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.

Grief is neither a disorder nor a healing process; it is a sign of health itself, a whole and natural gesture of love. Nor must we see grief as a step toward something better. No matter how much it hurts-and it may be the greatest pain in life-grief can be an end in itself, a pure expression of love.

There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.

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.

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.

Don't make it sound like that. Like some ordinary sort of grief. It's not like that. They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite. Over. This is a fresh wound every day.

No one ever came to grief-except honorable grief-through riding horses. No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle. Young men have often been ruined through owning horses, or through backing horses, but never through riding them; unless of course they break their necks, which, taken at a gallop, is a very good death to die.

I think the worst kind of grief is unacknowledged grief.

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.

Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly - to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut your grief in?

Daddy looked at her hard, and right before my eyes, he changed. I watched him inflate again, shake off his own emotions and puff himself up for her. Become her man. Her rock. I smiled. I loved him so much. He'd dragged mom kicking and screaming from grief once before and I knew I could rest easy that he would never let grief steal her from him again. No matter what happened to me.

Too many people I've loved dearly have left this earth. And some I've lost are still here breathing the same air. That grief can be comparable if not worse in its consumption.

Now I am setting out into the unknown. It will take me a long while to work through the grief. There are no shortcuts; it has to be gone through.

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.

I just think that gay men have much better taste than any straight man I have met. I have never gotten any grief about having a good time, being unapologetic, and irreverent from a gay man.

Art thou in misery, brother? Then I pray Be comforted. Thy grief shall pass away. Art thou elated? Ah, be not too gay; Temper thy joy: this, too, shall pass away. Art thou in danger? Still let reason sway, And cling to hope: this, too, shall pass away. Tempted art thou? In all thine anguish lay One truth to heart: this, too, shall pass away. Do rays of loftier glory round thee play? Kinglike art thou? This, too, shall pass away! Whate'er thou art, wher'er thy footsteps stray, Heed these wise words: This, too, shall pass away.

There is no running away from a great grief.

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.

Think 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.

Where but in the very asshole of comedown is redemption: as where but brought low, where but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we discern the savage afflictions that turn us around: where but in the arrangements love crawls us through

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.

Don't look for a life virtually free from discomfort, pain, pressure, challenge, or grief, for those are the tools a loving Father uses to stimulate our personal growth and understanding.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course.

How often, in this cold and bitter world, is the warm heart thrown back upon itself! Cold, careless, are we of another's grief; we wrap ourselves in sullen selfishness.

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.

Grief is perhaps an unknown territory for you. You might feel both helpless and hopeless without a sense of a 'map' for the journey. Confusion is the hallmark of a transition. To rebuild both your inner and outer world is a major project.

At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future.

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 self (Soul) is the constant-witness consciousness. Through all months, seasons and years, through all divisions of time, the past, present and future the consciousness remains one and self luminous. It neither rises nor sets. The ultimate self is free from sin, free from old age, free from death and grief, free from hunger and thirst, which desires nothing and imagines nothing.

There 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.

He'd lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.

You almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape; and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief.

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.

To be bowed by grief is folly; Naught is gained by melancholy; Better than the pain of thinking, Is to steep the sense in drinking.

Her grief was so big and wild it terrified her, like an evil beast that had erupted from under the floorboards.

Parents and children were put on earth to give each other grief. You were my punishment for how I behaved to my own father. And I'll have my revenge when you have children of your own.

Grief,she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.

We are capable of suffering with our world, and that is the true meaning of compassion. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don't ever apologize for crying for the trees burning in the Amazon or over the waters polluted from mines in the Rockies. Don't apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal. That is what is happening as we see people honestly confronting the sorrows of our time.

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.

I feel like the writer observing the grief, but it is difficult to be detached from it.

It happened. It was awful. You aren't perfect. That's all there is. Don't confuse your grief with guilt.

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.

Alcoholism is a well documented pathological reaction to unresolved grief.

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

It's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief . . . lessens. It may not go away completely, but after a while it's not so overwhelming.