Quotes About Grief

When I talk to people about what makes us human, some people say it's our tears. Because we are the only ones who weep, only we can feel true sorrow. When I hear this, I remember Isiro's face, her anguished eyes as she cried for Mikeno, how she screamed at the keepers with her teeth bared and pushed at the poles. How she dashed back to his body and dug her fingers into his chest as if the strength of her grip could bring him back. There is sorrow without tears. Of course there is.

Claudine tells me there was fluid around Bolombe's heart. That the stress of his capture was too much. I always thought hearts were broken, but apparently they drown.

Well, I've been here since thirty-eight. I was at Elgen first. I did thirty childbirths there; before Elgen I hadn't done any. Then came the war. My husband died in Kiev. So did my two children. Boys. A bomb. More people have died around me than in any battle in war. They died when there was no war, before there was a war. All the same. Grief is like happiness: it comes in all forms.

Al lettore Questo libro non è un'opera di fantasia. È un colloquio dell'autore con suo fratello morto. L'autore, scrivendo, cercava consolazione, non altro. Egli ha il rimorso di avere appena intuita la spiritualità del fratello, e troppo tardi. Queste pagine si offrono quindi come una sterile espiazione.

Only in return for death, destruction and grief as gifts can we see the paradise of independence.

We love you," my dad says, and mother nods. My mother my shows her love in every way possible but has a hard time saying the word. My dad and I have had many conversations about why this might be; we think it's because she's lost so many people she's said the word "love" to. Half her family is dead.

There seemed to be nothing left in the world, for I felt that Roland had taken with him all my future and Edward all my past.

People talked so foolishly, I thought, about the ennobling effects of suffering. No doubt the philosophy that tells you your soul grows through grief and sorrow is right--ultimately. But I don't think this is the case at first. At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself.

the Empress said, her own breath coming in gasps, lips against her daughter's cold forehead and soft hair—her hair at least was still the same, soft, delicate, sweet cobwebs. . . .

Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.

That profound darkness where weeping doesn't exist.

When Williams unleashed his fury on Po Toke, the old mahout, sobbing, admitted that Bandoola was dead. He claimed he did not know what had happened.

This was not a loss that could be shared. Grief was a place every person had to go alone, a lonely country populated by mistakes and a futile desire to turn back time for an impossible "do-over.

If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it faceup on the floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief.

I always knew that grief was something I could smell. But I didn't know that it's not actually a noun but a verb. That it moves.

Before my mother's death, I sat anywhere. Now I look for the image of the empty chair near the image of the empty table. An image of me sits down. Depression is a glove over the heart. Depression is an image of a glove over the image of a heart.

I know the heart doesn't really shatter, but I also can no longer feel it.

The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.

The way grief takes many forms, as tears or pinwheels. The way the word haystack never conjures up the same image twice. The way we assume all tears taste the same. The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular.

My mother, now covered, was no longer my mother. A covered apple is no longer an apple. A sketch of a person isn't the person. Somewhere, in the morning, my mother had become the sketch. And I would spend the rest of my life trying to shade her back in.

When I told my children, the three of us hugged in a circle, burst into tears. As if the tears were already there crying on their own and we, the newly bereaved, exploded into them.

The way grief is really about future absence. The way the future closes its offices when a mother dies. What's left: a hole in the ground the size of violence.

Before this other stone appeared, my mother's stone was still my mother because of the absence around her. The appearance of the new stone and the likeness to her stone implied my mother was a stone too, that my mother was buried under the stone too.

At the end of the day, someone took the monitor and speakers away. But the music was still there. This was my first understanding of grief.