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Quotes About Grief

I thought: And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brother.
~ Pat Barker
No one looks him in the face now, it's as if his grief frightens them. What are they afraid of? That one day they'll have to endure pain like this? Or that they never will, that they're incapable of it, because grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.
~ Pat Barker
As if you cope with loss by ingesting the dead person
~ Pat Barker
grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.
~ Pat Barker
We women are peculiar creatures. We tend not to love those who murder our families.
~ Pat Barker
Nobody looks him in the face now, it's as if his grief frightens them. What are they afraid of? That one day they'll have to endure pain like this? Or that they never will, that they're incapable of it, because grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.
~ Pat Barker
My two older brothers died beside him. I don't know how my third oldest brother died, but somehow or other, whether by the gates or on the palace step, he met his end. For the first and only time in my life, I was glad my mother was dead.
~ Pat Barker
Grief is only as deep as the love it's replaced
~ Pat Barker
because grief's only ever as deep as the love it's replaced.
~ Pat Barker
Now, he can see what he's been trying to do: to bargain with grief. Behind all this frenetic activity there's been the hope that if he keeps his promises there'll be no more pain. But he's beginning to understand that grief doesn't strike bargains. There's no way of avoiding the agony – or even of getting through it faster. It's got him in its claws and it won't let go till he's learnt every lesson it has to teach
~ Pat Barker
Nothing justifies this. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing
~ Pat Barker
Grief doesn't strike bargains.
~ Pat Barker
We howled, all of us, for the loss of our homeland - for the loss of our fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, for everybody we'd ever loved. For all the men carried away on that blood-dark tide.
~ Pat Barker
Many of the girls were crying again; I wondered how many of them had been promised in marriage to young men whose bodies now lay rotting inside the walls of Troy.
~ Pat Barker
From then on the improvement was dramatic, though still the conversations with the dead friend continued, until one morning he awoke crying, and realized he was crying, not only for his own loss but also for his friend's, for the unloved years.
~ Pat Barker
There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.
~ Pat Conroy
The safe places could only be visited; they could only grant a momentary intuition of sanctuary. The moment always came when we had to return to our real life to face the wounds and grief indigenous to our homr by the river.
~ Pat Conroy
Books are living things and their task lies in their vows of silence. You touch them as they quiver with divine pleasure. You read them and they fall asleep to happy dreams for the next ten years. If you do them the favor of understanding them, of taking in their portions of grief and wisdom, then they settle down in contented residence in your heart.
~ Pat Conroy
What kind of world is it, Ben thought, that lets its coaches die without his boys around him, buying him Cokes, calling him by his first name, and rubbing his shoulder with Atomic Balm? He died without a face in a room I never saw without my kisses in the stained gauze or without my prayers entering the center of his pain. But worst of all, O God, you let him die, let Coach Murphy die, let Dave die, without my thanks, my thanks, my thanks.
~ Pat Conroy
I'm sorry your bad dream died, I said as I left her and walked toward the gate. And I'm sorry I ever met you, Annie Kate.
~ Pat Conroy
The language of grief is an impoverished one in the South. It is admired only if it's done in silence.
~ Pat Conroy
The language of grief is an impoverished one in the South. Sorrow is admired only if it's done in silence.
~ Pat Conroy
thought that, at birth, American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.
~ Pat Conroy
Sloth is the great enemy -- the inspirer of cowardice, irresolution, self-pitying grief, and trivial, hairsplitting doubts. Sloth may also be a psychological cause of sickness. It is tempting to relax from our duties, take refuge in ill-health and hide under a nice warm blanket.
~ Patanjali