Quotes About Grief

Is the sorrow of death the same as the sorrow of knowing the pain in a child's future? What about the melancholy of music? Is it the same as the melancholy of a summer dusk? Is the loss I was feeling for my father the same I would have felt for a man better-fit to the world, a man who might have thrown a baseball with me or taken me out in the mornings to fish? Both we call grief. I don't think we have words for our feelings any more than we have words for our thoughts.

Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.

There was a deep boom, like the rolling in of an ocean wave. The hearse door had been slammed shut.

Sounds from the highway rolled in upon her with the rise and fall of eternal ocean waves. They were as deafening as grief. Windshields flashed into her eyes like lights through tears.

They raised their voices, cried out back and forth, as if grief could be fabricated into an argument to comfort itself with.

Mas a culpa por sobrevivermos àqueles que amamos, é justo que a carreguemos, pensava ela. Sobreviver-lhes é uma desconsideração que lhes fazemos.

She felt as though in death her father had been asked to bear the weight of that raised lid himself, and hold it up by lying there, the same way he'd lain on the hospital bed and counted the minutes and the hours to make his life go by. She stood by the coffin as she had by his bed, waiting it out with him.

How to explain Time and Separateness back to God, Who had never thought of them, Who could let the whole world come to grief in a scattering moment?

A work of art speaks a truth we can't speak outright: the truth of the human experience. Love, joy, grief, guilt, beauty—no words can communicate these. We can only represent them in stories and pictures and songs. Art is the way we speak the meaning of our lives.

For me, at least, half of dealing with grief is trying to figure out what I'm supposed to show the outside world.

When they're alive, it's easy to see the flaws. When they're gone, you tend to notice only the hole in the Earth that they left.

When I was cowering in the ambulance, waiting for Joe Vik to come for me and Jillian, it was Detective Glenn who was outside trying to give us cover. Sure, I found my courage. So did Jillian . . . god, did she ever. But Glenn had it all along. He died. We lived. Would Glenn turn away and leave this man on his doorstep? This grieving man. Fuck me.

When Dad was alive, the world was filled with color. Afterward, color only existed as a number on a list of hues. Everything felt muted.

The thing we know is that humanity has a hundred per cent mortality rate. We all die. But the facts don't matter – we can't bear to lose the people we love, and it doesn't quite register about the billions who die, or even about our own coming deaths. We don't experience our own death the way we experience the deaths of those we love.

Grief has a colour. It has other characteristics, I know now, collectively forming a personality of sorts. An antagonizing figure that arrives in your life and refuses to leave or sit anywhere but next to you or stop whispering the name of the departed in your ear.

The dead boy floats by.

impotent misery

I saw you dead.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

They went through all that shit to raise you, and now you're sad so you jump off a fucking bridge. If my kid did that, I'd be pissed. What a fucking moron! I wouldn't even give him a funeral.

If love would die along with death, this life wouldn't be so hard.

If love could die along with death, this life wouldn't be so hard

Time stands still when someone dear vanishes from life.

You know, when you've lost the person you love most in life, the pain doesn't ever feel like it's going to go away. It's not going to be okay. You're never going to hold them in your arms again, never going to laugh at their stupid jokes, never going to quarrel over something trivial . . . they're never . . . just never there again.