Quotes About Grief

The instinctive posture of grief is a shuffling compromise between defiance and prostration; and pride feels the need of striking a worthier attitude in face of such a foe.

He pulled the sash down and turned back. Catch my death! he echoed; and he felt like adding: But I've caught it already. I am dead--I've been dead for months and months.

He oft finds med'cine who his grief imparts But double grief afflicts concealing harts

Yet can he neuer dye, but dying liues, And doth himselfe with sorrow new sustaine, That death and life attonce vnto him giues. And painefull pleasure turnes to pleasing paine. There dwels he euer, miserable swaine, Hatefull both to him selfe, and euery wight; Where he through priuy griefe, and horrour vaine, Is woxen so deform'd, that he has quight Forgot he was a man, and Gealosie is hight.

But double griefs afflict concealing hearts, As raging flames who striveth to suppress.

Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe, Wherein my feeble barke is tossed long, Far from the hoped hauen of reliefe, Why doe thy cruel billowes beat so strong, And thy moyst mountaines each on others throng, Threatening to swallow vp my fearfull lyfe?

Wrath, gealosie, griefe, loue do thus expell: Wrath is a fire, and gealosie a weede, Griefe is a flood, and loue a monster fell; The fire of sparkes, the weede of little seede, The flood of drops, the Monster filth did breede: But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay; The sparks soone quench, the springing seed outweed, The drops dry vp, and filth wipe cleane away: So shall wrath, gealosie, griefe, loue dye and decay.

Was I grieving because he didn't possess everything, absolutely everything, or because I owned nothing?

Everything I touched or did spoke to me of sadness. Each article of clothing—shirt, tie, jacket—felt cut out of different bolts of sadness, each a peculiar weave and shape and hang of sadness, as though sadness came in lots of styles.

I've lost over twenty friends [to AIDS]. I've seen a world vanish-a culture that has been oppressed in one generation, liberated in the nest, and wiped out in the next.

I would not leave a mother alone in her plight. They described how she had kept the news of my brother's death from our ailing father and on the evening that he was brought home, chapel bells rang out and kept ringing in honor of him, his valor, and my father kept asking if it was a bishop or something that was visiting the parish, not knowing that it was his own son.

so many that had died on the scaffold and many more to die including, though she did not know it then, her own son.

it was then I cried, cried for the fact of not having cried and for the immensity of tears yet to be shed.

THE TWO OTHER GIRLS in the room, Mabel and Deirdre, said I imagined it. But they were wrong. My brother appeared to me there. A beam of light from the streetlamp lay in a crooked zigzag along the floor, toward the bed, and my brother stepped onto it, his face pensive but not crying, dressed as he might be for a wedding, his good suit, his collar and tie, and not a mark on him, no bloodstain

Michael, my darling light. Be sure to have Masses said for the repose of his soul and for us. Your loving mother, Bridget

her untimely death. Death for her meant death for us both.

My mother is dead, my mother is dead," she kept saying it in her numbed state, because it had not sunk in. It is outside of her, it is a figment, both because it is so sudden and because she cannot pinpoint the exact moment, it being such and such a time in one land and a different time on the clock of the other. It had happened in lost time. The three previous days are jumbled

The conflict was terrible; it was the combat of despair against grief and rage.

According to their national custom, the Barbarians cut off a part of their hair, gashed their faces with unseemly wounds, and bewailed their valiant leader as he deserved, not with the tears of women, but with the blood of warriors.

Robbins, with Dora and Louis on either side, did not speak. A storm came into his head and he missed a good part of the service.

Patrick's own nanny was dead. A friend of his mother's said she had gone to heaven, but Patrick had been there and knew perfectly well that they had put her in a wooden box and dropped her in a hole. Heaven was the other direction and so the woman was lying, unless it was like sending a parcel.

Mary that that 'swift return' was going a bit far. She glanced nervously at the coffin, as if Eleanor might fling off the lid and hop out any moment, throwing open her arms to embrace the word, with the awkward theatricality of the photograph on the order service.

When our worship is true, we experience joy, peace, love, and hope, even in difficult situations. When our worship is false, and the things we desire are unattainable or impotent, we can be grieved, bitter, depressed, angry, or fearful. Our emotions usually mean something, and it is wise to ask, "What are my emotions saying?" "What are they pointing to?

Perhaps Hurston saw in her mother, Lucy, a version of Persephone, who is so missed when she's gone that the world literally starts to die. This type of grief, as Toni Morrison writes in Sula , has no top and no bottom, just circles and circles of sorrow.