Quotes About Grief

my own instinctive feeling is that you do not work through bereavement. It works through you. It is the passivity that's involved in bereavement, the feeling that something terrible is being done to you – which it is – that is the most frightening.

When you're bereaved you're so all over the place that you might find a book heart-warming on a Tuesday and mindless nonsense on a Wednesday.

our tears and our smiles, our joys and our griefs, our weeping and our laughter, our curses and our blessings, our praises and our blames--every one of these we may find, if we calmly study our own selves, to have been brought out from within ourselves by so many blows. The result is what we are. All these blows taken together are called Karma--work, action.

On one of his comrades depicted in the book:] "Sasha was my friend … Like me, he was 19. But he didn't come home. He was killed 12 hours after this photo was taken.

Tears are the silent language of grief

I nuzzled them both to remind them that there was really no need to grieve, since I was okay and really a much better pet than Smokey ever was.

I remembered the boy crying the day they buried Smokey in the yard, and I hoped he wouldn't cry over my death. My purpose, my whole life, had been to love him and be with him, to make him happy.

As for me: I loyally remained right where I was, remembering the very first I had ever seen the boy and then just now, the very last time-and all the times in between. The deep aching grief I knew I would feel would come soon enough, but at that moment mostly what I felt was peace, secure in the knowledge that by living my life the way I had, everything had come down to this moment. I had fulfilled my purpose.

My purpose, my whole life, had been to love him and be with him, to make him happy. I didn't want to cause him any unhappiness now—in that way, I decided it was probably better that he wasn't here to see this, though I missed him so much at that moment the ache of it was as bad as the strange pains in my belly.

Ojalá no llorara por mi muerte. Mi propósito, toda mi vida, había consistido en amarlo y en estar con él, en hacerlo feliz. No quería provocarle ninguna clase de infelicidad ahora, así que en ese sentido pensé que era mejor que él no estuviera allí para verlo, aunque lo echaba mucho de menos y la nostalgia era tan fuerte como el dolor que sentía en la barriga.

To know the mountain and the valley have grieved May be a quiet thought [...]

Nature and Passion are powerful, but they are also full of grief. True happiness would have the calm and order of bourgeois routine without its utilitarian ignobility and boredom.

O dear white children casual as birds, Playing among the ruined languages, So small beside their large confusing words, So gay against the greater silences Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head, Impetuous child with the tremendous brain, O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain, Lost innocence who wished your lover dead, Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

Life is fleeting and full of sorrow and no words can prevent the brave and the beautiful from dying or annihilate a grief. What poetry can do is transform the real world into an imaginary one which is godlike in its permanence and beauty, providing a picture of life which is worthy of imitation as far as it is possible.

Though language may be useless, for No words men write can stop the war Or measure up to the relief Of its immeasurable grief, Yet truth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense, And often when the searcher stood Before the Oracle, it would Ignore his grown-up earnestness But not the child of his distress

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good.

To Paula in Late Spring" Let me imagine that we will come again when we want to and it will be spring we will be no older than we ever were the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud through which the morning slowly comes to itself and the ancient defenses against the dead will be done with and left to the dead at last the light will be as it is now in the garden that we have made here these years together of our long evenings and astonishment

by day the known world lost color my hold on it felt loose I imagine that was part of the grief I knew

All through the dark the wind looks for the grief it belongs to but there was no place for that any more I have looked too and seen only the nameless hunger watching us out of the stars ancestor and the black fields —W.S. Merwin, "Night Wind" The Second Four Books of Poems . (Copper Canyon Press, 1992)

You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us

Issac:"I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters." Computer: "I don't understand-" Issac: "Me neither. Pause

OK Computer? More like No Thank You Computers. They killed my father, and I hate them.

When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you re taken into life's severest confidence. You are undeceived.

My resolve, my anger, even my grief gave me confidence