Quotes About Grief

Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope.

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.

Desdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody else.

The Lisbon girls were thirteen (Cecelia), and fourteen (Lux), and fifteen (Bonnie), and sixteen (Mary), and seventeen (Therese).

By cutting off my hair I was punishing myself for loving someone so much.

Only the Lisbon house remained dark, a tunnel, an emptiness, past our smoke and flames.

Dr. Phil never talked about Smyrna and left the room if anyone did. He never mentioned his murdered sons and daughters. Maybe this was the reason for his survival.

And so we lie on our backs, probing, recoiling, probing again, and the seeds of death get lost in the mess God made us. It's no different with the girls. Hardly have we begun to palpate their grief than we find ourselves wondering whether this particular wound was mortal or not, or whether (in our blind doctoring) it's a wound at all.

In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased. Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.

Hardly have we begun to palpate their grief than we find ourselves wondering whether this particular wound was mortal or not, or whether (in our blind doctoring) it's a wound at all. It might just as well be a mouth, which is as wet and as warm.

At the same time, the fact that the girls were slowly sinking hadn't completely penetrated our minds, and on some mornings we awoke to a world still unruptured: we stretched, we got out of bed, and only after rubbing our eyes at the window did we remember the rotting house across the street, and the mossblackened windows hiding the girls from our sight. The truth was this: we were beginning to forget the Lisbon girls, and we could remember nothing else.

No, it's not a 'corpse thing.' I feel I lack the emotional capacity to deal with those in mourning...

Nadine would never forget this death because it had been her eighth birthday. Arleen had come home late, striding into the trailer in wet underwear carrying a boxed cake so warm the frosted flowers had melted off the top. To this day, those innocuous cake boxes with the clear-plastic tops made Nadine's stomach clench.

Sometime after seven o'clock, a distant church bell began to toll, and then another joined it, and another, until all the bells in a Springfield resounded with the terrible news.

Almost imperceptibly, the rawness of her grief dulled, but sometimes she would find herself swept up in a wave of sorrow so sudden and powerful that it took her breath away.

brothers and I finished digging the grave he had already begun, and we buried him in the company of Mr. Orrick's wife and two good German women, neighbors

anguished grieving. To Elizabeth Mrs. Lincoln

I didn't feel anything but a bone-deep weariness. Like I was suddenly a hundred years old, and I knew at that moment I would have to live a hundred more years, carrying my grief around like a backpack full of stones.

I miss him all the time. I shook my head, disgusted at my own mopiness. It's like being haunted or something. And I don't have the luxury of being haunted right now. I need to think about myself...

How could I live a life where the person who'd built and experienced and created it alongside me, the person who'd seen me in a hundred different moods, at my highest, at my lowest, in the middle of a C-section with my uterus laid out on my belly, was gone?

I thought, not for the first time, that maybe it would have been better if he'd just died, a thunderclap heart attack, an artery bursting in his brain, a peaceful exit in the middle of the night, in his own bed, after his favorite meal, with my mom beside him. We'd have mourned, then moved on. This was a slow-motion catastrophe, death by a thousand cuts.

There is no pathos in real misery, no luxury in real grief.

Sunlight is the life-blood of Nature. Mother Earth looks at us with such dull, soulless eyes, when the sunlight has died away from out of her. It makes us sad to be with her then; she does not seem to know us or to care for us. She is as a widow who has lost the husband she loved, and her children touch her hand, and look up into her eyes, but gain no smile from her.

In her diary entry of June 15, the day her husband died , Vicky (Victoria, Princess Royal of England, wife of Frederick III German Emperor) wondered, 'why does pain not kill immediately?