Quotes About Grief

The dead were gone through Hood's Gate. The living were left with the pain of their passage.

Not all things about oneself were likeable. So she had wept for her flaws, for her weaknesses and for her humanity. Before two witnesses who no doubt had their own stories, their own reasons to grieve.

Duiker said, a wave of sorrow flooding him.

Release gets addictive, you see. It becomes a fixed behaviour, as destructive as any other. Keep repeating the exercise of grief and it loses meaning, it becomes rote, false, a game of self-delusion, self-indulgence. A way of never getting over anything, ever.

Death is not an unkind fate,' Darist said above him. 'If she was a friend, you will miss her company, and that is the true source of your grief—your sorrow is for yourself. My words may displease you, but I speak from experience. I have felt the deaths of many of my kin, and I mourn the spaces in my life where they once stood. But such losses serve only to ease my own impending demise.

Names are no comfort, they're a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him? Why do the survivors remain anonymous—as if cursed—while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold? Name none of the fallen, for they stood in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown.

Yet, when it's done, what is the once-soldier? What does he or she become? An entire future spent walking backward, eyes on the past – its horrors, its losses, its grief, its sheer heart-bursting living?

We are all pushed into a world of madness, yet it must now fall to each of us to pull back from this Abyss, to drag ourselves free of the descending spiral. From horror, grief must be fashioned, and from grief, compassion.

Keep repeating the exercise of grief and it loses meaning, it becomes rote, false, a game of self-delusion, self-indulgence. A way of never getting over anything, ever.

If she was a friend, you will miss her company, and that is the true source of your grief—your sorrow is for yourself.

You misunderstand me. You always have. I have grieved, and that's faded away. Gone. Now … well, now there's nothing. A vast, unlit cavern. Ashes.

good men, the ones you lost.

There is no such place, Destriant. Even in isolation we were assailed – by our own doubts, by all the flavours of grief and despair. You and the Mortal Sword and the Shield Anvil, you have led us back into the living world – we have come from a place of death, but now we shall take our place among the peoples of this world. It is right that we do so.

The named soldier – dead, melted wax – demands a response among the living . . . a response no-one can make. Names are no comfort, they're a call to answer the unanswerable. Why did she die, not him? Why do the survivors remain anonymous – as if cursed – while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold?

We weep in our lives for the things lost to us, the worlds done.

Blend walked into K'rul's Bar and found it empty, save for the hunched figure of the historian, who sat at his chosen table, staring at the stained, pitted wood. She walked over and looked down at him. 'Who died?' Duiker did not look up. 'Not who, Blend. More like what. What died? More, I think, than we'll ever know.

Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.

The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins with love and ends with grief.

If people are going to be taken away from him, either through death or a transformation of their personality that makes them into strangers, then he's better off without them.

Lo siento, abuelo, no llegué a decirte adiós. Hubiese preferido decirte hola.

He hands the page to his wife and looks across the room to Colleen's picture, listening to her absence, breathing deeply the air she can't share.

I rush to her side and touch her cold skin, hoping against hope for a pulse.

We are artists. We are writers—slightly neurotic and probably addicted to coffee, late nights, sunsets, laughter, tears, and heartache. Creativity is our drug. We lose ourselves in the smell of old books. We're bewildered by how we can live in a world this full of glory and grief and not be awestruck every moment. And we write stories to help wake people up before they fall asleep for good.

When you look at the world as it is, how can you not be racked with grief? But when you look closer, how can you not be overwhelmed with awe?