Quotes About Grief

there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken.

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.

Desperately wanting to communicate with someone who no longer exists is essentially a lesson in gravity. No matter how hard you try to overcome it, it will always pull you down.

But everyone falls in love with Holden Caulfield when they're sixteen. They read The Catcher in the Rye and don't feel so alone. The problem is, they get over it. They forget that grief. Or they bury it. I never could.

It was something I thought about all the time: how death changes every remaining moment for those still living.

one thing you learn by losing someone is to seize the moment.

The Lakota unburdened themselves of hair, of fingers, cut into their flesh to temporarily escape the grief of a loved one's death. I saw this on A Man Called Horse and in Dances with Wolves. But as far as I knew, no one in my immediate family had ever done this. My mother was worth far more than a hank of hair. She was worth my spine. My eyes. My womb.

Doesn't seem right, does it? A split second to lose him and a lifetime to grieve over him.

You never get over something like that. You just try to keep it in a box on an out-of-the-way shelf in your brain. But then you open the closet to look for an old sousaphone—

We're all damaged. It's a universal component of the human condition, like the stages of grief, deja vu, and expired coupons.

If you're a father of a child who dies, it's an experience that never leaves you. It scars you forever and ever and ever. And so when I do any kind of story with somebody who's in the same position as my daughter was, there's no question that something comes out of me and embraces that story in a way that only a father who lost a child could.

Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.

When we assume that 'normal' people need 'time to heal,' or discourage individuals from making any decisions until a year or more after a loss, as some grief counselors do, we may be giving inappropriate advice. Such advice can cause people who feel ready to move on to wonder if they are hardhearted.

I'm not interested in using my father's death as some touch point for why I've become an actor - it's grossly opportunistic.

'The Notebook' was beautiful, and I was crying because its hero and heroine had died together.

I used to believe that it was not possible to lose someone I loved without sensing it somehow, without feeling something shift. But it's not true. People can die, sometimes the closest people to us, without us noticing a thing.

Of all the novels I've written, my favorite is 'Mick Harte Was Here'.

I feel like the writer observing the grief, but it is difficult to be detached from it.

Death is final. No it is not just final, it's worse than that, it's diminishing: the dead continue to decrease, to occupy less space.

the Waldorf looked like one of the dead and empty spaces which collect about the exit of a man who has lost a million in an hour.

Despair is the emotion we feel at the death of beings within us.

The thought Nicole really wanted to lose was that there was no more Gary. It was a possibility she did not like to consider. It was too depressing to believe he might not be on the other side.

She had built up a lot of control over all these months, but suddenly it just hurt so bad that she bawled right there at the table, two seconds after she saw the broken ring. It was the first real big cry she'd had about Gary in a long time, a month or so. She was not sure there was any such thing anymore as Gary. She didn't know if that was where her belief rested. He was a lot out of her mind. He might really be dead.

But to mourn, that's different. To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for the person.