Best 422 quotes in «grief and loss quotes» category

[E]scaping is its own special brand of pain, and tied to you always are the strings of the souls who didn't save themselves. ~ "The Worst You Ever Feel

Even as grief flickers in me, I feel something like a first kiss happening — a meeting with someone dearly amazing, life-changing, lucky....

Every day, I lost a little bit more of him, and I was afraid that he would slip away until nothing remained but an old photo and a faint longing, a half smile as I struggled to remember some thing he once taught me on a midnight long ago. I had to find a way to hold on to him. I had to find a way to hold on to myself.

Everyone else’s Minute of remembering is over, but ours stretches on and on. It doesn’t end.

Grievers I've come across function within society, and most days it appears pretty seamless. We volunteer at church. We go to school plays. We shop. We cheer from the sidelines. We try to blend in. We smile. We look normal. We need people to feel okay being open and natural around us, so as not to drive us even further apart from the world. We are not from another planet, but it feels that way, so far removed is our experience from those around us. There is a constant undercurrent of loss, a schism in our brains, which we gradually learn to adapt to, but is ever present. It's as if our brains are operating on two separate tracks. One is the here and now. The second is the parallel track of what could or should have been yet will not be. Most days I can keep the second track hidden. Other times, I haven't got a prayer.

For his mourners will be outcast men, And outcasts always mourn.

For me, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is like a good friend. A necessary girlfriend, but with chronic PMS. A temperamental – and even volatile – friend who does not play well with others and whom I dearly love. It’s a strange relationship.

For so long, she had remained the sleeping volcano, her passion and pain and anger roiling quietly as lava within. She’d buried her love deep within her core; with heat and pressure she made diamonds of it all, gemstones precious and beautiful, glittering and indestructible and of no use but to be hoarded in her heart.

For those struggling with grief, there’s no timetable. It can last months, years, or longer. There is no rush. Give yourself permission to take however long it may be to fully heal from your loss.

Ghosts are the manifestation of the longing of loss.

God is a creation of human brain

Grief, we know where we've been. We know where we want to be.

Grief at its peak has a terrible beauty to it, a blinding fission of every emotion. The world is charged with significance, with meaning, and the world around you, normally so solid and implacable, suddenly looks thin, translucent.

Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold.

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.

Grief is a strange journey. Each time we embark upon it, it is as though we have never taken its roads before. No, I have that wrong: each grief brings us through a familiar landscape carved into unrecognizable contours. For we do not only lose another person; we lose the person we were with the one we lost.

Grief is the midwife of your capacity to be immensely grateful for being born.

Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.

Grieving is messy and horrible, and it takes too long, and everyone tells you what you need.

Grief can have its own weightage. What is worse? The loss of a parent or one's own child?

Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.

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 not a feeling it is a capacity. It is not something that disables you, we are not on the receiving end of grief we are on the practising end of grief.

Grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.

Every wonderful quality "in" someone is waiting to be recognized in all of life's great symphony.

Finally, only her and Benji and the solitude she craved. But with solitude came feelings. Anger. Hovering between life and death. Wanting one, then the other. Hating Michael. Grieving for him because she'd loved him so. But most of all grieving for Willow until the pain became so great that she welcomed the numbness back as if a long-lost lover.

For a long time things were so bad. Very bad. Dark even when there was light. The only thing that kept the dark back was the Forever Shiny Thing that was her secret... It is a word...the word hangs on a silver chain. The word is HOPE.

For many people, the love or the loss of an animal often becomes a gateway into a deeper spiritual journey. The most pragmatic of men will begin to question the fundamental nature of being when he is visited by an apparition of his deceased cat or dog companion.

For no soul can ever be replaced, and death claims a beauty and a magnificence that will always be missed.

For my part I have no joy in tears after dinnertime. There will always be a new dawn tomorrow. Yet I can have no objection to tears for any mortal who dies and goes to his destiny. And this is the only consolation we wretched mortals can give, to cut our hair and let the tears roll down our faces.

From Sister by ROSAMUND LUPTON    The rain hammered down onto your coffin, pitter-patter; ‘Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, I hear raindrops’; I was five and singing it to you, just born. Your coffin reached the bottom of the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you. Then Mum stepped forwards and took a wooden spoon from her coat pocket. She loosened her fingers and it fell on top of your coffin. Your magic wand. And I threw the emails I sign ‘lol’. And the title of older sister. And the nickname Bee. Not grand or important to anyone else, I thought, this bond that we had. Small things. Tiny things. You knew that I didn’t make words out of my alphabetti spaghetti but I gave you my vowels so you could make more words out of yours. I knew that your favourite colour used to be purple but then became bright yellow; (‘Ochre’s the arty word, Bee’) and you knew mine was orange, until I discovered that taupe was more sophisticated and you teased me for that. You knew that my first whimsy china animal was a cat (you lent me 50p of your pocket money to buy it) and that I once took all my clothes out of my school trunk and hurled them around the room and that was the only time I had something close to a tantrum. I knew that when you were five you climbed into bed with me every night for a year. I threw everything we had together - the strong roots and stems and leaves and beautiful soft blossoms of sisterhood - into the earth with you. And I was left standing on the edge, so diminished by the loss, that I thought I could no longer be there. All I was allowed to keep for myself was missing you. Which is what? The tears that pricked the inside of my face, the emotion catching at the top of my throat, the cavity in my chest that was larger than I am. Was that all I had now? Nothing else from twenty-one years of loving you. Was the feeling that all is right with the world, my world, because you were its foundations, formed in childhood and with me grown into adulthood - was that to be replaced by nothing? The ghastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody’s sister now. I saw Dad had been given a handful of earth. But as he held out his hand above your coffin he couldn’t unprise his fingers. Instead, he put his hand into his pocket, letting the earth fall there and not onto you. He watched as Father Peter threw the first clod of earth instead and broke apart, splintering with the pain of it. I went to him and took his earth-stained hand in mine, the earth gritty between our soft palms. He looked at me with love. A selfish person can still love someone else, can’t they? Even when they’ve hurt them and let them down. I, of all people, should understand that. Mum was silent as they put earth over your coffin. An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

God gifted a Zoo; with a paralyzed care taker.

Grief brings many false dawns, but a solicitude of normality will undoubtedly return.

Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your heart. So I think we’d better look at what grief might offer us. It’s like what Rilke says about self-doubt: it is not going to go away, and therefore you need to think about how it might become your ally. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost…

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

Grief is a matter of the heart and soul. Grieve your loss, allow it in, and spend time with it. Suffering is the optional part. Love never dies, and spirit knows no loss. Keep in mind that a broken heart is an open heart.

Grief is a universal experience from which no one will be spared.

Grieving is an expression of gratitude, and that expression doesn't have to be rushed.

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.

Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to the other drivers, to the unwidowed.

Grief makes gravity heavier and air molecules denser, so breathing is accomplished in a shallow, half-hearted way.

Harsh, bitter laughs exploded from her like shrapnel, and she didn’t care who was cut in the process.

Having a conscience now is a grief-soaked proposition

Heaven is a place where all the dogs you've ever loved come to greet you.

Heaven is not a place constructed above the clouds, but the places inhabited by the breath of those one loves; remove the breath and all the miracles fell to delicate meaningless fragments like a house, a love letter, burning to ash.

Heaven left a hole in your heart. But it’s up to you to choose if that hole will be filled with pain, anger, and the eternal darkness of loss . . . Or if you will choose to fill it with light and love and have that hole shine out of you like a spotlight into your life, keeping their memory alive . . . {It’s up to you.}

He laughs and hugs me and says that I shouldn't believe anyone who tells me it's gonna get better. "Ride the wave," he says. "Don't wait for it. Don't fear it. Just ride it.

Her ideas were expressions of her inability to accept her own personal tragedy and her quest for some certainty on which she could rest a troubled spirit. Her her lack of education was a real handicap, because she had no historical or philosophical perspective from which to analyze her own experience of grief and loss. Because we lived in a cultural wasteland of suburbia, there were no schools or evening classes she might have attended which could offer an intellectually disciplined approach to her quest. Nor were there any churches which might have offered comfort through the beauty of their liturgy.

Heart Rings What stories would our bones tell if they had rings like trees? circles marking the times when you felt loved when you were in love when you grieved when you did something that required every last ounce of your courage when you were full of faith — That is how our hearts work a lone, rhythmic documentarian chronicling your life in the shadow of your flesh mysterious even to its owner And someday we might learn that it was drawing a map for the soul to navigate the real final frontier

Heartbreak is an altogether different thing. Disappointment doesn't grow into heartbreak, nor does failure...It comes form the loss of love or the perceived loss of love...Heartbreak is what happens when love is lost.