Quotes About Grief

Jess's feelings about Leslie's father poked up like a canker sore. You keep biting it, and it gets bigger and worse instead of better.

They gave Jesse all of Leslie's books and her paint set with three pads of real watercolor paper.

Humans have no monopoly on grief. Dolphins carry their dead on their backs for days. Giraffes refuse to eat. Elephants cry. Whit carried the dead on his back for years. For life. I'll carry him on my flightless wings always.

Death bears with it a stain that seeps into the hollow and fills the mind.

Ironic, isn't it? What? Here I am, trying to survive WITH you, when before my whole plan was just trying to SURVIVE YOU. I'm not sure what that means. And I wish you'd stop talking in puzzles and just say normal things, because I've had a big shock. This morning I was looking at a YouTube video of a hamster eating a tiny burrito and now I'm floating on this stupid raft and my friends are dead so just keep that in mind.

Grief, he thought, would have an ending, but it was a black cat that ran across life, through good conversations and orange firelight and endless drills. It sat on his shoulders and made his knees creek when he stood up. It balanced in the crook of his arm as he cleaned his rifle. And he could not banish it; it was loyal as a dog.

When Salter was fifty-five, his twenty-five-year-old daughter, Allan, died in an electrical accident. She was in the shower in a cabin next door to his in Aspen. He walked in and found her lying naked on the floor, the water running. He carried her dead body in his arms. He took her outside and tried to resuscitate her, somehow thinking she was drowning. We do not talk about this. He says only, "There was the wreckage of that.

If grief and gratitude are kindred emotions, two sides of a coin, than courage is what it takes to accommodate both at once, to stay focused on what is beautiful and abundant even as illness carves more and more of what you love away. Pg 26

Time does not heal, It makes a half-stitched scar That can be broken and again you feel Grief as total as in its first hour. -Elizabeth Jennings

I realized that it was not that I didn't want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn't know why I wanted to go on

Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell puts it, with one skin-layer missing.

It has been said that grief is a kind of madness. I disagree. There is a sanity to grief, in its just proportion of emotion to cause, that madness does not have. I know madness well, but I understood little of grief and I was not always certain which was grief and which was madness. Grief, as it transpires has its own territory.

I aged rapidly during those months, as one must with such loss of one's self, with such proximity to death, and such distance from shelter.

One joy, the Chinese believe, scatters a hundred griefs...

It's all right. I'm not upset. After all, they were just things . When you've lost your mother and your father, you can't care so much about things , can you?

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; Sweet little red feet! why should you die - Why should you leave me, sweet bird! why? You liv'd alone in the forest-tree, Why, pretty thing! would you not live with me? I kiss'd you oft and gave you white peas; Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees?

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep, He hath awaken'd from the dream of life; 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

Dearly departed, scarcely lamented, deeply demented...

To distract myself from thoughts of my father, i decided to check out the dead body.

Now I stood at the base of a tree and thought, "I can't do this." I remembered last night's climb, the grief and the loneliness. Here on the ground, I could keep that at bay. But up there… Rafe was up there. Maybe he always would be.

When I could finally speak, I twisted to face Daniel and said, "It's my fault Rafe's dead." "No, it isn't," he said fiercely. "I'm the one who knocked out the pilot.

Guess Mom's taking the day off," Corey said as we drew close enough to see the sheriff's SUV in the drive. "Considering she thinks you're dead, I'd imagine she's taking a lot of days off," I said.

After that, my life paused. Or, more accurately, I paused. I stood at the tracks, watching the train whip past. At first, I didn't care. When I finally did, I couldn't figure out what to do about it. My dreams and my future and part of my soul died with Michael, but now, deep inside, a voice has begun to scream that I'm letting the best years of my life slip past.

I seemed to be establishing a pattern here. Muster my strength and charge forward. Collapse in a puddle of grief and guilt. Charge forward. Collapse again. I said as much to Daniel and the others chimed in, making mock bets on who would spend the most time in therapy after this, and whether we could get group discounts.