Quotes About Grief

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

I am so sick of reading about another car bomb, another suicide bomber, another 10 20 30 70, 100 people dead in a day, both Americans and Iraqis.

When my dad died a lot of songs came, and they're still coming.

Svetlana was moved when her son, Joseph, kissed the body on the forehead to say good-bye.

My husband's death changed my nature. I feel it impossible to be silent and tolerant anymore. It is impossible to be always a slave.

Another survivor of Bergen-Belsen, a young girl who knew Anne, commented, "There it took superhuman effort to remain alive. Typhus and debilitation-well, yes. But I feel certain that Anne died of her sister's death. Dying is so frightfully easy for anyone left alone in a concentration camp.

To those who encountered Otto at the time, he seems to be a man purged by fire, walking through Amsterdam as though in a strange dream, searching for news of his children. Finding out that he was his family's sole survivor must have sent him to a very dark place. Vince hypothesized that Otto's grief had eventually turned into a mission to find the people responsible for the Annex raid, although his motive was not vengeance; he was seeking accountability and justice.

A soft gust of wind swooped at them under the hornbeam branches, setting the shadows flurrying, and when it died into the grass, Randal laid Bevis' body down, with a stunned emptiness inside him as though something of himself had gone too.

But tonight, because Rome had fallen and Felix was dead, because of Valerius's shame, the empty hut seemed horribly lonely, and there was a small aching need in him for somebody to notice, even if they were not glad, that he had come home.

Suicide doesn't end pain; it multiplies it exponentially and transfers it to those who loved you.

I've grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It's weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition.

Wherever you look there is so much loss and folly to contemplate.

Death preserves an ideal.

Her expression seemed to keep changing, from grief and fear and dismay to cold indifference. I wondered what caused the changes, or if my mind had conspired with the lights to half imagine them.

Gertrude's remedy for her mood swings was to print up hundreds of black-bordered calling cards embossed with the single word "Woe," which she handed out gaily declaring, "Woe is me.

I am grieving for the girl who always knew what she wanted and knew how to be alive in this terrifying world. That girl is gone. She is lying in pieces somewhere and I miss her. I miss her and I want her back.

Es que no hay forma de decir en voz alta que se puede odiar a alguien por morirse, como yo la odio a ella

Grief was an actual weight, he thought. It felt like a physical burden. You carried it with you all day, unsheddable. Your shoulders, by nightfall, felt dragged down." p 320

There. I said it. "Anne is my best friend: I say that in the present tense because I don't like to think of her as gone. Instead, I think of her as...away. Off someplace where I can't talk to her everyday like I used to.

Your brother lost his leg in a tragic bass fishing accident.

Tristeza é parte da vida. Ela é a reação natural da alma diante da perda de algo que se ama. O mundo está luminoso e claro – mas há algo, uma perda, que faz tudo ficar triste.

The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately.

Sometimes, honoring the memory of what we've lost is the only redemption we have.