Quotes About Grief

Loss is the hardest thing, I said. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore.

His blue eyes were seas where sorrow sailed.

It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.

But the more people we love and the more deeply we love them, the more vulnerable we are to loss and grief and loneliness.

Time doesn't, as advertised, heal all wounds. Although the wrenching immediacy of grief eventually passed, the settled sorrow that replaced it might in its own way be even more intense.

Here lie your hopes and dreams, shattered and swept aside...

There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom.

Grief is a healthy emotion, and it's healthy to embrace it. By accepting loss, we clarify our values and the meaning of our lives.

Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving me scarred and sore.

To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing—I'm sorry, I would rather not go on.

To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures to people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. It is like losing—I'm sorry, I would rather not go on.

When the final moment came, signalled to him by the dramatic stoppage of her loud, rasping breathing (whereas their son had departed so quietly, like the petals of a flower falling off), he felt like a sheet of ice being rushed along a river.

My mother still thinks of things to do for him. Light church candles, name a star, send money to somewhere.

He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.

Stop. I don't like it. I don't like having people die.

For such a tiny death, the empty eight-mat room seemed enormous.

When you're held by the dead, you begin to feel that you aren't in this world yourself.

He could not call up the faces of his own mother and father, who had died three or four years before. He would look at a picture, and there they would be. Perhaps people were progressively harder to paint in the mind as they were near one, loved by one. Perhaps clear memories came easily in proportion as they were ugly.

I feel sad that he's just a voice now.

The first few weeks of any firefighter's career are an impatient wait to start living the dream, and mine were no different. This was back before I understood that it was also a job, that there would be moments of frustration and grief, back when it was a fantasy that had come true but hadn't stopped being a fantasy yet.

I couldn't imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.

I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.

Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.

She was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief.