Best 422 quotes in «grief and loss quotes» category

If we can’t feel into the heart of grief, we can’t truly move on to experience hope and joy. We can’t be present to what is now, and what is next, because we are bound by the loss and sorrow that holds us to the past. Grief has to flow. It has to be carried, not just by you, but by the others with you, by your community, until it transforms to the next rightful calling of your heart to action.

If you cannot hold me in your arms, then hold my memory in high regard. And if I cannot be in your life, then at least let me live in your heart.

If you can just trust Him enough to bring it to Him, He will rejoice in your masterpiece. And if you need to scream a little, know that you have a God who can take that too, as long as your face is tilted (even slightly) toward Him

If you keep on like this, your heart will become like stone. Your mind will become sickly. Your soul will become dark. Your body will suffer from your spirit’s descent!” - Kindness Councilor Hayate

If you love someone and they vanish, you are left nodding like a zombie and throwing teacups at a wall.

If you’re searching for a quote that puts your feelings into words – you won’t find it. You can learn every language and read every word ever written – but you’ll never find what’s in your heart. How can you? He has it.

If you sense the tide of grief welling up in you, treat it like the sacred emotion it is, and honor it. Give yourself time to sink into it, allow it to immobilize you with its weight, and trust that it will flow through you and out - if you let it. Grief truly felt never lasts forever - only grief avoided does.

I have become conscious of my own “cry face.” My face puckers like the business end of a hot dog except for my mouth, which stretches in a grimace so wide as to accommodate said hotdog horizontally within it. It’s not pretty.

I guess it takes one to know one, and two can play that game.

I had someone once who made every day mean something. And now…. I am lost…. And nothing means anything anymore.

I know good things have happened, don't mistake an expression of pain for a lack of thankfulness.

I held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms. You have to be patient, he had said. If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic. And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.

I know you are afraid; you are afraid to get hurt again. But I also know that you are not meant to grieve forever.

I have poured my heart out …. And now I am empty.

I just want to know you're okay. I want to know that you didn't suffer. I want to believe that you are in a better place, that you are happy and have all the things in life that you loved, with you. I want to believe that you and your father are together. Maybe at a barbecue in heaven, eating hot dogs. I know that's not the case. I know that you are gone. But I don't know how to live with that knowledge.

I lay down on the ground and stared at the taunting white clouds that seemed to be laughing at me. Mocking my existence. Letting me know that even hell could be beautiful; it just wouldn’t ever be satisfying.

I looked at her small, sunken face and wanted to scream out loud and cry. I wanted everyone in the entire world to know how much I loved my mum and to know how much my heart was breaking for her right now.

I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places that this heart of mine embraces all day through.

I loved him not; and yet, now he is gone, I feel I am alone. I check’d him while he spoke; yet, could he speak, Alas! I would not check. For reasons not to love him once I sought, And wearied all my thought To vex myself and him: I now would give My love could he but live Who lately lived for me, and, when he found ’Twas vain, in holy ground He hid his face amid the shades of death. I waste for him my breath Who wasted his for me! but mine returns, And this lorn bosom burns With stifling heat, heaving it up in sleep, And waking me to weep Tears that had melted his soft heart: for years Wept he as bitter tears. Merciful God! such was his latest prayer, These may she never share. Quieter is his breath, his breast more cold, Than daisies in the mould, Where children spell, athwart the churchyard gate, His name and life’s brief date. Pray for him, gentle souls, whoe’er you be, And oh! pray too for me!

I miss that feeling of connection. Knowing he was out there somewhere thinking about me at the same time I was thinking about him.

I'm gonna tell you some stories, and some of them might be true." Jack Bates

I'm looking for oblivion, Doctor, not death. The drugs will put me to sleep, and as long as I'm unconscious, I won't have to think about what I'm doing. I'll be there, but I won't be there, and to the degree that I'm not there, I'll be protected.

I'm afraid of waking up to a world where you see and I am not what you saw

I'm really all right, she would think, carefully, lightly, as she pulled the key from the ignition, trying not to examine the sensation too closely or lose it with any sudden movement, as if it were a thin-filmed shiny bubble poised in her chest.

I need to stop running back to you in my mind all the time.

In a way, it was the same as any normal break up. You took what was yours …. and I kept what I’d had from before we were together… You took my heart …. and I had nothing…

In books and movies whenever someone dies there is always an underlying subtext, some kind of grand cosmic lesson to be gleaned from the experience. Popular culture perpetuates the fallacy that whenever someone or something is taken away, someone or something else is always out there waiting in the wings to take its place by the last turn of the page or that final post-credits scene. The reader closes the book with a satisfied smile, the audience leaves the theater filled to the brim with warm fuzzy feelings. But that’s entertainment for you, and the world would be a far less wonderful place without their happy endings. However, in the real world what once was, no longer is, and survivors are more often than not left with no other choice but to move on, cosmic lessons learned or not.

I never trust anyone", Alecto told Mandy as wisps of smoke drifted from his cigarette. "Treachery is the unfortunate result of any friendships I've ever had. I don't need friends anyway, what I want is to be left alone to carry out my work... it's a dangerous world and we're just on borrowed time, all of us... even you.

In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt's sons'd been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, you've got three sons, by Friday you've got none. Lady Albertina had just, y'know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally.

In my life, no three miles have been flat and no three days have had sun. I've been brave in the past, but now I'm beyond devastated. My grief is like dense clouds that cannot be dispersed. I can't think beyond the blackness of my clothes and heart.

In my gut-wrenching honesty and by acknowledging our big, big God, I found peace.

In the dim light of today are the shadows of yesterday’s affliction and the hope of tomorrow’s gifts.

Instead of spending your days focusing on your sense of hurt or loss, allow the Lord to bless you with the grace to believe that what lies ahead will glorify Him. It is the closest thing to true worship that we have in this life, and so often we miss it. I miss it.

In that moment Paulette stepped outside anything that had ever hurt her before. Harve needed her more than she needed herself. But she had nothing to say. Nothing to offer him. She came up empty. “I may not have shot any of those babies in safety seats, but I took out my share o’ guys in a country I started thinking we had no right bein’ in. I could tell myself they’d signed up for it, knowing they might not go home, but that just didn’t cut it after a while.” … … “Oh, they were scumbags, alright. Other guys in my unit’d be ready to just level the kids too, cause they were getting in our way, but I said, Wait. Let me try goin’ in first. Let me come at ’em from the rear. “Other times I just lost myself in the righteous glory of cluster bombing the hell outa those bastards. “And for that one moment, in all the cheering and explosions it’s like all was right with the world. It was John Phillip Sousa at Disneyland. “But then you wake up a little. You just snuffed out future generations. Maybe bad guys can have good kids if you let ’em. We’ll never know now.” He was coming close to crying. “And then you see all those pieces; kid parts lying everywhere. “And their little faces. “If they even still had faces. “Once you finish throwing up, and then toss back a few at camp pub, your next job is to find something inside you that you can bury that under. “And then … what? Just go on living?” - From “The Gardens of Ailana

In the end, only three things matter: How much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you. Buddha

I plucked one feather from my hood and left it on his forehead, for, his, head. For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning. For a little break in the mourning.

In the scheme of a life, it is not the duration of something but its impact that is important.

I often wonder when this will all end, but there is no end to grief. There's only navigating the way to a new normal.

I realized at that moment that depression and I will always be linked, tugging back and forth, like the drunken uncle who still gets invited to the family reunion even though everyone knows he’s going to make a messy scene.

I realized that it was not Ko-san, now safely ditched for ever, but Ko-san's mother who stood in need of pity and consideration. She must still live on in this hard unpitying world, but he, once he had jumped [in battle], had jumped beyond such things. The case could well have been different, had he never jumped; but he did jump; and that, as they say, is that. Whether this world's weather turns out fine or cloudy no more worries him; but it matters to his mother. It rains, so she sits alone indoors thinking about Ko-san. And now it's fine, so she potters out and meets a friend of Ko-san's. She hangs out the national flag to welcome the returned soliders, but her joy is made querulous with wishing that Ko-san were alive. At the public bath-house, some young girl of marriageable age helps her to carry a bucket of hot water: but her pleasure from that kindness is soured as she thinks if only I had a daughter-in-law like this girl. To live under such conditions is to live in agonies. Had she lost one out of many children, there would be consolation and comfort in the mere fact of the survivors. But when loss halves a family of just one parent and one child, the damage is as irreparable as when a gourd is broken clean across its middle. There's nothing left to hang on to. Like the sergeant's mother, she too had waited for her son's return, counting on shriveled fingers the passing of the days and nights before that special day when she would be able once more to hang on him. But Ko-san with the flag jumped resolutely down into the ditch and still has not climbed back.

I remember understanding what a brutal thing it is to be the bearer of truly bad news - to break off a piece of that misery and hand it to other people, one by one, and then have to comfort them; to put their grief on your shoulders on top of all your own; to be the calm one in the face of their shock and tears. And then learning that relative weight of grief is immaterial. Being smothered a little is no different than being smothered a lot. Either way, you can't breathe.

I realised I had a stream of thoughts about him which ran for the most part below conscious level. I noticed jets spurting up from this stream: comparisons with other relationships I knew of which had weathered massive changes and shifts of balance; small crumbs of hope he would find he missed the familiarity of my company, or that his gestures of comfort meant more than a gentle goodbye. I grieved for these hopes, and their hopelessness.

Irene Finney filled the void with a child not loved then lost, but first lost, then loved.

Isn't she doing this too? Connecting and disconnecting. Facing grief then turning from it. One minute she is caught up in minutiae. Will her feet get sore standing in heels at the church? Have they made enough food? Will the kitten get scared by dozens of strangers in the house? Should she shut him in a room upstairs? The next moment she is weeping uncontrollably, taken over by pain so profound she can barely move. Then there was the salad bowl incident; her own fury scared her. But maybe these are different ways of dealing with events for all of them. Molly and Luke are infantile echos of her, their emotions paired down, their reactions simpler but similar. For if they have difficulty taking in what has happened, then so too does she. Why is she dressing up, for instance? Why can't she wear clothes to reflect the fact that she is at her lowest end? A tracksuit, a jumper full of holes, dirty jeans? Why can't she leave her hair a mess, her face unmade up? The crazed and grieving Karen doesn't care about her appearance. Yet she must go through with this charade, polish herself and her children to perfection. She, in particular, must hold it together. Oh, she can cry, yes, that's allowed. People expect that. They will sympathize. But what about screaming, howling, and hurling plates like she did yesterday? She imagines the shocked faces as she shouts and swears and smashes everything. But she is so angry, surely others must feel the same. Maybe a plate throwing ceremony would be a more fitting ritual than church, then everyone could have a go...smashing crockery up against the back garden wall.

I still think of you every day. But I’m trying not to let it hurt me with the same intensity that it used to.

It could go on for years and years, And has, for centuries, For being human holds a special grief Of privacy within the universe That yearns and waits to be retouched By someone who can take away The memory of death.

It could be argued that death is inherently absurd, and that grinning is not necessarily an inappropriate response. I mean absurd in the sense of ridiculous, unreasonable. One second a person is there, the next they're not.

I thought about how the smallest of things could set someone on a bustling fire when you didn't have the right shoulder to lean on.

I think the purest of souls, those with the most fragile of hearts, must be meant for a short life. They can't be tethered or held in your palm. Just like a sparrow, they light on your porch. Their song might be brief, but how greedy would we be to ask for more? No, you cannot keep a sparrow. You can only hope that as they fly away, they take a little bit of you with them.

It hurts that I was just one page in the book of your life… But what hurts more is knowing you’ll revise that chapter someday…. ….. and you’ll erase me completely.