Grief Quotes - Page 8

For days and days, the rain beat its fists on the roof of our house— evidence of the terrible mistake God had made. Each morning, when I woke I listened for the tireless pounding, looked at the drear through the window and was relieved that at least the sun had the decency to stay the hell away from us.

What is love for, if not to intensify our affections—both in life and death? But, O, do not be bitter. It is tragically self-destructiveto be bitter.

She loved your mother', Taliesin said gently. 'This is her farewell.' As he spoke, a chanted melody began inside the chamber, a song without words. Yet it spoke of the beauty in the heart of the flame, of the passing glory of the white bird on the wing, and the blossom of the sea spray under the shining prow. It sang of a mother with her baby, of the hard love between men and women, and the gentle rest that comes at last to all.

I see now that my faith was becoming an ally rather than an enemy because I could vent anger freely, even toward God, without fearing retribution.

…determined to enjoy her luxury of grief uncomforted.

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

We read the pagan sacred books with profit and delight. With myth and fable we are ever charmed, and find a pleasure in the endless repetition of the beautiful, poetic, and absurd. We find, in all these records of the past, philosophies and dreams, and efforts stained with tears, of great and tender souls who tried to pierce the mystery of life and death, to answer the eternal questions of the Whence and Whither, and vainly sought to make, with bits of shattered glass, a mirror that would, in very truth, reflect the face and form of Nature's perfect self.These myths were born of hopes, and fears, and tears, and smiles, and they were touched and colored by all there is of joy and grief between the rosy dawn of birth, and death's sad night. They clothed even the stars with passion, and gave to gods the faults and frailties of the sons of men. In them, the winds and waves were music, and all the lakes, and streams, and springs,—the mountains, woods and perfumed dells were haunted by a thousand fairy forms. They thrilled the veins of Spring with tremulous desire; made tawny Summer's billowed breast the throne and home of love; filled Autumns arms with sun-kissed grapes, and gathered sheaves; and pictured Winter as a weak old king who felt, like Lear upon his withered face, Cordelia's tears. These myths, though false, are beautiful, and have for many ages and in countless ways, enriched the heart and kindled thought. But if the world were taught that all these things are true and all inspired of God, and that eternal punishment will be the lot of him who dares deny or doubt, the sweetest myth of all the Fable World would lose its beauty, and become a scorned and hateful thing to every brave and thoughtful man.

You think when someone you love passes away, everything becomes clearer, that your priorities and perspectives align in a way they’ve never aligned before because of the sobriety of it all. But it doesn’t. Those revelations just become skewed and distorted until you’re forced to rewrite them entirely. You can’t walk straight on a new path when you have too much luggage on your back. You just keep swerving, trying to find a way to accommodate the weight, but it’s all dead and you know it’s going to take you down. The only answer is to reroute.-Emma

Conner hadn’t liked leaving the gravesite with his father still not buried. But he’d learned from his grandmother’s funeral that you have to go. It’s expected. Nobody hangs around the cemetary. Grief—a little or a lot—is tucked into your pocket and carried away.

In days that follow, I discover that anger is easier to handle than grief.

Count your summers, not your winters.

In the quiet of the graveyard, the couple knelt together in soul-stretching silence—wishing, waiting, hoping, praying.

The facade of grief may be indifference, preoccupation, anger, cheerfulness, or any variety of emotions. But if we try to understand it, we may learn how to cope with it.

It’s times like this…. when it’s over a year later and I’m still crying over you that I want to turn to you and say: See…. This is why I asked you never to kiss me.

...It is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.

For this reason, it is well said that misfortune is sometimes good for something, for it teaches at the same time that it hurts.

By standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of another’s solitude, we may mediate the love of God to a person who needs something deeper than any human being can give.

Do not forever with thy vailed lidsSeek for thy noble father in the dust.Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die,Passing though nature to eternity.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

There's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.

At that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes.

I can't take this pain away for her. I can't make it better. It's all I want to do - make it better - make her feel better, but I understand grief. It's a bitch. Grief has to work itself out. It can either consume you or you can move on and at this point it's consuming her.

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?

Pain and grief have been kept buried for ages, bred in secrecy and shame, wrapped by an ongoing conspiracy of smiles and well-being. Pain and grief are most healing and ecstatic emotions. Yes, sure, they can be hard, yet what makes them most devastating is the perverted idea that they are wrong, that they need to be hidden and fixed. The greatest perversion I can conceive is the idea that illness and pain are a sign that there is something wrong in our life, that we have unresolved issues, that we have made mistakes. In this world everyone is bound to get ill, experience pain and die. The greatest gift I can give to myself and the world is the joyful acceptance of this. Today I want to be real, I will not hide my pain as well as my happiness. I will not care if my gloomy face or desperate words cause concern or embarrassment in others. I do not need be fed with reassuring words about the beauty of life. The beauty of life resides in the full acceptance of All That Is.

I harken to the call of my heart, embracing the depth that flows liquid ambered and animal soft within my cells.The dark abyss of denial has always been a poor mans trade for the guiding light of emotional wisdom.This crust of mortal skin is baptised with tear streaked holy waters. I rise to my heart with an uncommon courage and wade soul deep.Tissue thin ripples of redemption drift across the pain towards my future self, bathing me in hope. I rise and step closer to all that I AM.

The last time I felt alive – I was looking into your eyes.Breathing your air…. touching your skin…… Saying goodbye….The last time I felt alive…. I was dying.

We don’t have to be on the battlefields of the world to experience strife and conflict. We need only to open our eyes each morning and read the headlines, we need only to turn a keen ear when our phones ring with bad news, we need only to open our hearts to those next door—and maybe even in our own homes—to notice those with grieving hearts.

If rocks did not persevere under heat and pressure, they would never become diamonds.

At Night on the High SeasAt night, when the sea cradles meAnd the pale star gleamLies down on its broad waves,Then I free myself whollyFrom all activity and all the loveAnd stand silent and breathe purely,Alone, alone cradled by the seaThat lies there, cold and silent, with a thousand lights.Then I have to think of my friendsAnd my gaze sinks into their eyes,And I ask each one, silent and alone:"Are you still mine?Is my sorrow a sorrow to you, my death a death?Do you feel from my love, my grief,Just a breath, just an echo?"And the sea peacefully gazes back, silent,And smiles: NOAnd no greetings and no answers come from anywhere.

Life makes beggars out of those who have joyful hearts, taxing the living with hardship and tribulation, but the charity of companionship, the currency of shared and unmitigated love, alleviates all disconsolation.

In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night . . . You--only you--will have stars that can laugh! ...And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look at at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you . . .

Many people will tell that it is not for a man to cry, but they may not know how is to feel your head empty and only tears will come out to stand up for you.

I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.

I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant—step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word.

…nothing remained but loneliness and grief…

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope

As long as they talk about you, you're not really dead, as long as they speak your name, you continue. A legend doesn't die, just because the man dies.

Baby, don't build a monument for me of your sadness. You wouldn't have wasted your tears when I was alive. Why make an ocean of them now when it's over? The future you dreamed is a dream. Dream something else.

My death..I mean..will it be quick,and with dignity? How will i know when the end is coming?""When you vomit blood,sir," Tao Chi'en said sadly.That happened three weeks later,in the middle of Pacific,in the privacy of the captain's cabin. As soon as he could stand , the old seaman cleaned up the traces of his vomit, rinsed out his mouth , changed his bloody shirt, lighted his pipe, and went to the bow of his ship , where he stood and looked for the last time at the stars winking in a sky of black velvet. Several sailors saw him and waited at a distance, caps in hands. When he had smoked the last of his tobacco, Captain John Sommers put his legs over the rail and noiselessly dropped into the sea.-Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende.

I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for happy couples. I would see or hear about people, usually people I hardly knew or didn't even like, getting together, finding each other after so much groping, and I would feel bliss. I was blindsided by familiar things.

You can’t truly heal from a loss until you allow yourself to really FEEL the loss.

Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter’s death and to that sorrow she’d added a long life of entitlement and disappointment, of privilege and pride. And the dagger she’d fashioned was taking a brief break from slashing her insides, and was now pointed outward.

It has taken me four years to figure this out.If we live long enough, we all will experience this.Don’t ever predetermine how you think that you should feel on an anniversary of a tragic event in your life, such as a death of a loved one, or on a holiday after such an event.Each year starts out with 365 days, and I will be damned if I am giving up even one of them to misery.

Grief dares us to love once more.

So I let her go, too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.Takumi

It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine it.

We cried. The bones and dust of our fathers cried with us.

The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

Funerals seem less about comforting the souls of these dearly departed than aboutcomforting the people they leave behind.

I don’t cry for humans. I cry for things that are so beautiful I just can’t stand it, like Bonnie in front of me, all crusty from rolling in the sand, with a mouthful of half-chewed hay and eyes that knew everything I’d ever thought or felt or been.

Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy.

There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it… this place, she decided, was called Smog City.

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.

How I wish I could undo it all … take it all back…All those years I spent unhappy with him …. when I should have been looking for you.

On the way home I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much.

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I'd see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I'd realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That someday I would be grateful and that in fact I was grateful now, that I felt something growing in me that was strong and real.

And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you...

Every crisis is a wisdom crisis. If you have no peace around you then you lack wisdom.

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand. Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions 'on the further shore,' pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There's not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn't be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the Spiritualists bait their hook! 'Things on this side are not so different after all.' There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored.