Quotes About Grief

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

It was impossible to believe that Alan was lying in that pale, plain pine box merely from having caught a summertime disease. That box from which you cannot force your way out. That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve.

We are immoderate because grief is immoderate, all the hundreds and thousands of kinds of grief.

Pensando na morte de seu irmão - e no ataque mortal do pai - me peguei comparando aquele sorriso seu com um curativo sobre uma ferida. (p.75)

Which only goes to show what everyone learns sooner or later about loss: the absence of a presence can crush the strongest people.

Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler.... He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only I did.... Only I cracked, alone, later in the one place in our house where I knew I could go to be apart from the living and all that they cannot not do.

No one gets through unmarked by brooding, grief, confusion, and loss. Even those who had it all as kids sooner or later get the average share of misery, if not sometimes more.

It is said that the gates of paradise can only be opened by the tears of those left behind. I do not know whether that be true. It should be, I think.

He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband's death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence - something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it burrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it.

Edward   Once they're dead, I find they keep changing. You think you've got hold of them. And it's like you say, 'Oh I see. So that's what she was like.' But then they change again in your memory. It drives you crazy. Now I'd like to find out just who she was.

She might be all right, Freddy said. But she sure is dead.

When He comes back, He will be revealed as the heir of all things. Once He was rejected by tiny Israel; When He returns, He will be accepted by every single nation. Once He was a lowly Savior, acquainted with grief; Then He will be the mighty God, anointed with the oil of gladness.

I don't want to have to tell them that my life lost all its meaning when they died. They loved me, and they wouldn't want that.

After all my years working with the dying and the grieving, I have found that in this lifetime, the ultimate meaning we find is in everyone we have loved. Your loved one's story is over. For unknown reasons, their time on earth has drawn to a close, but yours continues. I can only invite you to be curious about the rest of the story of your life.

grief is optional in this lifetime. Yes, it's true. You don't have to experience grief, but you can only avoid it by avoiding love. Love and grief are inextricably intertwined. As Erich Fromm says, "To spare oneself from grief at all costs can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability

talk to other parents who are broken and bitter and feel robbed at the loss of a child. They want to know why I wasn't destroyed by Jim's death. I tell them that his life had meaning even though it was so short, and perhaps he wasn't meant to be here any longer. Being with him when he died was a gift, and I've learned to trust in God, his sovereignty, and his faithfulness. I

I could blame everyone else for not feeling the pain I felt, or I could feel my own grief without any expectations about how anyone else should feel. I could have gratitude for whatever kindness people extended to me, while recognizing that they could not be expected to share my feelings. This was my tragedy, not theirs. I thought of the Auden poem "Musée des Beaux Arts," about suffering "while someone else is eating or opening a window.

It may feel like all meaning left with the person you lost, but that is not true. You can continue to connect meaningfully with those who are still living, and you can form new connections, too. Those connections do not diminish your love for the person who died. They will only enhance it.

Maybe your meaning will come by finding rituals that commemorate your loved one's life, or by offering some kind of contribution that will honor that person. Or the loss of your loved one may cause you to deepen your connection to those who are still with you, or to invite back into your life people from whom you've been estranged. Or it may give you a heightened sense of the beauty of the life we are all so privileged to have as long as we remain on this earth.

are attempts to regain some of the control I felt I lost when my mother died.

Ultimately, meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you're moving forward with your life.

After all my years working with the dying and the grieving, I have found that in this lifetime, the ultimate meaning we find is in everyone we have loved.

Death leaves trails of mutes.

tiny: did someone die? me: yeah, i did. he smiles again at that. tiny: well, then... welcome to the afterlife.