Quotes About Grief

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.

Life's full of loss, who knows the cost, living in the memory of the love that never was.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

Only poetry can address grief.

As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.

There is no end to grief. Nor no end to poetry.

That loss is common would not makeMy own less bitter, rather more:Too common! Never morning woreTo evening, but some heart did break.

The destruction, it is just very heart-rendering.

Politicians... talk in generalities and lies, and I think they've caused all our grief. They're so awful, they're really funny. I hate thinking this because my dad loved politics.

It hurts deeper is when somebody you love becomes someone you loved.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

ORPHAN, n. A living person whom death has deprived of the power of filial ingratitude . . .

I am blessed. I am blessed because I am going to go long before any of them do. I am not going to have to grieve for them, because they are going to have to grieve for me.

grief just sits there.

The grief doesn't leave. It becomes a part of you. Either you learn to live with it or you die. ... But grief just sits there.

It's not hard to read about death abstractly. I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.

No one in the family has ever really gotten over Bob's death. We talk of him daily, recounting stories and imagining what his reactions would be to new books and recent events. He remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it's been since you turned the last page.

I realized then that for all of us part of the process of mom's dying was mourning, not just her death, but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don't really lose the person who has been.

You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them. I don't think I'll ever get over Melanie's death in Gone With the Wind. But I'm still so glad I got to know her.

I realized then that for all of us, part of the process of Mom's dying was mourning not just her death but also the death of our dreams of things to come. You don't really lose the person who has been; you have all those memories.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

Scarcely a tear to shed; Hardly a word to say; The end of a Summer's day; Sweet Love is dead.

Stoicism, understood properly, is a cure for a disease. The disease in question is the anxiety, grief, fear, and various other negative emotions that plague humans and prevent them from experiencing a joyful existence.