Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Susy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it—I didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then.

from under the ground, from under the waters, they clutch at us, they clutch at us, we won’t let go.

Funerals seem less about comforting the souls of these dearly departed than about comforting the people they leave behind.

Gifts of grace come to all of us. But we must be ready to see and willing to receive these gifts. It will require a kind of sacrifice, the sacrifice of believing that, however painful our losses, life can still be good — good in a different way then before, but nevertheless good. I will never recover from my loss and I will never got over missing the ones I lost. But I still cherish life. . . . I will always want the ones I lost back again. I long for them with all my soul. But I still celebrate the life I have found because they are gone. I have lost, but I have also gained. I lost the world I loved, but I gained a deeper awareness of grace. That grace has enabled me to clarify my purpose in life and rediscover the wonder of the present moment.

Ghosts are just pieces of memory. They haunt us because we don't wan't to forget. We are the ghost makers. We take fragments of the dead and project them onto shadows and sounds, trying to make sense of loss by assigning it to a new shape. Ghosts aren't real. Dead is dead. There is no getting someone back. I'm starting to forget the small things. The way Grace smiled at me. How her voice sounded when she was angry. What color nail polish she wore. Her smell. Smell is supposed to be our sense with the strongest ties to memory. Sometimes I pull out one of her shirts to remind me of her scent because I can fell Grace slipping from me. And I'm terrified of what that means.

Given the dark fears we feel when we experience loss, nothing is more generous and loving than the willingness to embrace grief in order to forgive. To be forgiven is to be loved.

Give yourself permission to see and feel the extraordinary events in your own life. In internalizing them, you also will find your perspective about life and its meaning will change, resulting in growth and expansion of your soul.

Give yourself a set period of time to grieve and heal before focusing on financial matters.

Go ahead." That's all I say. Those two words, go ahead. Destroy me with what you are going to tell me. Bring me back to that night and pray it doesn't cripple me again.

God's word will produce with your level of understanding. The much you can understand it, the more wisdom you are privileged to have.

Goodbye forever" is the perfect joke, because forever is impossible. Every night I say it, and every morning I see my father again. Forever is meaningless. Tough talk, an empty threat. Forever is our secret handshake. Our code word. Our decoder ring. Not a measurement of time at all. I know this because "Goodbye Forever" comes easily. The passage of actual time is much more difficult.

Goodbye," she told him, running her hand across his broad back one last time. "I love you. And I'll never, ever stop missing you.

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.

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.

Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.

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.

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.

Grieving the loss of a loved one—whether human or animal—is not only permissible, it is essential.

...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)

Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don't like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which irritates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck.

Grief Changes shape but it never dies

Grief could take the form of violence too, could give a false sense of permission, erase the world around, and that was what frightened Clare most about violence, how transferable it was.

Grief denied will surface in borrowed clothes, the mad, sad clothes of paranoia, fear or loneliness

Grief doesn't arrive on schedule, as much as we'd like to.

Grief has no timeline.

Grief is always sudden as winter, no matter how long the autumn.

Grief is a monster - not everyone gets out alive, and those who do might only survive in pieces. But it's a monster that can be conquered, with time.

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open.

Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs.

Grief is like that: One minute you think you know the rules and it's one card, one emotion at a time, the next, the deck explodes all around you.

Grief is messy. It's traumatic. Devastating. Confusing. Exhausting. Grief is a natural process of our human experience. May you find comfort in these unexpected places along your journey.

Grief is one big, gaping hole, isn’t it? It’s everywhere and all consuming. Some days you think you can’t go on because the only thing waiting for you is more despair. Some days you don’t want to go on because it’s easier to give up than to get hurt again.

Grief is one illness that defies all remedies; it must ever run its course.

Grief is such a lonely thing. There is no-one in it with you - others may grieve for the same soul, but they do not grieve exactly for what you also grieve. No-one has lost precisely what you have lost. Not exactly, never exactly. We are in it alone.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.

Grief. This is what it does to people. It makes them strangers to themselves.

Grief was a threshold thing that lived at the heart of the inevitable.

Grief was like that, Ceecee had learned. It either opened your heart or closed it.

Grief was the deal God struck with the angel of death, who wanted an unpassable river to separate the living from the dead; grief the bridge that would allow the dead to flit among the living, their footsteps overheard, their laughter around the corner, their posture recognizable in the bodies of strangers you would follow down the street, willing them to never turn around.

Grief which is not dealt with properly can cause us to lose our perspective on life.

Grievers use a very simple calendar. Before and after.

Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse.

Grief comes with many losses. Whatever its cause, grief will come to all of us.

Grief did not quieten the world's demands, and I was thankful to be kept busy.

Grief does not change you. It reveals you.

Grief doesn’t hit us in tidy phases and stages, nor is it something that we forget and move on from; it is an individual process that has a momentum of its own, and the work involves finding ways of coping with our fear and pain, and also adjusting to this new version of ourselves, our “new normal.