Grief Quotes - Page 32

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open.

There once was a girl who found herself dead.She peered over the ledge of heavenand saw that back on earthher sister missed her too much,was way too sad,so she crossed some pathsthat would not have crossed,took some moments in her handshook them upand spilled them like diceover the living world.It worked.The boy with the guitar collidedwith her sister."There you go, Len," she whispered. "The rest is up to you.

I never even heard her voice."And after a while:"It is a strange grief."Softly:"To die of nostalgia for something you never lived.

Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn’t true.

It is the heart that has been pierced that feels the most.

There is a period of one to two earth years that humans are to refrain from making big decisions. It’s because you don’t always make the best decisions when you are grieving. Those who make decisions in haste often live to regret them. You must move through the time of suffering, strengthening your faith and being willing to grow through the grief in order to be able to see things differently. As you grow, your blind faith will continue to open your eyes. You will see everything in a whole new light when you come out the other side of grief. Then you will be able to make very good decisions for yourself, better than ever, because of what you learned.

The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older - a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.

It's a small thing, a life.

All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.

Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground – I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses, some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an Hour and a Quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation – Sophia fainting every moment and I running mad as often. At length a groan from the hapless Edward (who alone retained any share of life) restored us to ourselves.

Life is so sweet even though it is full of lies and half truths...

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

We can’t even remotely fathom that whatever is ending for us is always more than an ending.

I looked at the woman crying over the doll and felt something else. I was sick of people acting against their own interests. Mooing about how to refinance the slaughterhouse. Putting skylights in the killing pen and pretending the bolt in the brain was a pathway to a better field. I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book, I thought.

In times of trouble, people need artists. We create those spaces where their own pain and worry and sadness can rest, and where their broken hearts can hope again.

On April 18, 1906, when that earthquake hit San Francisco and took David from her, Vivien began to speak the language of grief. She understood that grief is not neat and orderly; it does not follow any rules. Time does not heal it. Rather, time insists on passing, and as it does, grief changes but does not go away. Sometimes she could actually visualize her grief. It was a wave, a tsunami that came unexpectedly and swept her away. She could see it, a wall of pain that had grabbed hold of her and pulled her under. Some days, she could reach the air and breathe in huge comforting gulps. Some days she barely broke the surface, and still, after all this time, some days it consumed her and she wondered if there was any way free of it.

When his wife died, for a while it was the end of the world, because part of him had died with her. As the long, slow recovery proceeded, he had gratefully and guiltily accepted the return of equilibrium. But he had not paid attention to a parallel phenomenon: his reversion to what he had been before his marriage. Though changed by whatever he had learned during their years together, and by whatever healing had taken place, he had fallen back into the old patterns of withdrawal. Nursing the dreadful wound of her absence, he had failed to notice the subtler void opening up within himself.

Knowledge is power, as some say. But on some days it is just as much pain and confusion as it is power; and any wise man worth his salt as a wise man at least understands this. One may be able to comprehend all the human perspectives in the universe, but this gives more to decipher regarding what is actually true; and even after discovering the truth, the challenge is in maintaining a patience for the infinite number of opinions that do not reflect that truth. Its consistency in man is challenge. A worldly knowledge ends at the former challenge of confusion, but the knowledge of Christ ends at the latter challenge of patience.

What's gone and what's past help Should be past grief.

Friedrich Rückert wrote 425 poemsAfter his two youngest childrenDied from scarlet feverWithin sixteen days of each otherIn 1833 and 1834 he could not copeAnd often thought they had gone outFor a while "they'll be home soon"He told himself to tell his wife"They're only taking a long walk"Mahler scored five of those poemsIn 1901 and 1904 for a vocalistAnd an orchestra to break your heartAs soon as I heard the plaintive oboe And the descending movement of the hornAnd the lyric baritone enteringI felt I should not be listeningTo Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singingKindertotenlieder with the Berlin PhilharmonicMahler's wife was superstitiousAnd thought he was chancing disasterWith Songs on the Death of Children"Now the sun wants to rise so brightlyAs if nothing terrible had happened overnightThat tragedy happened to me alone"Mahler knew he could never have written themAfter his four-year-old daughter diedFrom scarlet fever three years laterHe said he felt sorry for himselfThat he needed to write these songsAnd for the world that would listen to them

Watching someone you love… die? There are no words for how broken that makes a person. It’s like waking up from a bad dream only to find out that it’s you reality, it’s like watching sunlight fade from the sky, like watching death suck the one you love dry, and being powerless to stop it. You may as well try to stop the waves from rolling in, or the sun from rising.In the end, the waves will roll, the sun will set, and death will come. The only thing you have a choice in? How you deal with it…when it does.

May you hear my feeble voice! It will tell you that here below there is a heart full of the memory of you.

It's funny, how one can look back on a sorrow one thought one might well die of at the time, and know that one had not yet reckoned the tenth part of true grief.

The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.

Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren't all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

I force myself to think of anything but the one thing that I'm actually always thinking about. And that is so exhausting that I sleep more than I ever have.

Hope comes in the form of synchronicities. When one even occurs and is followed by another, which is in complete alignment with the first, we sense we are not alone. We know, intuitively throughout our beings, that what we are experiencing is the universe lovingly embracing us.

Sometimes for our sanity own sanity we just have to look at the bigger picture.

When I was with him suddenly I wasn’t this broken person anymore.I was just me.I was whole again.I was just a person – like everyone else.

What I think is that there is no perspective in grief, or in love. How can there be, when one person becomes the center of the universe - either because he has been lost or because he has been found?

It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

I watch and listen, helpless to help. There is no point in saying "This, too, shall pass," For a time we do not even want it to pass. We hold on to grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal.

A lie doesn't become dangerous only with exposure; it is toxic, however well buried.

The dead should not have to answer to the claims of the living, even the sharpest grief.

Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad.

When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot and use it to hang your troubles.

Oscar did not know what he was supposed to be feeling right now, what all the adults behind him would be expecting him to feel. He did not even know what he was, in fact, feeling. Except, whatever it was, it was a lot. Too much. More than bodies could hold.

The one so loved that a single lyreraised more lament than lamenting women ever did;and that from the lament a world arose in whicheverything was there again: woods and valleyand path and village, field and river and animal;and around this lament-world, just asaround the other earth, a sunand a starry silent heaven turned,a lament-heaven of disordered stars -- :This one so loved.

Tears of joy are better than smiles of sorrow.

They say “Follow your heart”….…. But I can’t follow you where you’re going…

He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but from his being shamefully and repulsively unhappy. He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was torn with grief, they would be merciless to him. He felt that men would crush him as dogs strangle a torn dog yelping with pain. He knew that his sole means of security against people was to hide his wounds from them

the heart aches through nights—the broken places of neglect

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so long he refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.

I wonder if I were to have an X-ray at the little hospital, would the machine see my grief? Is it like rust, arheum about the heart?

Why do they lie?” she asked herself aloud. “They say time makes losing someone you loved easier to deal with, but it only makes it worse.

I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn't you think so? Doesn't it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never - I never thought it would be this small, did you?

Anger is the only antidote strong enough to counter grief.

Hope is a better friend than despair.

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.

Grieving is not a race, nor is it a predictable experience - it is as unique as each and every one of us. Therefore by creating your own path you will find your own way through.

Man cries, his tears dry up and run out. So he becomes a devil, reduced to a monster.

The door slams in response, and I laugh. I'm glad she can laugh. It means she really is coping. I know she’s internalizing a lot, though. Putting on a show for me. She’ll have new scars on her wrists soon.

It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

Nothing you did could have changed anything. And that being angry and blaming yourself for not being able to control the past or the future is only going to hurt worse. If you keep thinking like this, you will only be re-inventing pain.Heaven would tell you that it’s just a little rain. And it’s not the rain that kills you, it’s the pain of wanting to control the sun.

Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.

The bad chapters of your life lead to the good ones if you keep turning the pages.

Harold's Bow and FoodBowl bowl bowl bowlFood food food foodThe miracle of the heavenly restaurantI mouth thisgreat dark sad eveningSuddenly they come for me in a limousineHow could I have believed I was vanquishedI never lay slain Iam the victor this parade is for meNow they have led me to the doors of GodLong ago and foreverI was in this placeon the other side of eatingwhere I am full and the emptybowl is beautiful-- from Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs

Ten years from now, her mother might not even recognize her. Already she was different, but the day would come when she'd be this person her mother had never seen. There would be other people - someone like Carolyn or Alan, or even Violet - who had known her longer than her mother ever did.