But it’s more a case of hour by hour, and during my worst times, minute by minute.

The difference, she decided, was that now there was something to be done. Hell would be raised, and Oberon would come or not, but at least there would be no more idle tears. The night would end in joy or ruin, and somehow that was easier to abide than an endless, static grief.

The fish will not blame you. You have to do this. I will not look at you and think you're a bad brother. Nobody will. You have to leave because this time you have to save yourself.

The flame of love can never dwindle unless we insist on confining it to the past.

The food in the hostel mess is worst of a kind. The grief in my words reach easily to those who have "been there and done that" Chapatti in the meal is either so uncooked or overly cooked and you can only expect dal in the ocean of water when you are ready to swim.

The gastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody's sister now.

The graces are restless today. They pweet and muss, shuddering their wings so that the feathers stick out at defensive angles. I feel that restlessness too. When the sea is fractious like this – when it chutters and schwaks against the moorings, when it won't talk but only mumbles – it's difficult to think.

THE GREAT DEATH I stood at the back of the funeral room. Very still. Black dress. Black coat. It’s cold. Purposely alone. Ears closed. Not wanting to hear the tirade of sweet lies. Did they not know you were already dead? I think they did. They walk with the dignity of a funeral crowd into the tea room. I can see them chatting happily through the window. “What a fantastic guy he was. Cheese or meat sandwich?” I sit outside, next to you. No one can see. No one bothers to look. Sinking to fresh earth, I ask you why you did that to yourself. Why did you cling to that which fed you a slow poison? Why did you betray that which was guard to your soul? There is no reply. The words get taken by the chill wind. You cry in your sleep. The tears never see the light of day. The sadness is not this death. You are not even dead. You are just over there. The sadness is the other death – the death that doesn’t end. The one that follows behind, ever present with its grey, hollow touch. Walk a bit further. There is a different land not far away. The people in it have the magic to break the icy fingers of the great death. I heard that you don’t even have to pay. However, you have to find their door. It is only found by those who pay the other price.

The grief that does not speak whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break.

The griefs that have been hardest for me were the ones I didn’t recognize as griefs, because they came in what were supposed to be the best times of my life. No one whispered in my ear that the best times, the ones that change our lives, are woven with the thread of loss.

The grief you hide leaves the deepest scars.