Quotes About Grief

When the dead are done with the living," Franny said to me, "the living can go on to other things.

No one knew how he continued to do what he did, while simultaneously they wanted him to shut all signs of his grief away, place it in a file somewhere and tuck it in a drawer that no one would be asked to open again.

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out. Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.

And I don't believe you dead. How can you be dead if I still feel you? Maybe, like God, you changed into something different that I'll have to speak to in a different way, but you not dead to me Nettie. And never will you be.

T}here is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.

There is a special grief felt by the children and grandchildren of those who were forbidden to read, forbidden to question or to know.

I do not grieve in the abstract, but in the heart.

Spanish moss draggled bloody to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in mourners that they strutted, without noticing their feet, along the thin backs of benches: their piercing shouts of anguish and joy never interrupted by an inglorious fall.

It does not matter to me: wherever you are grieving whether Paris, Damascus, Jerusalem, Bamako, Mexico or Beirut or New York City my heart, too, is bruised and dragging. There used to be such a thing as melodrama when feelings could be made up, but now there is bare pain and sorrow, a sense of endlessly missed opportunities to smile and embrace The other.

Four years after my father's death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.

Or maybe he had gotten too inured to death, and was hoping to elicit from me an expression of the natural horror he was no longer capable of...I have made use of this technique myself, however, this attempts to access emotions vicariously...eager to detect in my listener that flinch of grief that eluded me.

Perhaps I'm being histrionic, trying to displace my actual grief with this imaginary trauma.

Mother had it all wrong. Uncle Gloucester had been ruling the north justly and well. Why should he not rule all England as wisely? She could not imagine him wreaking vengeance. It was just not in character. Mother was overwrought with grief, she decided.

things had once stood between them. That had gone for ever, she knew, and in its place there was a terrible sense of loss that sometimes threatened to overwhelm

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

The most important thing about dreams is the existence in them of magical emotions, to which waking consciousness is not ordinarily sentient. Awe of vast constructions; familiar eternal halls of buildings; sexual intensity in rapport; deathly music; grief awakenings, perfected lodgings.

We wore that grief like one wears one's underclothes. An invisible skin, unseen to prying eyes, but knitted to us all the same. We wore it every day.

Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.

In many instances nothing marked the spot where lay the vestiges of some poor mortal-who, leaving a large circle of sorrowing friends, had been left by them in turn-except a depression in the earth, more lasting than that in the spirits of the mourners.

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.

Musgrave and Lawley were alone with the dead body of their friend, whose masquerading dress had become his shroud.

He selected some music and thought that he would dance, but he failed. Instead he turned up the music until it smothered the sound of the dead woman weeping in his heart.

He tried to tell himself the dead are dead, but he knew Jenner had been right. Their ghosts stick in the minds of those that knew them, loved them, hated them. Those that killed them most of all.