Quotes About Grief

The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you. You know what I mean? I’ve always liked that phrase “He was visited by grief,” because that’s really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It’s not like it’s in me and I’m going to deal with it. It’s a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door.

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.

I think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.

We do not want to lose our grief, because our grief is bound up with our love and we could not cease to mourn without being robbed of our affections.

There are those, however, that are not frightened of grief: dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a centuries-old tree...their eyes well with tears that fall easily to the ground. The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder thats been locked away. Suddenly we notice a sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from the ground

I think people become environmentalists through experiences of beauty and grief. There was that pond that you visited when you were a child, and there were frogs and turtles. You go back there and it's dead now. The forest you went to, now there are bulldozers, now it's a strip mall. These experiences of beauty followed by grief affect us more than learning that CO2 levels are now 400 parts per million.

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.

Edward's grief if you die will be a terrible thing. It will hurt him, a lot, and men like him never grieve alone. He will spread his grief all over us, not because we failed, but because it'll give him something to focus on so he doesn't have to feel the pain.

Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.

People talk about the pain of grief, but I don't know what they mean. To me, grief is a devastating numbness, every sensation dulled.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.

It is possible I am pushing through solid rock, like the vein of ore encased, alone. I am such a long way in I can see no way through and no space. Everything is close to my face and everything close to my face is stone. I don't have much knowledge yet in grief, so this darkness makes me feel small. You, be the Master; Make yourself fierce; break in. And then your great transforming will happen to me And my great grief cry will happen to you.

My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief; we could think of nothing else. All night long we had only snatches of sleep, waking up perpetually to the sense of a great shock and grief. Every one is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling.

The grief we carry is part of the grief of the world. Hold it gently. Let it be honored. You do not have to keep it in anymore. You can let go into the heart of compassion; you can weep.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

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.

The greatest dread of ordinary man is death, with its rude imposition interrupting fortuitous plans and fondest attachments with an unknown and unwelcome change. The yogi is a conqueror of the grief associated with death. By control of mind and life force and the development of wisdom, he makes friends with the change of consciousness called death-he becomes familiar with the state of inner calmness and aloofness from identification with the mortal body.

I realized with grief that purposeless activities in language arts are probably the burial grounds of language development and that coffins can be found in most classrooms, including mine.

Good grief, Molly. He doesn't scare you?" "Of course not." "But he's..." "He's sweet," Molly insisted. Dare snorted. "He's still listening.

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle; ...they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; ...those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. It comes at last--the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them--and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence, ...a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.

In short, if your body or mind Or your soul or your purse come to grief, You need only get drunk, and you'll find Complete and immediate relief.

If it were possible to heal sorrow by weeping and to raise the dead with tears, gold were less prized than grief.

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.

No one feels another's grief.

The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.

Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?

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.

There is no time for grief; there never is.

Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.

The goodness of God to mankind is no less evinced in the chastisement with which He corrects His children than in the smiles of His providence; for the Lord will not cast off forever, but though He cause grief, yet will He have compassion according to the multitude of His mercies.

The upside to grief is it takes away your appetite. When people say you look good they really mean it. Nature's thoughtful that way.

Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.

Let us be honest with each other. The threat to marriage is not the gays. It is a lack of loving commitment - whether it is found in the form of neglect, indifference, cruelty or adultery, to name just a few manifestations of the loveless desert in which too many marriages come to grief.

Memories of the last nine years have turned Ground Zero from a site of horror, to a reminder of grief, to an occasion for ludicrous artistic posturing - and now to something very close to parody.

Grief is a process, not a state.

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

When I'm with him, there is someone with me in my house of grief, someone who knows its architecture as I do, who can walk with me, from room to sorrowful room, making the whole rambling structure of wind and emptiness not quite as scary, as lonely as it was before.

Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.

It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence.

He that is thy friend indeed, - He will help thee in thy need: - If thou sorrow, he will weep; - If you wake, he cannot sleep; - Thus of every grief in heart - He with thee doth bear a part.

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.

I swore that I would not suffer from the world's grief and the world's stupidity and cruelty and injustice and I made my heart as hard in endurance as the nether millstone and my mind as a polished surface of steel. I no longer suffered, but enjoyment had passed away from me.

Gradually, the night stumbled as if stunned and wandering aimlessly into an overcast day -- limped through the wilderland of transition as though there were no knowing where the waste of darkness ended and the ashes of light began. The low clouds seemed full of grief -- tense and uneasy with accumulated woe -- and yet affectless, unable to rain, as if the air clenched itself too hard for tears. And through the dawn, Atiaran and Covenant moved heavily, unevenly, like pieces of a broken lament.

Not everyone understands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief.

These days it seems the lyric impulse, so seemingly fragile, comes in for a lot of abuse-or simply a lot of mistrust. What's it for, anyway, in this hard-edged, worried world? Into this cultural uncertainty Gregory Orr's spirited meditation on the surprisingly tensile strength of poetry in the face of profound suffering and grief presents a welcome fresh view of the ancient human instinct to cry out and to praise.

And knowing that the only alternative to your grief is the nothingness that’s fast approaching, you try to embrace your own sorrow, to be open and empty and let it all pass through you. This is the key, you have learned – to relinquish control, to relinquish the desire for control. Even in this late drama, to try to control is to go mad. And so you do your best to let it all go.