Quotes About Grief

One adjusts, although you never fully recover from the loss of a loved one.

Their baby girl had been born premature while Ian was at sea, and it became immediately apparent that she had a defective heart. By the time Ian returned home, Allison Marie had already been laid to rest.

No one told me it would hurt this much.

These unwelcome feelings could be attributed, Mary realized, to her mother's death this past February.

Grandmother was gone. The house was gone. Green Valley was gone.

After Christian's death he'd just existed. He felt nothing, just a sense of emptiness. In some ways he welcomed that hollowness inside of him. It was easier to be numb, not caring beyond the basic needs to survive. But with spring's return, some intangible force stirred inside him, as if his emotions had been frozen through dead of winter. Now it was time to live again. His spirit awakened.

To ache so deeply now for Nana gave the older woman's life profound meaning. It was a privilege to mourn such a loss because it meant you had loved and been loved.

I buried my grief for my son, not my memories, but my grief.

There was no true recovery from the loss of a child. A part of her was broken and it couldn't be fixed.

When parents die, the dream dies, too—the dream that they will see you for who you really are (and, I suppose, the dream that they will ever be the parents you wish for).

No one can truly know the answer to the question, What will you do when you lose the person you love?

Now he wasn't going to be here to love me or to talk to me. To have conversations with me about everything. Stuff. What was on his mind.

Now the colonel seemed to grieve for his President again, because he said, "This world spits out a beautiful man like he was poison.

Gladys had seen all of this, and she made it his to know. She'd lost her future to death, and lost her child to life.

He had no idea what missing was. Missing was lying in the dampness of your tears night after night. Missing was a constant hollow spot in the center of your chest. Missing was a yawning ache that was never satisfied.

Grief is a scar. The tissue is tough and when it's cut again, it heals poorly.

She died in a fire. I miss her like you... If I was underwater, I wouldn't miss oxygen that much.

Grief, I swear to God, doesn't live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can't smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint.

And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)

Grief, he said, is carnivorous.

Twelve dead?" I said. "Jesus.

My father's gone, Joe said eventually. Emma's dead. Your brother's dead. My brothers scattered. Shit, D, you're one of the only people I know anymore. I lose you, who the fuck am I?

Teddy wondered, and not for the first time, not by a long shot, if this was the day that missing her would finally be too much for him.

But as the years passed, he missed her more not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking.