Quotes About Grief

Mary kissed her gentlewomen, who burst into uncontrolled fits of sobbing.

Within the space of six months, she had been widowed and orphaned and had lost her standing as queen of France.

His two infant sons had died the previous year

Sorrow floats.

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don''t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time.

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. ''I lost one, too,'' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

Grief is contagious," Marion began again. "I didn't want you to catch my grief, Eddie. I really didn't want Ruth to catch it.

GOD HAS TAKEN YOUR MOTHER. MY HANDS WERE THE INSTRUMENT. GOD HAS TAKEN MY HANDS. I AM GOD'S INSTRUMENT.

And I? With Egg and Mother gone—and Sorrow in an unknown pose, or in disguise—I knew we had arrived in a foreign country.

You write about when it's safe for a widow to re-enter the world, but there is no such thing as a widow for one year. I will be a widow for the rest of my life!

Okay," I said. I still have that photograph, though I don't like remembering any part of the day Carlton Delacorte died.

Sorrow," Frank kept repeating, until he fell asleep. "It's Sorrow," he murmured. "You can't kill it," Frank mumbled. "It's Sorrow. It floats.

Retrieving Sorrow is a kind of religion, too.

The girl looked too frightened to speak. Then she said: "I know you have to give my mother the flag—at the funeral. I know what my mother's gonna do—when you give her the flag. She said she's gonna spit on you," the pregnant sister told Owen. "And I know her—she will!" the girl said. "She'll spit in your face!" "IT HAPPENS, SOMETIMES," Owen said.

Owen and I were eleven; we had no other way to articulate what we felt about what had happened to my mother. He gave me his baseball cards, but he really wanted them back, and I gave him my stuffed armadillo, which I certainly hoped he'd give back to me—all because it was impossible for us to say to each other how we really felt. How did it feel to hit a ball that hard—and then realize that the ball had killed your best friend's mother?

Your first loss of a loved one, the first death of someone dear to you—when it happens, the pace of everything changes. In the past, there were times when nothing seemed to be happening. When you lose someone, you're aware of the earth's motion; the world is always moving, always ahead of you. For the rest of your life, you know there are other deaths coming—one after another, yours included.

For the Lord will not cast off for ever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men.

There's no one around to answer all my questions now that Ben's gone. It's a stark fact that continually reasserts itself each time I wonder what I'm supposed to do now. That brown robe he wore might as well have been made of pure mystery; he clothed himself in it and then left nothing else behind on the Death Star. I

And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun/ And she forgot the blue above the trees,/ And she forgot the dells where waters run,/ And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;/ She had no knowledge when the day was done,/ And the new morn she saw not: but in peace/ Hung over her sweet basil evermore,/ And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.

I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving: O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving.

And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?

sidelong fix'd her eye on Saturn's face: There saw she direst strife; the supreme God At war with all the frailty of grief, Of rage, of fear, anxiety, revenge, Remorse, spleen, hope, but most of all despair.

My heart aches, a drowsy numbness pains as if of hemlock I had drunk.

I did not cry then or ever about Finney. I did not cry even when I stood watching him being lowered into his family's straightlaced burial ground outside of Boston. I could not escape a feeling that this was my own funeral, and you do not cry in that case.