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grief is a house where the chairs have forgotten how to hold us the mirrors how to reflect us the walls how to contain us grief is a house that disappears each time someone knocks at the door or rings the bell a house that blows into the air at the slightest gust that buries itself deep in the ground while everyone is sleeping grief is a house where no on can protect you where the younger sister will grow older than the older one where the doors no longer let you in or out
Jandy NelsonTo mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.
Meghan O'RourkeIn the history of thought and culture the dark nights have perhaps in some ways cost mankind less grief than the false dawns, the prison houses in which hope persists less grief than the promised lands where hope expires.
Louis KronenbergerThe first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing mattered. Grief or grief has drained me clean; Still it seems a pity No one saw,โit must have been Very pretty.
Edna St. Vincent MillayReal grief is not healed by time... if time does anything, it deepens our grief. The longer we live, the more fully we become aware of who she was for us, and the more intimately we experience what her love meant for us. Real, deep love is, as you know, very unobtrusive, seemingly easy and obvious, and so present that we take it for granted. Therefore, it is only in retrospect - or better, in memory - that we fully realize its power and depth. Yes, indeed, love often makes itself visible in pain.
Henri NouwenGrief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory
Andrew SolomonWe infrequently contemplate the harms that await any new-born childโpain, disappointment, anxiety, grief, and death. For any given child we cannot predict what form these harms will take or how severe they will be, but we can be sure that at least some of them will occur. None of this befalls the nonexistent. Only existers suffer harm.
David BenatarOnce in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone's been missing too long. I have to think my mother felt something like that.
Leif EngerThink of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.
Elisabeth Kubler-RossI believe, not theoretically, but from direct personal experience, that very few of the things that happen to us are purposeless or accidental (and this includes suffering and grief - even that of others), and that sometimes one catches a glimpse of the link between these happenings. I believe - even when I am myself blind and deaf, or even indifferent - in the existence of a mystery.
Iris OrigoThe heart which grief hath cankered, Hath one unfailing remedy - the Tankard.
Charles Stuart CalverleyTo get the best out of life here ...Good grief. There's plenty of it about, so indulge. Give yourself some thing to remember. Fall in love. Fall out of love. Gamble. Get drunk. See how long you can stay awake. Go for long walks at night. Discover what you're afraid of doing, and then do it.
Philip PullmanI sometimes find it half a sin, To put to words the grief i feel, For words like nature,half reveal, and half conceal the soul within.
Alfred Lord TennysonThe heart bow'd down by weight of woe, To weakest hope will cling, To thought and impulse while they flow, That can no comfort bring, That can, that can no comfort bring, With those exciting scenes will blend, O'er pleasure's pathway thrown; But mem'ry is the only friend That grief can call its own.
Alfred BunnDo not surrender your grief so quickly Let it cut more deeply Let it ferment and season you As few human or divine ingredients can Something is missing in my heart tonight That has made my eyes so soft And my voice so tender And my need of God so absolutely clear.
HafezThe most important aspect of writing the pieces that make up this eighth book was yielding to my obsessive side, letting my own "complicated grief" in on the process. You can imagine how tempting it is to try to fight the part of you that loops and loops, caught up in tangled sorrow from which it seems there's no escape.
Laura MullenThere is no fullness of joy in the next life without a family unit, including a husband, a wife, and posterity. Further, men are that they might have joy. In the eternal perspective, same-gender activity will only bring sorrow and grief and the loss of eternal opportunities.
Dallin H. OaksBut anyone who has been that young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least.
Sarah DunantThe very dull truth is that writing love scenes is the same as writing other scenes - your job is to be fully engaged in the character's experience. What does this mean to them? How are they changed by it, or not? I remember being a little nervous, as I am when writing any high-stakes, intense scene (death, sex, grief, joy).
Madeline Miller...does that not tell you that grief is like life and that there is always somethings unknown beyond it?
Alexandre DumasEvery time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.
Robert A. HeinleinChildhood is supposed to be happy, and if you can't remember yours with any happiness, what hope have you later, when life starts handing you fresh grief?
Amity GaigeViewed from a distance, or through the eye of the All-Knowing CEO of the Universe, the crash of 2008 followed the usual pattern. A long-lived boom driven by cheap credit, going back as far as 1982 (though subject to interruptions in the mid-1980s and 1990s, and in 2001), came to grief because of a rise in the cost of borrowing money.
James BuchanI take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.
George R. R. MartinI am going to St. Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow. Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I'm sick of the job-it's a thankless one and full of grief. I've been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor.
Al CaponeShe wantedโwhat some people want throughout lifeโa grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.
Nathaniel HawthorneI have outlasted all desire, My dreams and I have grown apart; My grief alone is left entire, The gleamings of an empty heart. The storms of ruthless dispensation Have struck my flowery garland numb, I live in lonely desolation And wonder when my end will come. Thus on a naked tree-limb, blasted By tardy winter's whistling chill, A single leaf which has outlasted Its season will be trembling still.
Alexander PushkinI treat anger, grief and strife as a sin, so I let all that go and I am no longer living a sinful life. Today, I command my days by confessing that every minute will be blessed and perfect. My confession then has no other choice but to confer blessings upon my life.
Kam WilliamsIt is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
Katherine DunnYou left ground and sky weeping, mind and soul full of grief. No one can take your place in existence or in absence.
RumiGolf and women are a lot alike. You know you are not going to wind up with anything but grief, but you can't resist the impulse.
Jackie GleasonThe [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
Adrienne RichThere is no cure for the social battles that we fight in our culture - and there's so much grief around race, gender, and so forth - until you eliminate "withdrawal" and "attack" and replace them with "acceptance" and "help." Once you do that and not just talk about it, these other issues will fall into place quickly. They will not fall into place at all unless it is done this way.
Dallas WillardSometimes I think God is like weather - you may not like the weather, but it has nothing to do with you. You just happen to be there. Deal with it. Sadness and grief are part of being human and always will be.
Douglas CouplandI am certainly not proposing that we wait passively for the people in power to change their minds. I think we need to be confrontational, to expose the truth in ways that are uncomfortable and that, yes, require courage. What I caution against is using hateful rhetoric to inspire action, and I see a lot of that today. We strengthen the underlying field of hatred, dehumanization, and conquest. It certainly doesn't engage what allows people to do courageous things and to commit deeply, which is the experience of beauty, love, grief.
Charles Eisenstein