Quotes About Grief

Grief is accepting the reality of what is. That is grief's job and purpose-to allow us to come to terms with the way things really are, so that we can move on. Grief is a gift of God. Without it, we would all be condemned to a life of continually denying reality, arguing or protesting against reality, and never growing from the realities we experience.

In 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.

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.

Love and grief enable us to feel how we're all at heart the same. In love and grief, which is always very personal, the distinctions that separate us melt away.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

Emulation is grief arising from seeing one's self, exceeded or excelled by his concurrent, together with hope to equal or exceed him in time to come, by his own ability. But envy is the same grief joined with pleasure conceived in the imagination of some ill-fortune that may befall him.

The heart that loves must one day grieve. Love and grief are the Goddess's twined gifts. Let the pain in, let it open your heart to compassion. Let me help you bear your grief and then may your heart ease and open to greater love. May the love that flows eternally through the universe embrace and comfort you. p.85

Mine eyes are full of tears, my heart of grief.

Silence is not just about secrecy, Your Majesty. It is grief and it is shame.

When a man's eyes are sore his friends do not let him finger them, however much he wishes to, nor do they themselves touch the inflammation: But a man sunk in grief suffers every chance comer to stir and augment his affliction like a running sore; and by reason of the fingering and consequent irritation it hardens into a serious and intractable evil.

Keep your intelligence white hot and your grief glistening“ so your life will stay fresh.

In the course of writing a book I'll produce loads of pieces of paper to help the novel itself. Diagrams, charts, family trees. And at the end of each book I'll pack it all away. It takes me a while to do it - it's like a relationship that way; there's a period of letting - go, of grief, in a way - but then I box it up, label it, and put it in the attic.

We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

Laughter and grief join hands. Always the heart Clumps in the breast with heavy stride; The face grows lined and wrinkled like a chart, The eyes bloodshot with tears and tide. Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die.

the territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace.

Whatever you do to recover from a loss, people will be critical because they believe that the only way to recover is their way. And you will even run into some people who should be run into by rhinos because they actually don't want to see you get over your tragedy at all; grief is a spectator sport for them.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said we "should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge." It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.

There's a conflicted look in Day's eyes, a joy and a grief, that makes him so vulnerable. I realize how little defense he has against my words. He loves so wholly. It is his nature.

Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.

Don't be sad, don't be angry, if life deceives you! Submit to your grief - your time for joy will come, believe me.

Miss Havisham is a glitch in the smooth functioning of the Patriarchy, enforcing awareness of a moment of social disaster and personal shame, something it seems she would want us to forget (but no one would forget). (Maybe an interesting "discussion question" for readers of Complicated Grief might be, "What do Terry Barton and Miss Havisham have in common?"?)

What's the newest grief? Each minute tunes a new one.

Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.

What happens when you have great grief in your life is the arteries of that heart begins to spasms down, just literally squeezes down like this because you're feeling the tension of your life and then the heart muscle itself will also begin - to get stressed out.

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

When a virtuous man is raised, it brings gladness to his friends, grief to his enemies, and glory to his posterity.

The activity affected by causes like fainting, sleep, excessive joy, grief, possession by spirits, fear etc goes to the heart, its own place.

Golf 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.

The sorrow, grief, and rage you feel is a measure of your humanity and your evolutionary maturity. As your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal.

How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire.

I love when people are resilient and when they form ways of dealing with grief or dealing with some traumatic episode, and sometimes those are the wrong choices.

There 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.

Sometimes 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.

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.

Nothing speaks our grief so well as to speak nothing.

My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.

Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.

All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

What torments of grief you endured, from evils that never arrived

It's Steven's [Sebring] view of what he saw in traveling and working with me. But on another scale, I think the film [Dream of Life] is very humanistic: It touches on motherhood, death, birth, art, laundry, anger against the Bush administration... While I don't think it's the kind of film where one goes to find some of the darker, edgier aspects of life, the film was born of grief.

Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.

Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived.

Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother — even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing.

We live in grief for having left the womb, for having left the teat, then school, then home. In my case, it was leaving marriages, and the death of my wife.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.