Quotes About Grief

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.

Another misconception is that if we truly loved someone, we will never finish with our grief, as if continued sorrow is a testimonial to our love. But true love does not need grief to support its truth. Love can last in a healthy and meaningful way, once our grief is dispelled. We can honor our dead more by the quality of our continued living than by our constantly remembering the past.

I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

Grief is a normal and natural response to loss. It is originally an unlearned feeling process. Keeping grief inside increases your pain.

Going back to my mother's passing, there was no way I could hold back my tears or sense of grief at knowing her physical presence left the planet. Working consciously with such an in-my-face overwhelmingly painful loss, I was able to process it to the point of accepting that although my relationship with her would be different, I could still sense and celebrate that there was no separation between our spirits. Being present and open to each stage of grief eventually led to her visiting me in my dreams and a tangible sense of her presence.

Sometimes grief is a comfort we grant ourselves because it's less terrifying than trying for joy. Nobody wants to admit it. We'd all declare we want to be happy, if we could. So why, then, is pain the one thing we most often hold on to? Why are slights and griefs the memories on which we choose to dwell? Is it because joy doesn't last but grief does?

Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed.

Joy and grief decide character. What exalts prosperity? what imbitters grief? what leaves us indifferent? what interests us? As the interest of man, so his God - as his God, so he.

He sought...to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars.

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved - the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!

Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

Grief, I swear to God, doesn't live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can't smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint.

Rebirth is almost impossible without the darkness.....I tell myself I am experiencing the death of myself as mother, the death of myself as a younger woman -- precious old lives going by the wayside. Of course, I should let myself grieve. To deny the grief is to squander a transforming and radiant possibility.

She threw into the wine which they were drinking a drug which takes away grief and passion and brings forgetfulness of all ills

After my husband, Dave, died, I called my friend Adam, a psychologist who studies how people find meaning in our lives, and I asked him what, if anything, I could do to help myself and my kids get through this. We started talking about resilience, then reading about it, then talking to other people who had gotten through grief and other huge challenges. In time, those conversations and that research helped me heal.

Sometimes my grief is overwhelming, and even though I understand that we will never see each other again, there is a part of me that wants to hold on to you forever.

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.

I loved [fairy stories] so, and my mother weighed down by grief had given up telling me them. At Nohant I found Mmes. d'Ardony's and Perrault's tales in old editions which became my chief joy for five or six years ... I've never read them since, but I could tell each tale straight through, and I don't think anything in all one's intellecutal life can be compared to these delights of imagination.

When it comes to women, our perfectionism gives us a lot of grief. Women want to be super moms, super partners and super performers at work - and all at the same time. That's stressful.

Don't run away from grief, o’ soul/ Look for the remedy inside the pain/ because the rose came from the thorn/ and the ruby came from a stone.

If I didn't write in my journal every couple of days, I felt like I was going to burst. Later I learned the research about how important journaling can be to recovering from trauma and grief. That was definitely true for me.

3:12 pm Secretly, I admit, I find many of my classmates annoying. I've often thought to myself, 'Good grief, these people are five-year-olds. Why must I spend my days among them?' But have I ever said such things aloud? No. I have been nothing but generous to them, and kept these thoughts to myself. And how have they repaid me? Have they been grateful or kind? Ho NO!

This is a racist and imperialist war. The warmongers who stole the White House have hijacked a nation's grief and turned it into a perpetual war on any non-white country they choose to describe as terrorist.

It's hard to make progress with grief.

Viewed 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.

I 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.

I 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.

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

Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took away all the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Patience is necessary in this life because so much of life is fraught with adversity. No matter how hard we try, our lives will never be without strife and grief. Thus, we should not strive for a peace that is without temptation, or for a life that never feels adversity. Peace is not found by escaping temptations, but by being tried by them. We will have discovered peace when we have been tried and come through the trial of temptation.

It was like Percy had faced death before, like he knew about grief. What mattered was listening. You didn’t need to say you were sorry. The only thing that helped was moving on—moving forward.

A wise son makes a glad father, But a foolish son is the grief of his mother.

What I sometimes mistake for ecstasy is simply the absence of grief.

I got a lot of grief from my teammates about that. It might backfire on my mom. Hopefully, my brother will have another chance somewhere down the road.

Grief, no matter where it comes from, can only be resolved by connecting to other people.

We must work on our souls, enlarging and expanding them. We do so by experiencing all of life-the beauty and the joy as well as the grief and pain. Soul work requires paying attention to life, to the laughter and the sorrow, the enlightening and the frightening, the inspiring and the silly.

Han spotted a child‟s homespun dolly in the ditch, pressed into the mud. He reined in, meaning to climb down and fetch it so he could clean it up for his little sister. Then he remembered that Mari was dead and had no need of dollies anymore. Grief was like that. It gradually faded into a dull ache, until some simple sight or sound or scent hit him like a hammer blow.

Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone. But grief returns with the revolving year.

Whoever finds love beneath hurt and grief disappears into emptiness with a thousand new disguises

Grief dejects and wrings the tortured soul.

To those who see the magical surface of things, you are invisible.' Good grief. Will you still be able to see me?' He met her eyes in a way that made her shiver pleasantly. 'I see you in a great many ways. It would be hard to blind me in all of them.

Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, expels diseases, softens every pain.

I wake up in that state of grief when you can tell you've been mourning even in your sleep.

Most of the time, if you're not really paying attention, you're someplace else. So your child might say, "Daddy, I want this," and you might say, "Just a minute, I'm busy." Now that's no big deal-we all get busy, and kids frequently ask for attention. But over your child's entire youth, you may have an enormous number of such moments to be really, fully present, but because you thought you were busy, you didn't see the opportunities these moments presented. . . . People carry around an enormous amount of grief because they missed the little things.

Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.

She couldn’t read his expression. As he started toward her, she recalled the way he’d seemed to glide through the sand the first time she’d ever seen him; she remembered their kiss on the boat dock the night of his sister’s wedding. And she heard again the words she’d said to him on the day they’d said good-bye. She was besieged by a storm of conflicting emotions—desire, regret, longing, fear, grief, love. There was so much to say, yet what could they really begin to say in this awkward setting and with so much time already passed?