Quotes About Grief

All through that bad time, when Virgil's absence was wearing into us, when "missing" kept renaming itself more and more insistently as "dead" and "lost forever," I was yet grateful. Sometimes I was grateful because I knew I ought to be, sometimes because I wanted to be, and sometimes a sweet thankfulness came to me on its own, like a singing from somewhere out in the dark.

Counting noses, Bess missed Andy and went to look for him. She found him finally in the dining room, in the corner at the end of the sideboard, crying. The knowledge of it passed over us all. He didn't know, as we grownups knew, what the war meant and might mean. He had only understood that what we were that day was lovely and could not last.

But grief and griever alike endure.

The conflicts of life and work, like those of rest and work, would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each. In practice, however they probably can be resolved (if that is the word) only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either or to sacrifice either to the other. But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary.

I was changed by Nathan's death, because I had to be. Our life together here was over. It was my life alone that had to go on. The strand had slackened. I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember.

But we had a year when even to look at one another would make us grieve.

When my grandfather was dying, I was not thinking about the past. My grandfather was still a man I knew, but as he subsided day by day he was ceasing to be the man I had known. I was experiencing consciously for the first time that transformation in which the living, by dying, pass into the living, and I was full of grief and love and wonder. And so when I

This is the real power of joy, to make us certain that, beneath all grief, the most fundamental of realities is joy itself.

In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so - that it is fundamentally alien to our being, this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we reject suffering as a basic human truth, while greeting joy as integral to our very substance.

Grief is love in another form.

If I look into the wings, I can see Mom standing like a statue, Medea or Lady Macbeth, one of those tragic horrors, her face zombified by the steely reflected light from my funeral pyre.

These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished. Memory fingers in their hair of murders Multitudinous murders they once witnessed. Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander, Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.

Let us say your wife dies——

Grief has this that is noble in it—it accepts all sympathy, come whence it may. She

Apparently beauty is born in suffering, and wisdom is the child of grief.

Grief, Mom discovered, was not a problem you could fix, a loose screw you could tighten, a math problem you could solve, a child whose pain you could comfort. It just sat there in your stomach and didn't move. Sometimes it grew, sometimes it shrank, but it was always, always there. That was the hardest part, she said, harder than anything else, before or after. The grief doesn't leave. It becomes a part of you. Either you learn to live with it or you die.

a bonnet full of black feathers, as if a raven had wandered onto her hat and died of pure wretchedness.

It is right it should be so; Man was made for joy and woe; And when this we rightly know, Thro' the world we safely go. Joy and woe are woven fine, A clothing for the soul divine. Under every grief and pine Runs a joy with silken twine. - Auguries of Innocence

Joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine. Under every grief and pine, runs a joy with silken twine.

O! he give to us his Joy That our grief he may destroy; Till our grief is fled and gone He doth sit by us and moan.

It is right it should be so Man was made for Joy & Woe And when this we rightly know Thro the World we safely go Joy & Woe are woven fine A Clothing for the soul divine Under every grief & pine Runs a joy with silken twine

His pains he soon forgot: Lured by her beauty outside of himself in shadowy grief. Two Wills they had; Two Intellects: & not as in times of old. Silent they wanderd hand in hand like two Infants wandring From Enion in the desarts, terrified at each others beauty Envying each other yet desiring, in all devouring Love

I feel very sorry for myself - that is what grief is.

I wasn't feeling grief: that hellish chest-crammed agony you feel - but some portion of my brain activated by the memory decided to trigger the tear ducts