Quotes About Grief

You know that grief cannot be avoided. And that when it finds a person, they might look the same but they're changed: their missing person has altered the atmosphere in the house, the classroom, the playground; on birthdays and holidays; amongst friends and with the parent who survives.

I wanted to tell you that I was so sad I felt as if I might be happy, or in love, simply because such powerful feelings can appear the same to the naive. I was mighty with grief, and I thought I should be empowered by it. I thought my hands should shine with a yellow light, and that should I reach out to touch our mother on the head, I would call her back from the place she'd gone.

She might do what the mortals did, and strain to convince herself that the death of her Boy and the loss of her husband had happened for some reason, that some restitution would be made for her, that she would be paid for her suffering with a truer and more tolerable understanding of the world, but she didn't think she had the muscles for it.

I have a box at school, Storm, filled with photos of friends and famiy. They have one thing in common. They're all dead. How long 'til add your name to the list, huh? What am I suppposed to do, keep on going 'til there's no one left I love?

This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.

In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.

Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn't the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn't deserve my own pity.

I'm going to write to you about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away. I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges.

There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.

The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work - I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate - but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one's address book dressed in black and exported into pews in non alphabetical order.

When death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death-sadness, questions, and policemen- and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order.

The mourners clustered around the edge of the grave, paralyzed by the horror of this thing, this first discovery of death that was worse than the death itself.

Tom wouldn't want us to be sad. I took crocuses to his grave this morning. I arranged them as best I could, and then I came home.....One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to. In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.

We looked as if we'd been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking to my husband's funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City.

did not cry when they killed my sister but I did cry when I heard the music coming out of the soldiers' truck because I was thinking, That is my sister's favorite song and she will never hear it again.

I wasn't going to get such a nice car - I was going to get a cute little hybrid or something, keep the trees happy - but then my grandfather died, and it was all: retail therapy!

A student asked me recently why somebody always dies in my books. I said, because somebody is always dying in my life.

Everyone in this house has been shocked by Henry's death,

This is the saddest place on Earth," I say. "Take it from a rat, kid--there are lots of saddest places on Earth.

I think back to my father, and the fact that the dead are the only extinguished lights we can never really see again.

You are both the most caring, giving people I know. You share, you love, you devote yourselves to each other and me. You're unselfish and generous with your souls. That is why she loved you, why I love you. So, while we miss her every day, please console yourselves with knowing you were lights in her life.

You know people say the dead look peaceful, like they're sleeping? I guess it depends on how you die, because Eric's eyes were open. He was looking right at me, and he was scared. My cousin died in terrible pain.

As they stood there, anguished wails continued to come from within.

Harold Bloom weeps for me.