Quotes About Grief

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.

And since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don't, offence-giving and offence-taking are common.

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

At a social event she and I would normally have attended together, an acquaintance came up and said to me, simply, "There's someone missing." That felt correct, in both senses.

Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is "success" in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both?

Sabía ya que sólo las viejas palabras servían: muerte, congoja, tristeza, pesar, sufrimiento. Nada moderadamente evasivo o medicinal. La aflicción es un estado humano, no médico, y aunque haya píldoras que nos ayuden a olvidarla - y todo lo demás -, no hay pastillas que la curen. Los afligidos no están deprimidos, sino solo debidamente, adecuada, matemáticamente tristes.

Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to the other drivers, to the unwidowed.

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more,: the belief that any pattern exists

Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.

Belki de her türlü ortak motifi ortadan kald?ran keder daha da fazlas?n? ortadan kald?r?yor: ortak motiflerin var olduÄŸuna olan inanc?.

This is true, and defines the lostness of the grief struck. You constantly report things, so that the loved one 'knows'. You may be aware that you are fooling yourself (though, if aware, are at the same time not fooling yourself), yet you continue. And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.

Throw off your grief,' such doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending that death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

Don't ever have dogs, Paul. They die on you, and then there comes a point when you don't know whether to get one last one or not. One for the road. So here we are, Sibyl and me. Either I'll die and break her heart or she'll die and break mine. Not much of a choice, is

Ich glaube nicht, dass ich sie je wiedersehen werde. Ich werde sie nie wieder sehen, hören, berühren, in den Armen halten, ihr zuhören, mit ihr lachen; nie wieder auf ihre Schritte horchen, lächeln, wenn eine Tür aufgeht; nie wieder ihren Körper an meinen, meinen an ihren drücken. Ich glaube auch nicht, dass wir uns in entmaterialisierter Form wiedertreffen. Ich glaube, tot ist tot.

Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

Great grief can be worn charmingly by a beauty and I have seen a lot of gracious dignity at funerals in my time but it is my experience that when grief is becoming it is also suspect. Real unhappiness is ugly and wounding and scarring to the soul. I blush to recall that I was surprised that Charles – nice, bluff Charles with his shooting and his hedgerows and his dogs – had a heart that could be broken. But he had and I was there to witness its breaking.

moment that the parents of one's friends choose to die or go to

She feels a great pang of loss, an unexpected welling of sorrow mixed with confusion.

New losses dig up past losses, as if one needs the other to remember how it's done.

She felt the pain of his loss inside her like a savage hook. She wanted to reach into him and take it out, as though it were shrapnel. But the pain was old to him, and somehow it had become a part of him. He could bear it and speak of it. It had shaped him; he had accommodated it. He had loved and he had lost and it had made him who he was.

If he'd been able to imagine it, perhaps he could have saved himself from what was to come. A grief that would reshape his life the way a tsunami reshaped a coastline.

Judaism offered no Shivah for lost love. There was no Kaddish to say, no candle to burn...no injunction against listening to music or going to work.

He grieved too, Klara said, for the loss of a certain idea of himself.