Quotes About Grief

You have to start over. That's what they say. But life is not a board game, and losing a loved one is never really starting over. More like continuing without.

When a lost loved one appears before you, it's your brain that fights it, not your heart.

Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.

but then she did. she died. no more visits, no more phone calls. And without even realizing it, I began to drift, as if my roots had been pulled, as if I were floating down some side branch of a river.

Mothers support certain illusions about their children, and one of my illusions was that I liked who I was, because she did. When she passed away, so did that idea.

That's the thing when people leave us too suddenly, isn't it? We always have so many questions.

Every loss leaves a hole in your heart.

But ask yourself this: Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back. What if you got it back?

I believe he died this way on purpose. I believe he wanted no chilling moments, no one to witness his last breath and be haunted by it, the way he had been haunted by his mother's death-notice telegram or by his father's corpse in the city morgue.

Maybe laughter after someone dies is the way we tell ourselves that they are still alive in some way. Or that we are.

people in grief can imagine many things. It makes them feel better. It doesn't make it real.

Shouldn't the world stop? Don't they know what has happened to me?

The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.

Have you ever dreamt of someone who's gone,but in the dream you have new conversation? The world you enter then is not so far from the world I'm in now.

If we love something and somebody so much, how much—if at all—are they ever really gone from our hearts?

Lost love is still love, Eddie. It just takes a different form, that's all. You can't hold their hand... You can't tousle their hair... But when those senses weaken another one comes to life... Memory... Memory becomes your partner. You hold it... you dance with it... Life has to end, Eddie... Love doesn't.

You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.

Loss is as old as life itself. But for all our evolution, we are yet to accept it.

Feeling loss is part of why you are on Earth. Through it, you appreciate the brief gift of human existence, and you learn to cherish the world I created for you.

You're never in love with anyone the way you are when you're eighteen, on a beach, at night, with your shoes off. I still can't believe he's gone.

Lost love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it. "Life has to end," she said. "Love doesn't.

Morrie," Koppel said, "that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?" "You bet," Morrie whispered.

His father, who for years had refused to speak to Eddie, now lacked the strength to even try. He watched his son with heavy-lidded eyes. Eddie, after struggling to find even one sentence to say, did the only thing he could think of to do: He held up his hands and showed his father his grease-stained fingertips.

Once, when Giselle was alive, he thought about the future. Now he only thought about the past.