Quotes About Grief

The name Downhere comes from a song I wrote after a friend of mine died in college, and it was kind of the first time I was dealing with loss and, you know, real mortality, and it was a song of how down here on Earth, we don't have the big picture.

My mother and father both died at 64.

I lost my mom to breast cancer, and then I lost my father three years later. I thought, 'What am I waiting for?' Motherhood has been the greatest gift of my life.

Mother's Day is a bittersweet day for many of us. We all have mothers, but some of us have lost them.

For too many families, the aftershock of the war in Afghanistan will be felt every day, most probably for the rest of their lives. I know because I've looked into the eyes and the faces of grieving mothers.

I'll shout out to James L. Brooks. 'Terms of Endearment' always makes me cry. Also, 'Stepmom' always makes me cry. I guess, you know, mothers dying. It's a safe bet that I'm going to cry.

Too many mothers have lost their children, for thousands of different reasons.

She went away in beauty's flower, Before her youth was spent; Ere life and love had lived their hour God called her, and she went. Yet whispers Faith upon the wind: No grief to her was given. She left your love and went to find A greater one in heaven.

She seized his hand almost gratefully and laid her white face, still twisted with her grief, against his shoulder. It was the gesture of a child: a gesture that asked for love, pity, and tenderness. It tore up great roots in him, bloodily.

And no matter what anybody says about grief and about time healing all wounds, the truth is, there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken.

The days will always be brighter because he existed. The nights will always be darker because he's gone. And no matter what anybody says about grief, and about time healing all wounds, the truth is, there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken.

Can a heart break, once it's stopped beating?

They believe that the loved ones who have passed on are somehow looking down from heaven and watching out for them. All of that may feel nice, but there is no biblical basis for assuming it's true.

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. 'Daddy, tell the truth,'Kathleen can say, 'did you ever kill anybody?' And I can say, honest, 'Of course not.' Or I can say, honestly, 'Yes.

I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my "living" room, not really sad, just floating; trying to imagine what it was to be dead. Nothing much came to me. I remember closing my eyes and whispering her name, trying to make her come back. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt some...thing go shut in my heart while something else swung open

Everywhere, it seemed, in the tress and water and sky, a great worldwide sadness came pressing down on me, a crushing sorrow, sorrow like I had never known it before.

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.

On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters. Then he burned the two photographs.

He enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's pain, he wanted to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he could think was Boom-down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of having his boots off and the fog curling in around him and the damp soil and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night.

But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.