Quotes About Grief

... he wasn't crying for the woman who had died. He was crying for the woman she had been.

He couldn't count them all. Nobody taught him how to count past ten. Such losses were beyond his comprehension.

You lose a child and you do understand each other's grief at first, but if you get out of step with each other, it's all over. Suddenly each of you is alone.

The sudden loss of her father was like living with a wound that would never heal, yet her memories of him were fading more and more every day.

It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...

Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life.

The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that.

This was not [him]. It was a thing, with all the [him]-ness gone from it. Death takes the person and leaves his shell behind, like a hollowed-out tree.

Throw off your grief, ' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

Someone dies, there oughta be something. It oughta shake the world! You're not supposed to walk away!

Tears aren't for the people we've lost. They're for us. So we can remember, and celebrate, and miss them, and feel human.

Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

Stop your weeping. Grief is for the dead.

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

She's dead, you stupid cat. She's dead.

All my life I'd been a believing Christian. ... But that instant in the ER--the instant Annette [his wife] died--I seemed to feel my religious faith die

I felt like the sky around me was closing me in. Trapping me in some sort of bubble where time stands still and grief would linger on forever.

I wish R.I.P meant Return If Possible...

Kellyanne opened the car door and crawled into my bedroom. Her face was puffy and pale and fuzzed-over. She just came in and said: "Ashmol, Pobby and Dingan are maybe-dead." That's how she said it.

Death is a dark flower, its perfume heady and dangerous as it pulls you into its bosom.

It's almost funny, in a tragic way, that the fiery thing at the center of my universe did die and that I, a girl whose name is synonymous with summer, am expected to live without it.

People don't like to talk about death because it makes them sad.

I realized that that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something, but reality resists it. Death is inert and heavy, and it has no relation to your heart's desires.