Quotes About Grief

It's only when you've lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that phrase "It's a small world". It isn't. It's a vast, devouring world, especially if you're alone.

A grief-stricken man is driven to defy the gods.

This is the thing, I think often, that never occurs to you when you consider what it would be like to lose someone you love. That you would miss not just the flowers and kisses, but the totality of the experience. You miss the failures and little evils with as much desperation as you miss being held in the middle of the night.

It is the image in the mind that links us to our lost treasures; but it is the loss that shapes the image, gathers the flowers, weaves the garland.

A woman can never die of grief. She is such a solid creature, so hard to kill!

Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness

We may have civilized bodies and yet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights of this world; deaf to its voice; and dead to its death. And not till we know, that one grief outweighs ten thousand joys will we become what Christianity is striving to make us.

It was sad enough to see her father drift away, but it was crushing to find her respect for his intellectual worth vanish with him.

After all, no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons.

The most hateful grief of all human griefs is this, to have knowledge of the truth but no power over the event.

Tereza's death hurt me so much, it was as if I had two heads smashing into each other. One was full of mown love, the other of hate. I wanted the love to grow back. It grew like grass and straw, all mixed up together, and turned into an icy affirmation on my brow. That was my damn stupid plant.

this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

When he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again

At least, he thinks, the fellow has the wit to see what this is about: not one year's grudge or two, but a fat extract from the book of grief, kept since the cardinal came down. He says, 'Life pays you out, Norris. Don't you find?

Children's] lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts in our lives...The unborn, whether they're named or not, whether or not they're acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt.

His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.

Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers.

The feeling around his heart—that it is crushed, forced out of shape—he now understands as a deformity caused by grief.

The dead do not come back to complain of their burial. It is the living who are exercised about these matters.

All Hallow's Day: grief comes in waves. Now it threatens to capsize him.

It was only a year before his girls died of the same cause.

Oh, Caddy," said Saffron miserably. "I know. It's awful. But I'm going. We all should." "It will be so sad." "You have to be sad sometimes," said Caddy. "Whatever Dad says. He may be right. Granddad probably had totally lost his marbles, but I am still sad and I'm still going to the funeral. I shall be as unhappy as I like and I shall where black.

She considered it a great relief when a few days later she heard that her abandoned husband had caught pneumonia.

But if they spoke of Bee, he believed he would not be able to bear it, and if they didn't, it might be equally terrible.