Quotes About Grief

I'm sick of seeing people die!

True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.

We cry for ourselves, don't we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring.

For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human.

So quickly? Todd cleared away another wave of tears and looked down at the body on the table. Dempsey's eye was still half-open, but it didn't look back at him any longer. Where there'd been a sliver of bright life, where there'd been mischief and shared rituals—where, in short, there'd been Dempsey—there was nothing.

Somebody's voice rose in prayer, another simply sobbed. What grief was this? Not his passing, surely. He was too minor to earn such lamentation.

A feeling of intense loss overwhelmed him for a moment as he thought of his once-charmed life—of love, and magic, and friends, all of it, and all of them, dead.

But if it failed to show itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to solve.

Grief is like that sometimes. Like water, it finds any opening, forces itself through any crack until it explodes, inexorable.

Or a ghost is a knot in the otherwise smooth flow of time, an electrical storm in a jewelry box, grief perfectly aligned. And sometimes a ghost is a shared thing; sometimes the entire population of a city or country will just happen to look in the mirror at the same time, and from then on there was a city in the sky, as all cities are if we consider that the sky reaches to the ground, and this city, too, thought it was alive, and the candles walked off by themselves.

It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.

Grigor, of course, was in bed, having heaped enough blame on himself for his son's death that he could barley rise under the weight

Reconnected the dead to the living world that processed without them.

The niggers did not post sentries over their dead. Niggers did not pound on the door of the sheriff, they did not haunt the offices of the newspapermen. No sheriff paid them any mind, no journalist listened to their stories. The bodies of their loved ones disappeared into sacks and reappeared in the cool cellars of medical schools to relinquish their secrets. Every one of them a miracle, in Stevens's view, providing instruction into the intricacies of God's design.

She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs-- she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison.

Gloria laughed at them and said that she'd overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.

Rami often felt that there were nine or ten Israelis inside him, fighting. The conflicted one. The shamed one. The enamored one. The bereaved one. The one who marveled at the blimp's invention. The one who knew the blimp was watching. The one watching back. The one who wanted to be watched. The anarchist. The protester. The one sick and tired of all the seeing.

she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison. No wonder they gave them out free to the soliders. Lucky Strikes.

It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.

Her heart turned dark at the place that had been his.

It wasn't Sarah. Sarah wasn't dead.

the impossibility of replacing a person

A long time elapsed, and the parents had not mentioned the name of their dead child. They never spoke of the little girl they had lost; their sorrow would have become doubly heavy if it had been brought out into clear daylight, and its power acknowledged. Now they tried to push it away, not let it penetrate beyond thought. As long as words didn't help, why use them? Exchanged between two mourning people, they were only a dissonant sound, disturbing the bitter consolation of silence.

The shock, the pain, the agonizing self-pity over the fact that he would never see her again, never hold her, never smell her, the list went on, and on, and on like some pounding surf that threatened to drown him.