Grieving Quotes - Page 2

...what happens when you returnand find nothingbut a hollowed shell,shingles and floor,walls and echoesand the light that lead you herehas now burned outand the ones who built ithave traveled afarand you cant go to them,no matter what shoes you wear.

I raised you so high that every other man on earth is now doomed to live in your shadow.

Eby wanted to say so much to her. She wanted to say that waking up is the most important part of grieving, that so many women in their family failed to do it, and she was proud of Kate for fighting her way back. But Eby didn't say anything. She could fix a lot of things, but family wasn't one of them. It was one of the hardest things she'd ever had to come to terms with.

Death doesn't happen instantly. For a little while, you hover around your body, confused. What you want more than anything is to go home, to be safe, to know you're okay. But my life was over.

I would have followed you to hell and back... if only you'd lead me back.

Loss is an invitation to a journey of unparalleled growth, yet we seldom RSVP the invitation.

from under the ground, from under the waters,they clutch at us, they clutch at us,we won’t let go.

From a medical standpoint, the third and the most probable explanation is that Jesus was indeed dead, and what his disciples experienced were mere hallucinations evoked by the grief over the loss of their beloved teacher. It is clinically known as “Post-Bereavement Hallucinations Experiences” or PBHE.

He means to make his subjects merciful and wise; sorrow and struggle bringeth both. We will, he tells me, grow by grieving, live by dying, love by losing. The heart itself is the field of battle and the garden green.

You’re everything to me. But at best, I’m just a memory to you.

Loss is the uninvited door that extends us an unexpected invitation to unimaginable possibilities.

It’s just never going to get any easier is it. It’s never going away, this missing you. It’s going to become a sadness I incorporate into myself – along with all the other sadnesses – and quietly carry around with me forever…

Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.

You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me.... You'll be all right.

The dirty secret she’d learned about grief was that nobody wanted to hear about your loss a week after the funeral. People you’d once considered friends would turn their heads in church or cross to another side of a shopping mall to avoid the contamination of your suffering. “You might imagine I’m coping day by day,” she murmured. “But it’s more a case of hour by hour, and during my worst times, minute by minute.

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

There is an ocean of silence between us… and I am drowning in it.

Whatever might be taken from me need not leave me with a deficit in its wake.

Had life not given me reasons to grieve, I would never have known the healing power of a hug.

{She} considered mentioning...how she, to, was all alone. But it didn't matter. So many stupid ways to live and die. She felt a shift inside herself at the thought, a letting go...she had reached a limit now and was moving into something new.

He was both everything I could ever want…And nothing I could ever have…

Every quote, every book, every film seemed to suggest that ‘one day’ someone would come into my life and love me with an intensity and a passion I had never experienced before. And to their credit they were right; It all came and went so fast it really did feel as if it were just ‘one day’....

Grief is such a lonely thing. There is no-one in it with you - others may grieve for the same soul, but they do not grieve exactly for what you also grieve. No-one has lost precisely what you have lost. Not exactly, never exactly. We are in it alone.

That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

Sometimes we grieve the living more than the dead.

For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.

In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all and it often comes with bitter agony. Perfect relief is not possible except with time. You cannot now believe that you will ever feel better. But this is not true. You are sure to be happy again. Knowing this, truly believing it will make you less miserable now. I have had enough experience to make this statement.

I never dreamed that I'd meet somebody like you.And I never dreamed that I'd lose somebody like you.No, I don't want to fall in love (This world is only gonna break your heart)No, I don't want to fall in love (This world is only gonna break your heart)With you (This world is only gonna break your heart)What a wicked game to play, to make me feel this way.What a wicked thing to do, to let me dream of you.What a wicked thing to say, you never felt this way.What a wicked thing to do, to make me dream of you and,I want to fall in love (This world is only gonna break your heart)No, I want to fall in love (This world is only gonna break your heart)With you.

Death will paint everything a different shade of remorse. You’ll feel guilty that you’re still breathing.tBut you can’t stop.You’ll feel guilty for wanting to laugh again. tAnd it will be awful the first time that you do. You’ll feel guilty for just about everything at first.And someday, at some point, you’ll start to feel guilty . . . for forgetting to feel guilty.But of all Heaven’s lessons, guilt isn’t one of them. You don’t need to hold on to it. It doesn’t need to be a practice and it shouldn’t be your life. tHeaven would never approve of your guilt.Because Heaven has no regrets.

I’d never dreamed anybody could love me the way he did. And even when he proved it to me time and again – I still could hardly believe it was true.

You can miss places. You can miss people.Just know that what you’re really missing is the way things were. And even if you could go there again…. see them again…. you can’t go back.They’re not the same.You’re not the same.The loss of them changed you.

Maybe when we face a tragedy, someone, somewhere is preventing a bigger tragedy from happening.

Your memory feels like home to me.So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.

Time heals nothing. It only brings other issues and tissues, and takes what is incurable or unacceptable out of the center of our attention.

Ava turned to the side, staring out into the dark. In profile, her face was suddenly tired and sad, and Cole felt the urge to wrap himself around her. To protect her from whatever was dragging her down.

...and then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate. Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't.

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you.

A funeral is no place for secrets.

It’s difficult for me to imagine the rest of my life without you. But I suppose I don’t have to imagine it... I just have to live it

Grief makes gravity heavier and air molecules denser, so breathing is accomplished in a shallow, half-hearted way.

I think perhaps I will always hold a candle for you – even until it burns my hand.And when the light has long since gone …. I will be there in the darkness holding what remains, quite simply because I cannot let go.

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn't. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say "I'm sorry" to, "I didn't mean it" to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.It was only remembering the good times that kept you from taking the knife from the kitchen drawer and, holding it so, tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how your best moments in the world had been spent--holding it so, roll onto the blade, slowly so that it slid like love between your ribs and into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you regretting.

. . . I understand that I was writing (recording) as well as seeking to right (to rectify) the wrong, and now, as I retell the tale, I realize that ‘I am still at the same subject’ still engaged in the same fearful and fierce activity–writing and seeking to right a mortal wrong. (86-87)

With you in my life I felt like I could conquer anything.It was as if I was on top of the world and even the stars themselves were just within my grasp.But without you …. even getting through the day is hard.

My heart’s been empty since you left - but still I refuse to put up a vacancy sign.I’m just not ready for anybody else to move in yet.

I am not alive if I am only a wispy memory in someone’s fickle brain . . .

Wandering is better than place sometimes, than home, than destination. Sometimes she can eke out the idea that wandering is possibility, chance, serendipity--he might be there, that place she didn't think to look, hadn't worked hard enough to find....

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?

Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.

I’ve been moving a little to the music while I worked …and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I’ve been holding myself…Mostly I’ve been moving cautiously, numbly, steeled because I know, at any moment, I may be ambushed by overwhelming grief. You never know when it’s coming, the word or gesture or bit of memory that dissolved you entirely…It happens every day at first, then not for a day or two, then there’s a week when grief washes in every morning, every afternoon.

Like my loved one, I am convinced that we all have critical conditions. Battles that we undertake behind the hospitals, in lonely alleys, secret locations and sometimes public places that are out of reach to those who seem to care.

Certainly she could never have exchanged pleasantries with anyone. What would there be for them to say anyway? Sorry? Sorry your daughter is dead, Sorry your daughter jumped off the roof of her school when you were on your way to pick her up. Sorry you were late. Too bad you'll be reliving that failure for the rest of your miserable life.

She scanned the Starveil posts, her mood darkening. Spartan had been a part of her life since elementary school. Losing him felt like having a piece of herself torn away. No amount of fix-it fics or alternate universes could change the fact her one true character had died.

We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.

At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.

Chronic illness is hard. Pain is hard. Isolation is hard. The financial cost is hard. Grieving is hard and necessary and sometimes takes far longer than we every imagined.

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

He wept bitter tears over the death of his enemy. It was his enemy, after all, who knew him best and kept him up at night.