Quotes About Grief

HE WEEPS as he lifts me onto our bed. My corpse sags; it is warm in the tent, and the smell will come soon. He does not seem to care. He holds me all night long, pressing my cold hands to his mouth.

do not fear for Troy. It is only Hector that he wants. Hector, and Hector alone. When Hector is dead, he will stop.

There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles," Chiron said. "And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth, when another is gone. Do you think?

Her black eyes seem to contract, like dying stars. "I am glad that he is dead," she says. It is the last thing she will ever say to him.

It is like a tomb. This is what it will be, every day, without him.

Briséis, lui répondis-je. S'il meurt, je le suivrai de près.

And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth while another is gone.

You care more for him in death than in life.

When he was gone, would I be like Achilles, wailing over his lost lover Patroclus? I tried to picture myself running up and down the beaches, tearing at my hair, cradling some scrap of old tunic he had left behind. Crying for the loss of half my soul.

Patroclo —dice—, Patroclo, Patroclo. Lo repite una y otra vez hasta que la palabra es solo un sonido. Ulises se arrodilla y le insta a comer y beber. Le invade una ira feroz al oír eso y está a punto de matarle, pero para eso debería dejarme y no puede. Me sujeta con tanta fuerza que casi noto el latido de su corazón, como el aleteo de una mariposa. Es un eco, el último jirón de mi espíritu aún sujeto a mi cuerpo. Un suplicio.

Daedalus did not long outlive his son. His limbs turned grey, and all his strength was transmuted into smoke. I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation he was to me.

No logré darle la divinidad —dice Tetis con voz quebrada y llena de pesar. —Pero le diste la vida.

The death I had put into his hand.

And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone

his beautiful body lost to bones and gray ash.

The tears of those of naiad blood can flow for eternity, and I thought it might take an eternity to speak all my grief.

That men worshipped him like a god, but no one mourned.

Within him, there was an ocean's worth of grief; which could only be stopped for a moment, never emptied.

She put her head down on the table and cried all the tears that she knew she should have cried in the past year and a half. But they weren't ready then, they were now.

A terminal illness doesn't belong only to the one who is sick—it affects family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers. Not unlike a still pond disturbed by a falling stone, an impending death sends ripples through all the relationships in the life of the dying. Each person involved has his or her own set of issues, fears, and questions.

Dr. Kübler-Ross expanded on this theme in her 1961 book, On Death and Dying

She pressed the veil against her cheeks, letting it drink up her tears.

Girls are cruelest to themselves," observes Anne Carson in "The Glass Essay," her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief, and desire, giving us as poetic adage what any number of other fields give us as statistic.

The witnesses and detectives fold and unfold this towel many times, always with a certain solemnity and formality, as if it were a flag. But the flag of what country, I cannot say. Some dark crescent of land, a place where suffering is essentially meaningless, where the present collapses into the past without warning, where we cannot escape the fates we fear the most, where heavy rains come and wash bodies up and out of their grave, where grief lasts forever and its force never fades