Best 3947 quotes in «grief quotes» category

There is nothing I can do to keep time from wedging more of itself between us.

There is nothing to fear. Nothing to worry about. Grieve nothing in this transitory world," he says softly.

There is nothing like feeling truly "awake" and aware of my life and what it means to me. So I look ahead and think, "There is still so much to be done, and I will continue to make the most of it.

…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can’t know, is kind. I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly…I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored. I suspect that the ease of Wally’s death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he’s all right now. And yet. And yet he’s gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily hourly presence. My experience of being with Wally… brought me to another sort of perception, but I can’t stay in that place, can’t sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he’s all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he’s gone. And doubt. And the fact that we can’t understand, that it’s our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing? We need our doubt so as to not settle for easy answers. Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves…Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see. Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind.

There is something embarrassing about someone else's grief. It is hard to know what to do around it. The right answer, always, is hugs.

There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both - taken and taken and taken, until there's nothing left but hope, and you've given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.

There is the scent too. Wonder follows it; wonder about how a boy can smell like that when he probably has no idea. He smells like the woods in the winter or the rain when it first falls, or maybe it’s just the way he always smells and there is no way to define it.

There is uncertainty in hope, but even with its tenuous nature, it summons our strength and pulls us through fear and grief— and even death.

There need not be a purpose to a person's death, other than that they have lived the length of their days on this Earth and now begin the longer part of their existence.

There’s a room in my heart full of unpaid bills. We all have one. It’s useful to go in occasionally and open a few.

There's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.

There's a threshold of pain, a person loses consciousness in order not to die. And there's a threshold of grief, it suddenly stops hurting. And you feel nothing. Nothing at all.

There's a water cycle. Water never goes away. It never dies or is destroyed. It just changed from form to form in a continuous cycle. On a hot summer day, you've drunk water that a dinosaur drank. You might have cried tears that Alexander the Great cried. So I'm returning Eli's energy - his spirit - and all that it contained. His life. His music. His memories. His loves. All the beautiful things in him. I give to the water so he can live that way now. Form to form. Energy to energy. Maybe I'll meet my son again in the rain or in the ocean. Maybe he hasn't touched my face for the last time.

There should be a limit to my suffering As I’m a sinner, not a disbeliever

There's no end. There's no end to this world, everlasting. We crumble to dust in its arms.

There's no expectation of some linear progression from agony to okayness. It goes in circles. It's sloppy.

There’s nothing you can do, Valoria. I’m not one of your inventions. I’m broken, part of me is missing, and you can’t fix me with copper wires or a piece of string.

There’s only ever been one person I’ve looked at and thought… ‘I could quite easily spend the entire rest of my life with that man’. And sooner or later I need to accept that he’s spending it with somebody else.

There's too much blank sky where a tree once stood.

There's supposed to be more value in your life than spending more than sixty hours in a week in a place you don't care about and in an environment they don't care about you.

...there's the suffering from love and the suffering from grief - either pain permanently scars the soul...

There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it… this place, she decided, was called Smog City.

There was healing in the tyranny, and tyranny in the healing.

There was little Hiroko Tanaka hadn’t learnt about the shameful resilience of the human heart.

There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.

There was this constant urge in me to tear my insides apart, I didn't know why. By the time I made my mind that it was impossible for me to do, there alighted the fear, haunting me with the words that rang constantly in my head, "You're not brave enough". I didn't feel devastated, I felt the urge to be devastated.

...there was something in the texture of the weave that felt happy: the echo of a memory so far down in his soul it was all emotion, a burst of colour and warmth, adrift from time and place.

There was this competitive grieving thing that could happen. People would crowd into the hospital and stand around for days, sort of posturing. That sounds terrible, but it's true. Not that they had bad intentions, just...you always want to believe you're important in someone's life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren't.

There will come a time when people decide you've had enough of your grief, and they'll try to take it away from you.

The risk of all friendship is, alas, a little grief.

The road of grief is often long and lonely and many stones need to be moved out of the way, but it is not without its lighter moments.

... the room rose in a rhythmic swaying motion, eyes ablaze or closed in tight serenity, afraid to let go of the emotion, joy, suffering and pain merged in the euphoria of the moment. (Vindication Across Time)

The role of Cherishing in Bereavement - I think that the key to healthy grieving is to cherish those who have passed on, so that you celebrate their lives and the times you did have together with thankfulness, instead of trying to cling on and wish that things were different. I believe that you should let them go in peace with love, not try to hang on to their spirits, just hold the precious moments gently in your heart.

The saddest sound in the universe is made when the heart breaks.

…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you. Some people might find that strange. But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.

The sad fact is there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, the unjust taking of a loved being. And even the luckiest of us will encounter at least one murder in our own lives: our own. It is our fate. We all live a murder mystery of which we are the victim.

The scene sucker-punched Max. He never saw it coming. It encapsulated in one poignant instant the tragic beauty of his family history.

The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom; no one can sound its depths.

The sentiment that one "should have done something more" reflects, it seems to me, an underlying wish to control the uncontrollable. After all, if one is guilty about not having done something that one should have done, then it follows that there is something that could have been done - a comforting thought that decoys us from our pathetic helplessness in the face of death.

The shovel worked in and out of the light beams as the dirt hit him in the stomach, on his back, fell into his ears, his eyes, as I covered him along with the things that had made him: his walks, his rest, his eating when hungry, the stars he watched sometimes, the first day I brought him home, the first time he saw snow, and every second of his friendship, what he took with him into silence and stillness ...

The sharp, superficial pain at being spoken to unkindly had obscured the deeper pain, which had not yet turned into something hard and heavy.

The Silence of the Final Goodbye I knew you best from the silences, The time and space in between, The moment before our lips touched, The way your arms went up in the air before you laughed, The smile that we shared before we talked, The redness on your face before your tears, The sensation of your arms around me after you released the embrace. The look you gave me before you walked away, Nothing had ever been so painful, No words could say what your eyes told me, When I wake in the morning without you, It’s the first thing I hear… The silence of the final goodbye.

The soul's hands carry the heart's burdens.

The soul's tears are worth more than the heart's smiles.

The sounds of a man crying is a piteous noise, almost worse than an infant's cry. Babies are either hungry, sick or bored, or need changing. This man was none of those things. He was wrapped in grief as deep as the ocean, and no one could do anything to help him.

The Staging In the weeks after my mother's death, I sleep Four or five hours a night, often interrupted By dreams, and take two or three naps a day. It seems like enough. I can survive if I keep This sleep schedule as it has been constructed For me. But if it seems my reflexes are delayed, Or if I sway when I walk, or weep or do not weep, Please don't worry. I'm not under destruction. My grief has cast me in a lethargic cabaret. So pay the cover charge and take your seat. This mourning has become a relentless production And I've got seventy-eight roles to play.

The strength you seek to survive grief’s demands is not found in resistance but within the tenderness of your loving heart.

The spiritual messages for mum kept coming to me in meditation. I never questioned them, I just passed them on.

The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars... I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world. I knew I had come there out of kindness, theirs and mine. The grief that came to me then was nothing like the grief I had felt for myself alone... This grief had something in it of generosity, some nearness to joy. In a strange way it added to me what I had lost. I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences, presences of absences, the living and the dead. The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.

...the sweetness of grace and freedom comes hand in hand with the uncomfortable, bitter-rawness of honest emotions and grief.