Quotes About Grief

After my father died, we went to church for a long time every day, and then every other day during the summer.

My father blamed me for my brother Gunther's death, for not bringing him home. He died in an avalanche as we descended from the summit of Nanga Parbat, one of the 14 peaks over 8,000m, in 1970. Gunther and I did so much together. It was difficult for my father to understand what it was like up there.

These displays of affection mean a lot to our family and are a reminder of the heart that my people have. In this time of grief we ask for a little privacy and space to digest this news; our sister was our sun and we are broken by her departure.

Let me die because I do not want to see the sun again.

Mum died on a Saturday - apparently that's quite common. Dad already had dementia, and my brother and I had to let him know the news. Forty-five minutes later we had to tell him again. We spent the whole of that Sunday reminding him over and over.

Religion was quite a thing in our house - we were Baptists. Some Sundays I went to church three times. If there was a talk on missionary work in the afternoon, I could be there all bloody day. But religion took its first big knock after Dad died.

I try to make the readers feel they've lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?

How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights! Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters, on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault, we both had nothing except patience, but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!) and I watched him as he took and took: none of it I could claim as mine.

The grief, too, passes.

I don't have much knowledge yet in grief - so this massive darkness makes me small. You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in: then your great transforming will happen to me, and my great grief cry will happen to you.

I have my dead and I have let them go and been surprised, to see them so consoled, so soon at home in death, just right this way, so unlike what we hear. Only you, you come back; you brush against me, you move about, you want to knock into things, to make them sound of you, telling me you're here. Oh don't take away what I'm slowly learning.

Alone he climbs on, up the mountains of primal grief. And not once do his footsteps echo from the soundless path.

Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you?

Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.

Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived.

Some of your hurts you have cured, and the sharpest you've even survived. But what torments of grief you've endured from evils which never arrived - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

Sorrow makes us all children again[,] destroys all differences of intellect[.] The wisest know nothing[.]

The south-wind brings Life, sunshine, and desire, And on every mount and meadow Breathes aromatic fire, But over the dead he has no power, The lost, the lost he cannot restore, And, looking over the hills, I mourn The darling who shall not return.

Sweet is death forevermore.

Don't grieve too much. This hour of parting is the hardest; the years will pass before you know they have come and gone. They will pass as night does in sleep, and I will return to you.

we are not "to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Our parting is not the end of our relationship, only an interruption.