Best 422 quotes in «grief and loss quotes» category

No matter how much time passes, or how many times you cry about it, losing a dog is almost as hard as living without him would have been.

No one ever told me how sorrow traumatizes your heart, making you think it will never beat exactly the same way again. No one ever told me how grief feels like a wet sock in my mouth. One I’m forced to breathe through, thinking that with each breath I’ll come up short and suffocate.

No one has called me. They all think I'm toxic or damaged, or both. I cannot stop crying so Dad holds me while Mom stands in the doorway with her half-open mouth and palms against her chest. Dad rocks me and whispers to me. He sings a little song in my ear as he dries my naked body with a towel while Mom stands in the doorway. He carries me to my bed, rests me head on his knees and lets my tears and snot soak dark spots into his white trousers.

No one knew she cried in the night for Lyle and her lost happiness, that under that biscuit crust exterior she was all butter grief and hunger.

No. Really. I've thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people any more. It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It's just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a whole. I don't know. It's like you become... a doughnut instead of a bun.

No sunset winks, but surely be followed by the sunrise! - Try to remember this on your moments of despair.

Not everyone deserves to hear your grief. Not everyone is capable of hearing it. Just because someone is thoughtful enough to ask doesn't mean you are obliged to answer.

Nothing has the power to hold you in the state of pain except your own self.

Nothing new can happen here, so all you do is think about the days of life when possibility hadn't been ripped from you forever, when anything could happen, and wonder why so much was squandered, so much wasted.

Now, what’s stirring in this murky sea of complexity and foolishness is an almost suffocating need to breathe fresh history.

Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die My skin is in blazing furore I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse In to the sun-coloured bladder I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me I'll destroy and shatter everything draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger Shubha will have to be given Oh Malay Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self My power of recollection is withering away Let me ascend alone toward death I haven't had to learn copulation and dying I haven't had to learn the responsibility of shedding the last drops after urination Haven't had to learn to go and lie beside Shubha in the darkness Have not had to learn the usage of French leather while lying on Nandita's bosom Though I wanted the healthy spirit of Aleya's fresh China-rose matrix Yet I submitted to the refuge of my brain's cataclysm I am failing to understand why I still want to live I am thinking of my debauched Sabarna-Choudhury ancestors I'll have to do something different and new Let me sleep for the last time on a bed soft as the skin of Shubha's bosom I remember now the sharp-edged radiance of the moment I was born I want to see my own death before passing away The world had nothing to do with Malay Roychoudhury Shubha let me sleep for a few moments in your violent silvery uterus Give me peace, Shubha, let me have peace Let my sin-driven skeleton be washed anew in your seasonal bloodstream Let me create myself in your womb with my own sperm Would I have been like this if I had different parents? Was Malay alias me possible from an absolutely different sperm? Would I have been Malay in the womb of other women of my father? Would I have made a professional gentleman of me like my dead brother without Shubha? Oh, answer, let somebody answer these Shubha, ah Shubha Let me see the earth through your cellophane hymen Come back on the green mattress again As cathode rays are sucked up with the warmth of a magnet's brilliance I remember the letter of the final decision of 1956 The surroundings of your clitoris were being embellished with coon at that time Fine rib-smashing roots were descending in to your bosom Stupid relationship inflated in the bypass of senseless neglect Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah I do not know whether I am going to die Squandering was roaring within heart's exhaustive impatience I'll disrupt and destroy I'll split all in to pieces for the sake of Art There isn't any other way out for Poetry except suicide Shubha Let me enter in to the immemorial incontinence of your labia majora In to the absurdity of woeless effort In the golden chlorophyll of the drunken heart Why wasn't I lost in my mother's urethra? Why wasn't I driven away in my father's urine after his self-coition? Why wasn't I mixed in the ovum -flux or in the phlegm? With her eyes shut supine beneath me I felt terribly distressed when I saw comfort seize S

One Day: One day, you will heal One day, you will be grateful for the deepest cuts of pain One day, you will glance at yourself And see a stronger person through your reflection One day, you will kiss away your hurt... gently, and with grace Until then, use it all to propel you forward Like a white-hot pyre through your star-spangled eyes A fire to regenerate every shadowy cell And open your heart to every experience Knowing that one day You will search your heart And understand that love is the only thing to ever hold onto

one must learn to live with the living before one can learn to live with the dead.

...one of the hardest things about losing someone that you love is that you have to allow yourself to seek and accept comfort in other areas of your life

One gives people in grief their own way.

One's suffering, one's melancholy is, in itself, really only looked upon as failure or as punishment, as detestable or sinful or socially unacceptable in the eyes of man; but this is not so in the eyes of God: for He is close to the broken-hearted.

Our brokenness summons light into the deepest crevices in our hearts.

On grief. We know where we've been. We know where we want to be.

Our parting was like a stalemate…. Neither of us won. Yet both of us lost. And worse still … that unshakable feeling that nothing was ever really finished.

Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude makes us less miserable.

patience is the thread of healing.

People kept giving me space, all of us hoping my grief had a half-life, but I didn't need space. I needed people to say Miles's name out loud. I needed them not to flinch when I said it. Weren't they curious about the color of his eyes? I needed them to acknowledge not just that he had died but that he had lived.

Paul heard his mother's grief and felt the emptiness within himself. I have no grief, he thought. Why? Why? He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.

Perhaps we become accustomed to our grief and, as it becomes increasingly familiar, increasingly part of the emotional landscape, it becomes a dullness. But there is no closure, no forgetting. One mourns those one has loved who have died until one joins them. It happens soon enough.

People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem.

Perhaps as one gets older one takes one's joys altruistically,"said John, in turn thinking aloud. "I must say though I sometimes wish I could get it selfishly, just for myself, as Gay used to give me, when I was young." Lady Emily found nothing to say. John's last words fell dead on her heart. It terrified her that he could speak of his youth as a perished thing.

Perhaps ... To R.A.L. Perhaps some day the sun will shine again, And I shall see that still the skies are blue, And feel one more I do not live in vain, Although bereft of you. Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet, Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay, And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet, Though You have passed away. Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright, And crimson roses once again be fair, And autumn harvest fields a rich delight, Although You are not there. But though kind Time may many joys renew, There is one greatest joy I shall not know Again, because my heart for loss of You Was broken, long ago.

People say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. They say that when you been through something terrible ... But it doesn't. It breaks your bones, leaving everything splintered and held together with grubby bandages and yellowing sticky tape. Creaking along the fault lines, Fragile and exhausting to hold together. Sometimes you wish it had killed you.

Perhaps I was easier to shake off for you because you’re such a together person. I was just an extra layer on the outside… like a blanket you could shrug off and feel just the same…. except maybe a little colder…. But I was always a broken person that was haphazardly held together by little more than my own strength. And so you just seeped in the cracks and mingled with my insides until you became an inseparable part of me. And as painful as that is, it still kind of warms me to know I will always carry a part of you with me.

Reap, reap the grain and gather The sweet grapes from the vine; Our Lord's mother is weeping, She hath nor bread nor wine; She is weeping. The Queen of Heaven, She hath nor bread nor wine.

Please don’t tell me, it was less painful than a broken backbone, a forgotten poem, a lost home.

Rather than help us rise above being human, teachings in any true tradition help us become more human: more connected, not less attached.

Reverend was right about one thing: people always want a reason for the bad things in life. Sometimes there ain't one.

Sadness creeping from the shadows will get less and less until it crushes her no more than a petal might her breath.

Right now, you know, everyone one is going to be there for you." I explained. "Everyone will surround you with love and you'll be busy and have things to keep your mind off the worst. And then in six weeks, or may be twelve weeks, everybody else's life is going to start to get back to normal. But your life isn't going to be normal again. As a matter of fact, as you probably understand already, it's going to get harder for you. And after a while you're going to start feeling guilty because you're going to be going to the same people constantly for help, or just to talk. And as their lives get back to normal, you going to start to worry about leaning on them too much. There might come a time when you think, I'm asking too much. I've got to stop complaining. So when you're down and you feel guilty for burdening your family and friends," I said, "pick up the phone and call me.

Sage of old held desire as suffering But suffering is desire as known to me

Sadness is treated with human connection.

She had begun to love the rocks and the ocean, the thunder of the wave, and the sterility of the sand,–awful objects, the incessant recurrence of whose very sound seems intended to remind us of grief and of eternity. Their restless monotony of repetition, corresponds with the beatings of a heart which asks its destiny from the phenomena of nature, and feels the answer is ‘Misery.’ 'Those who love may seek the luxuries of the garden, and inhale added intoxication from its perfumes, which seem the offerings of nature on that altar which is already erected and burning in the heart of the worshipper;–but let those who have loved seek the shores of the ocean, and they shall have their answer too.

She did not belong to the healthy group of widows and widowers who, after mourning, would nurture the seed of their grief into growing from loss—perhaps continuing the dreams of the lost, or learning to cherish alone the things they’d cherished together. She belonged instead to the sad lot who clung to grief, who nurtured it by never moving beyond it. They’d shelter it deep inside where the years padded it in saudade layers like some malignant pearl.

She’d lost so much in the process of becoming Zyne, but somewhere in the middle of it all, she’d found herself. Her heritage had shattered her illusions of a tranquil life. Destiny swept behind in a blaze, decimating everything she tried to hold on to. She was left alone, like the solitary tree standing after a forest fire. She’d thought she would crumble to ash, just another memory on the wind. But as blackened pieces of her cracked and fell away, she saw the truth. Under all that charred wreckage was the heartwood. Bruised. Scarred. But still good. Still capable of growth. When she looked in the mirror, she no longer saw a victim, but a survivor.

Sei dovunque, amore mio. Anche quando mi guardo allo specchio e mi vedo e sono come ‘sto pennello. Freddo, senza vita, ma ogni ruga, amore mio, ogni capello bianco sei tu. Come faccio?

Seven years on, and their absence has expanded. Just as our life would have in this time, it has swelled.

She could always walk somewhere without him. Of course this somewhere had to be somewhere "safe." She could walk to her office. But she didn't want to go to her office. She felt bored, ignored, and alienated in her office. She felt ridiculous there. She didn't belong there anymore. In all the expansive grandeur that was Harvard, there wasn't room there for a cognitive psychology professor with a broken cognitive psyche.

She felt like someone had carved her heart out of her chest and then turned her loose to stumble through a dark forest on a frigid night.

She missed most of all the feeling of having a mother.

She was gone but it seemed she was still always there, right at the center.

She thought of the Good Shepherd with His sheep. Of the Man hanging upon the cross. And the understanding bubbled up within her soul: He makes all things new.

Someday you will wake up feeling 51 percent happy and slowly, molecule by molecule, you will feel like yourself again.

Sitting out on the canoe tonight, watching the indigo waters of the South China Sea, I noticed the waxing moon calculating that maybe by the time it is full we’ll be back in the U.S. of A. I shed a few tears for Michael again. I was hoping his ghost would materialize just to let me know there actually is a spiritual realm but no such luck. It was just me, alone. It’s so bizarre. He was here and now… he’s gone. That’s the way it is. We are… and then, we are no more. Two or three loved ones keep our memory alive… and then, they are no more. And we all fade into that massive vapor cloud of forgotten souls. Why were we even here in the first place? I began to stand up. That’s when I saw it. It entered the night sky from the west and streaked to the east, forming a brilliant but thin arc of flame. A shooting star. A meteorite. Was that my confirmation? I would like to think so.

Some people appear to thrive after trauma. Loss emboldens them, they form great ambitions and stride forward as if nothing, now, could hurt them. They are exhibits in those old stories about disaster being character-building, strength in adversity. My experience, to my shame, was nothing like this. I couldn't find it in me to do much more than reel from one day and year to the next, with little optimism about what lay ahead... I had no idea how to grieve.