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Quotes About Grief

It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.
~ Nick Hornby
for a while, I regarded just about any song in which somebody had lost somebody else as spookily relevant, which, as that covers the whole of pop music, and as I worked in a record shop, meant I felt pretty spooked more or less the whole time)
~ Nick Hornby
She didn't want her father to die. She would mourn him. She owed him . . . not everything, exactly, because there were lots of things she'd had to obtain for herself, but enough. If, however, the choice was between a brief good-bye and a new life, then it was no choice at all.
~ Nick Hornby
If people have to die, I don't want them dying near me. My mum and dad won't die near me, I've made bloody sure of that. When they go, I'll hardly feel a thing.
~ Nick Hornby
Professional mourners may shed real tears.
~ Nico H. Frijda
They ease, I suppose, and smooth away a little and become a part of your life's pattern. The sharp edges do get dulled in time..." "But every so often something will catch you," Holly said. "A memory, a place, a thought, and for that one moment the grief will be as sharp and terrifying as it ever was.
~ Nicola Cornick
All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.
~ Nicole Krauss
I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I-he-none of us-would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she'd built a world out of them she knew how to survive on even if no one else could.
~ Nicole Krauss
I know sometimes things are hard with Mum. She misses Dad, I said, which was like pointing out that a sky-scraper is tall. Uncle Julian nodded.
~ Nicole Krauss
He had slept next to her for thirty-six years, and the mattress felt different without her weight, however slight, and without the rhythm of her breath the dark had no measure. There were times he woke feeling cold from the lack of the heat that once came from between her thighs and behind her knees. He might have even called her, if he could have momentarily forgotten that he already knew everything she could possibly say.
~ Nicole Krauss
HE LIKED TO COOK AND LAUGH AND SING, COULD START A FIRE WITH HIS HANDS, FIX THINGS THAT WERE BROKEN, AND EXPLAIN HOW TO LAUNCH THINGS INTO SPACE, BUT HE DIED WITHIN NINE MONTHS
~ Nicole Krauss
Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form
~ Nicole Krauss
My son's mother, the girl I fell in love with when I was ten, died five years ago. I expect to join her soon, at least in that. Tomorrow. Or the next day. Of that I am convinced. I thought it would be strange to live in the world without her in it. And yet. I'd gotten used to living with her memory a long time ago. Only at the very end did I see her again. I snuck into her room in the hospital and sat with her every day.
~ Nicole Krauss
I took a drink, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, repeating the gesture that was made a hundred times by my father and his father and his father's father, eyes half closed as the sharpness of the alcohol replaced the sharpness of grief.
~ Nicole Krauss
What I lost is, in the grand scope of things, almost... negligible. It's true that there's grief: it wakes me in a cold sweat thinking,, Who was I? What did I care about? What did I find funny sad, stupid, painful? Was I happy? All of those memories I accumulated, gone. Which one, if there could have been only one, would I have kept?
~ Nicole Krauss
Of his first wife, Ekatarina, who had died of tuberculosis in 1907, a year after their marriage, Stalin had reportedly said: "With her died my last warm feelings for humanity."3)
~ Nigel Hamilton
Man's heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink." - The Narrator.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis
I was once more struck by the truth of the ancient saying: Man's heart is a ditch full of blood. The loved ones who have died throw themselves down on the bank of this ditch to drink the blood and so come to life again; the dearer they are to you, the more of your blood they drink.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis
I am always filled with melancholy. It's as if I see everything black. Everything wounds me deeply.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis
Death had entered my life with a familiar and well-loved face, like a friend come to call for you and who waits patiently in a corner until you have finished your work.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis
This distance between my dreams and my capabilities makes me so furious that I want to die–to die from spite and also from grief.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis
Pensar que Mirdin y Karim estaban bajo tierra era como tragar una infusión de cólera, pesar y tristeza
~ Noah Gordon
We are born into a realm of constant change. Everything is decaying. We are continually losing all that we come in contact with. Our tendency to get attached to impermanent experiences causes sorrow, lamentation and grief, because eventually we are separated from everything and everyone we love. Our lack of acceptance and understanding of this fact makes life unsatisfactory.
~ Noah Levine
I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can't believe I'm here without her."- on losing her best friend
~ Nora Ephron