Quotes About Grief

What is life if not a habitation to loss?

Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children's picture book.

I was a voracious reader, but after Hannah's death I grew insatiable. Books became my milk and honey. I made myself feel better by reciting jejune statements like 'Books are the air I breathe,' or, worse, 'Life is meaningless without literature,' all in a weak attempt to avoid the fact that I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable. Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children's picture book.

You looked inhuman when you were dying, Doc, your eyes glistened like dimming stars, you were wasting away and life was leaving you piecemeal, your soul no longer fit your body, you hated it and I hated it and I couldn't recognize you and I couldn't see you and I was frightened and I never knew what to do, I looked for the man I love in you and I searched for who I used to be around you and I couldn't find either.

I have lost my dewdrop", cries the flower to the morning sky that lost all its stars

Even he whose near ones have all died, one by one, is not alone-companionship comes for him from behind the screen of death.

Rajalakshmi would send for Bihari and express her grief. Bihari would tell her, 'Ma, when the worm weaves a cocoon there is not much to fear, but when it breaks out and flies away, it is hard to make it return. Who would have thought he would break free of his bond with you in such a manner?

Run first,' Shane said. 'Mourn later.' It was the perfect motto for Morganville.

Run first,' Shane said. 'Mourn later.' It was the perfect motto for Morganville.

But what dominates palliative medicine is not the proximity to death, but the best bits of living. Kindness, courage, love, tenderness – these are the qualities that so often saturate a person's last days. It can be chaotic, messy, almost violent with grief, but I am surrounded at work by human beings at their most remarkable, unable to retreat from the fact and the ache of our impermanence, yet getting on with living and loving all the same.

I guess it reminded me of having a kid,' she said finally. 'You survive your own death,' she added, 'and then there's nothing left to do except talk about it.

Guiltily I would think that I had baptised her early in the eternal doctrine of human pain, of things passing, of what was loved vanishing, never to return.

Father's death left us very badly off, a fact mother circled round with us for a considerable time – she had her own bearings to get.

The more one suffered and lived, the more one had known of joy and grief, the deeper the response must be if an artist were great enough to summon it.

each loss had been devastating in its own ways and had changed her life.

We have our moments of emotional vulnerabilities as any other human being, and my greatest fear gnawing away at me is losing my loved ones.

My father died when I was seven. I guess I am interested in fatherlessness as a metaphor for vulnerability and unprotectedness. Being on your own in the world in a way you're not quite ready for, ever.

And that's where I think vulnerability comes in - the fact that we're figuring out that there is strength in actually being vulnerable to one another, there is strength to letting go of grief, or at least processing grief more helpfully than we've necessary seen, particularly in these corseted upper class dramas before.

When you've been touched by sadness and grief, it makes you vulnerable. And because I am vulnerable, I try to be positive. And when I say 'try,' I really do mean try, because it's an effort.

I was slapped down to the ground when my son Wade died in 1996, in April of 1996.

I just can't think how I would go on without children having lost Edith already... It's too upsetting for me to write about them. Naturally, I still hope, and wait, wait, wait.

When we lost Bobby, I would wake up in the morning and think, 'He's OK. He's in Heaven, and he's with Jack and a lot of my brothers and sisters and my parents.' So it made it very easy to get through the day thinking he was OK.

I hadn't accepted he was seriously ill. The idea that someone so close to you couldn't wake up was utterly incomprehensible. Then the doctor came in... Maurice had no brain left. There wasn't any activity at all.

When you - when someone dies in your family and you think you're over it, and then you wake up in the morning and it hits you, 'I won't ever see my brother again. I won't ever see my mom again.' And it just kind of hits you like that.