Quotes About Grief

Crying for someone else is nothing to apologize about," I told him. "Especially someone you care for, someone who's passed away

I straightened up and looked out the plane window at the dark clouds hanging over the North Sea, thinking of what I had lost in the course of my life: times gone forever, friends who had died or disappeared, feelings I would never know again.

Everything seems pointless since you left

I was born an outcast in an ancient and subtle way; I was conceived out of some grief or darkness and would be made to pay a price for it.

There were, in fact, countless things he appreciated about AnnaLee. He liked her wildness, the way she carried herself like a great ship through the world; her grief, and her great mind; the way she listened in church, her strange vulnerability to her mother. She had a resilient, perfectly normal marriage, she was afraid to drive, and she dreamed primarily in smells. She interested him.

grief splinters, Taos, it splits off into fragments (I think nostalgia does this, too, nostalgia being a very specific manifestation of grief), and that each of those fragments then has a life of its own. Every day is a new way to grieve

A story about grief is actually a story about what is possible, multiple universes, up against the finite, or what happens when, as Tillich says, the infinitely removed makes itself felt.

Langston, don't you know how Alice died? Where have you been? What goes on with you that you are so completely free of anyone else's story? My God.

God is helpless. We are at the mercy of our own radical freedom, and all God can do is take into God's self the grief, the violence, the sublime acts of kindness, the good sex. God comes to us from the future, and has only one godlike gift: the lure. We are lured toward truth, beauty, and goodness . . . the lure is pulling at our hearts like some lucid joy inside every actual occasion and all we have to do is . . . Say yes.

When our mothers die, we are on our own; there is no one to call for help, no one to blame, and no one left who has a copy of your grandmother's recipe for the traditional Christmas coffee cake, which you can't find anywhere. Her

Who doesn't cry when they hear, "Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven?

As soon as I looked at Alphonse's face, I knew that he was dead. I had the strange feeling that I was dead myself. It felt as if I were lying at the bottom of a grave and earth was being thrown on me. When death takes someone you know, he holds you and whispers all his secrets in your ear.

Marie felt an incredible coldness. She had stopped pursuing, even on an imaginary level, the one person she loved in the world. Sadie was no more. Sadie was dead to her. But she was not mourning Sadie, she was mourning the part of her that had ever loved Sadie. She had put aside a love for a father and now she was setting aside the love of her youth. In the coming days she knew she would become a monster. She stood on the balcony letting the metamorphosis happen.

Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.

Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backwards glance.

I have seen animals shot, and I have seen people who have been blindsided by greief. We always know what has hit us. We don't always know that it will kill us.

I have often thought that poetry is a way to name loss, but it cannot accompany one on the journey of loss.

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

I haven't written adult fiction, but I do not sugarcoat grief - or what I expect grief to be.

After my mom died, there was so much written about her fashion and her style and all that, and I felt that one of the most important parts of her was missing, her real intellectual curiosity.

It's wrong for parents to bury their children. It should be the other way around.

In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they're frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner's fault.

I lost three cousins and a best friend, and they all came at the wrong time. Everyone told me to be strong and that they were in a better place. But I didn't want to hear that. They were gone and I will never see them again.

Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears; O life, no life, but lively form of death; Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs.