Quotes About Grief

Bereavement disrupts the whole structure of our lives and throws us into chaos.

How can you know love, and lose it, and go on living without it, and not feel the loss forever?" "You can't," Feather answered. "You feel the loss forever. But you put it in a corner of yourself, and bit by bit some of your sorrow changes into joy. And that's how you go on living.

I sensed that he was dead, but wasn't sure if death was forever. It seemed best to stay nearby, in case the chance came to make everything changed.

My heart lurched and cleanly broke.

It's raining in my heart, like it's raining in the city. What is this sadness that pierces my heart?

When did simple sadness become an inadequate expression of grief?

when your world falls apart and everything's ruined, you lose part of yourself. Not all, inconveniently. One half, the best half, dies. The other half lives.

We can't stop loving and caring about others just because it hurts when we lose them.

Didn't she know yet? People you loved, the ones you cared about the most, they all died eventually. No one was spared. When you lost them, everything you had, all of your heart, was lost, too. It crippled you. Left you an empty shell, functioning on instinct alone. "You're horrible," she whispered, so softly that

Soft hearts bled, and in their pain they caused grief and havoc.

To revive sorrow is cruel.

Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.

Her first week as a girl wearing black came and went and she knew she was doing a terrible job at it. But she didn't care. How could she focus on the inanities of life as a Thorndike student when she knew that Melissa Mayhew had tortured and killed her father?

When you're talking about the idea of loving your ex, and being able to hold on to that amidst all the other feelings of being heartbroken or sad or missing something that's gone --something dies when a relationship ends. It is a death because that thing that was the two of you together was alive and now it won't be and the only two people who really knew that thing was alive are the two of you. No one else knows.

Are griefs then too loved? Verily all desire joy. Or whereas no man likes to be miserable, is he yet pleased to be merciful? which because it cannot be without passion, for this reason alone are passions loved?

And yet there succeeded, not indeed other griefs, yet the causes of other griefs. For whence had that former grief so easily reached my very inmost soul, but that I had poured out my soul upon the dust, in loving one that must die, as if he would never die?

Fear also seizes Him, and His spirit languishes in mortal sadness.

There is no spot on earth that is free from loss. On this street, or in this room, someone lay down or was put down and was no more. Someone held someone else for the last time here. Rivers and lakes and oceans are full of people who vanished beneath the surface and were never seen again. Wherever you are standing, wherever you call home, someone left the earth there. Everyone we love dies and disappears.

Love, too, a leveler, a dying all its own, the parts left behind not to be replaced, a loss ongoing, and every day increased, like rising in the night, at 3:00 am, to watch the snow or the dead leaf fall, the rings around the streetlight in the rain, and then the rain, the red fist in the heart opening and closing almost without me. —Stanley Plumly, from "Variation on a Line from Elizabeth Bishop's 'Five Flights Up'," Poetry(June 2015)

My child died last night—and now I shall be alone again, if I must really go on living. They will come tomorrow, strange, hulking, black-clad men bringing a coffin, and they will put him in it, my poor boy, my only child.

ever since he discovered that all his millions could not bring him back his wife, he has learned to despise money.

savez-vous ce que c'est que de voir mourir quelqu'un ? Y avez-vous déjà assisté ? Avez-vous vu comment le corps se recroqueville, comment les ongles bleuis griffent le vide, comment chaque membre se contracte, chaque doigt se raidit contre l'effroyable issue, comment un râle sort du gosier...avez-vous vu dans les yeux exorbités cette épouvante qu'aucun mot ne peut rendre ?

He was enmeshed in his grief. He did not notice that Graceless's leg had come off and that she was managing as best she could with three.

Her blank eyes burrowed through the fetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes, but voids sunk between two jutting pent-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rags of a futile grief were hung.