c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I will not speak falsely and say to you: 'Do not grieve for me when I go.' I have loved my children and tried to be a good mother and it is right that my children grieve for me. But let your grief be gentle and brief. And let resignation creep into it. Know that I shall be happy. I shall see face to face the great saints I have loved all my life.
— Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
There’s something of a restorative quality about spring, where something whispers wild rumors of new beginnings arising from the seemingly dead seeds in our lives. There’s something almost cruel about it all, as if there might be some sort of truth about a new life actually being possible. Yet, maybe it is true.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
And we mustn't lose our sense of humor," Mrs. Which said. "The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.
— Madeleine L'Engle
You're my phantom limb, Mouse. I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid, Mouse. Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me.
— Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry
All I was aware of was this hole, this gaping hole where my heart should have been. I read somewhere once that your heart is supposed to be the same size as your clenched fist, but this hole felt far bigger. It seemed to expand over my whole upper body and it felt cold, vacant - the cooling wind seemed to cut right through it. I felt frail and insubstantial, as if the wind could have blown me away.
— Maggie O'Farrell
We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections. . . .Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
— Joan Didion
Then the door is before him. There is darkness all around him, there is silence in him. Then the door opens and he stands alone, the whole world falling away from him. And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound. Then the earth tilts, he is thrown forward on his face in darkness, and his journey begins.
— James     Baldwin
Life however is teeming with vitality and is likewise terribly tenacious
—  holding on against impossible odds in impossible situations over impossible lengths of time.
The adult world that runs our school considers this a teachable moment (a new phrase for our era) where children will learn to process loss and grief and loneliness by sitting in the football bleachers and being presented with the truth of mortality. There's nothing to be taught. Only something to be felt.
— Adrienne Stoltz
Part of dealing with the sense of being cut off - for both the one dying and the one bereaved - is acknowledging that though a vital part of life has changed dramatically, all relationships (with friends, even with you, perhaps) have not.
— Sandra L. Bertman, Facing Death: Images, Insights, and Interventions: A Handbook for Educators, Healthcare Professionals, and Counselors
There are lies in tears. The ones we weep most loudly are usually for ourselves, yet how easily we can pass them off as grief.
— Kate Kerrigan, Recipes for a Perfect Marriage
I listened as she talked, thinking that the worse the tragedy, the more people wanted to forget it--and the harder that became. Maybe that's what made it tragic; not losing the person, but losing your peace of mind.The living suffer more than the dead, after all.
— Isabella Rogge, Exhaled: A Novella
For each person I lost I found a new layer of grief to cover myself with, and each time I tried to bring something of their essence into my own being - be it unconditional love, kindness and piety.
— A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
Grief is always sudden as winter, no matter how long the autumn.
— J. Aleksandr Wootton, Forgetting: impressions from the millennial borderland
I followed many conversations about what happened in Norway and the death of Amy Winehouse because they happened one after the next. Too many of those conversations tried to conflate the two events, tried to create some kind of hierarchy of tragedy, grief, call, response. There was so much judgment, so much interrogation of grief—how dare we mourn a singer, an entertainer, a girl-woman who struggled with addiction, as if the life of an addict is somehow less worthy a life, as if we are not entitled to mourn unless the tragedy happens to the right kind of people. How dare we mourn a singer when across an ocean seventy-seven people are dead? We are asked these questions as if we only have the capacity to mourn one tragedy at a time, as if we must measure the depth and reach of a tragedy before deciding how to respond, as if compassion and kindness are finite resources we must use sparingly. We cannot put these two tragedies on a chart and connect them with a straight line. We cannot understand these tragedies neatly.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
Grief is such a lonely thing. There is no-one in it with you - others may grieve for the same soul, but they do not grieve exactly for what you also grieve. No-one has lost precisely what you have lost. Not exactly, never exactly. We are in it alone.
— Susan  Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea
Unexpressed grief leaves the deepest scars.
— Marty Rubin
Strange, what the heart can bear. It can carry grief beyond measure. It can bear a weight that is too great to speak of. But a heart can't bear the world. It has its limits...
— Susan  Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea
Time doesn't always heal all wounds.
— A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar
Grief is beautiful?' She thought it was the most dreadful feeling possible. At best she viewed the world through a haze, and at worst everything looked black.'It means you've loved another with all your heart,' Luka said. 'What's the use of being alive if you've never loved like that, not even once?
— Belinda Alexandra
Harold's Bow and FoodBowl bowl bowl bowlFood food food foodThe miracle of the heavenly restaurantI mouth thisgreat dark sad eveningSuddenly they come for me in a limousineHow could I have believed I was vanquishedI never lay slain Iam the victor this parade is for meNow they have led me to the doors of GodLong ago and foreverI was in this placeon the other side of eatingwhere I am full and the emptybowl is beautiful-- from Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs
— Denis Johnson
The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off—it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.
— Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space
A grief travels with us as far as we carry it.
— Marty Rubin
In order to heal, you have to first be broken.
— Renee Dyer, Eyes Wide Open
It didn't help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn't see her. An unseen mother couldn't go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or help you with your homework, the familiar scent of her in your nostrils as she leaned in to correct a misspelling or puzzle over the meaning of an unfamiliar poem; or read with you on cold Sunday afternoons when the fire.
— John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things
He thinks he can see all her grief in her face, all her love and empty days.
— Susan  Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea
The look on his face told her what had happened and that hurt burrowed deeper than anything she'd ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was. Love, she learned, could reduce its recipient to an essential thing, as important as food or shelter, whose presence is not only longed for but needed.
— Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
The tough times start," he said, "the day the last casserole dish is returned.
— Michael Perry
Everyone's pain is relative. We've learned how to deal with grief, because we've had to. But Bree hasn't. And our grief was shared, because we all felt it at the same time. She had to deal with hers alone.
— Kate Lattey, Dream On
Sometimes it's your fragrance that comes to me, out of the blue, on a crowded road in a Sunday afternoon.But more often, it's memories of us that cross my mind almost every lone evening.All I want is to lessen the pain I feel every night.But every morning I wake up is another day, hopeless and miserable, with nothing but a deafening silence, a wave of tears, memories and your absence.
— Sanhita Baruah
Sometimes all you can do is hug a friend tightly and wish that their pain could be transferred by touch to your own emotional hard drive.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
When a small group of people come together to relive the Salem witch hunts, God cries. For if anything is sorrowful to God, it is evil done in his name. When you find out you were not given the truth, how will you live with yourself?
— Shannon L. Alder
Cut.Take gazillion an
— Jessica Hendry Nelson
They say (she had read somewhere) that no one ever disappears, up in the atmosphere, stratosphere, whatever you call space--atoms infinitely minute, beyond conception of existence, are up there forever, from the whole world, from all time.
— Nadine Gordimer
It is not as if an 'I' exists independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is part of what composes who 'I' am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who 'am' I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost 'you' only to discover that 'I' have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost 'in' you, that for which I have no vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as *the tie* by which those terms are differentiated and related.
— Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
At Night on the High SeasAt night, when the sea cradles meAnd the pale star gleamLies down on its broad waves,Then I free myself whollyFrom all activity and all the loveAnd stand silent and breathe purely,Alone, alone cradled by the seaThat lies there, cold and silent, with a thousand lights.Then I have to think of my friendsAnd my gaze sinks into their eyes,And I ask each one, silent and alone:"Are you still mine?Is my sorrow a sorrow to you, my death a death?Do you feel from my love, my grief,Just a breath, just an echo?"And the sea peacefully gazes back, silent,And smiles: NOAnd no greetings and no answers come from anywhere.
— Hermann Hesse
What were you going to make for Christmas dinner?” one of myolder children asked in a very reasonable tone. I cleared my throat,but couldn’t speak. There was no real explanation for my behavior. I’d been so intent on getting through this first Christmas without David. I’d found new rituals to replace the old, wrapped gifts, and even made cutout sugar cookies. I’d modified Christmas in order to endure it. What I hadn’t done was plan on or prepare a Christmas meal. Everyone was looking at me expectantly by this point, including my sweet, hungry grandchildren.“I forgot all about Christmas dinner,” I finally admitted. No one batted an eye.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
I held back from seeing Jacob much during those weeks. He wanted only his mother, and I wasn’t sure I could handle seeing him like that. I stopped by to pick up his siblings and take them away, but I rarely went inside the house. After several days of this, I knew I must face the sight that my daughter faced daily. Inside, I approached the couch tentatively.Would I upset him? A few times when I had visited, he’d hidden his facein a blanket. I reached out hesitantly, touching his thin arm, the skin hot and dry as paper. He didn’t move, but I could see the rise and fall of his swollen chest. Suddenly, my legs gave way, and I dropped to my knees in front of the grandson that I loved so dearly. My hand shook as I lifted it to his soft, fuzzy head. I felt as though I was in the presence of someone very holy.“I love you,” I whispered, and when he didn’t respond, an even softer whisper, “Tell Grandpa that I love him and miss him.” And then, with a groan, “Dear God, don’t let him suffer.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
You strive all through your life, to get somewhere, to be something, Some One, to matter, to have this, to have that, fill up your life with possessions, bonds, connections and in the end, the greed is still there, one does not want to let go, not unless the great gods come down and say enough is enough, no more......till then all you want is one more day." - Frank Adams
— Noorilhuda, The Governess
What were you going to make for Christmas dinner?” one of my older children asked in a very reasonable tone. I cleared my throat, but couldn’t speak. There was no real explanation for my behavior. I’d been so intent on getting through this first Christmas without David. I’d found new rituals to replace the old, wrapped gifts, and even made cutout sugar cookies. I’d modified Christmas in order to endure it. What I hadn’t done was plan on or prepare a Christmas meal. Everyone waslooking at me expectantly by this point, including my sweet, hungrygrandchildren.“I forgot all about Christmas dinner,” I finally admitted. No one batted an eye.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Refined By Fire: A Journey of Grief and Grace
It didn't help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn't see her. An unseen mother couldn't go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or help you with your homework, the familiar scent of her in your nostrils as she leaned in to correct a misspelling or puzzle over the meaning of an unfamiliar poem; or read with you on cold Sunday afternoons when the fire
— David Nicholls, Us
People come and go from our lives all the time. It's not our fault that people leave. The Universe is just making room for new people with new lessons.
— Sue Fitzmaurice
There's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.
— Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You
We do not have control over many thingsin life and deathbut we do have controlover the meaning we give it.
— Nathalie Himmelrich, Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple
Never compare your grief.You - and only youwalk your path.
— Nathalie Himmelrich, Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple
That was when they noticed that every musician on the stage was wearing mourning black. That was when they shut up. And when the conductor raised his arms, it was not a symphony that filled the cavernous space.It was the Song of Eyllwe.Then Song of Fenharrow. And Melisande. And Terrasen. Each nation that had people in those labour camps.And finally, not for pomp or triumph, but to mourn what they had become, they played the Song of Adarlan. When the final note finished, the conductor turned to the crowd, the musicians standing with him. As one, they looked to the boxes, to all those jewels bought with the blood of a continent. And without a word, without a bow or another gesture, they walked off the stage.The next morning, by royal decree, the theatre was shut down.No one saw those musicians or their conductor again.
— Sarah J. Maas
We cried. The bones and dust of our fathers cried with us.
— Sharon Ewell Foster, Abraham's Well
When my mother died, I thought I’d drown in sorrow. But my grandmother said something very wise, and I’ve always held it close to my heart. She said that not even the sea is infinite, and neither is grief.
— T. Frohock
It's always fallen to women to forge the peace between all these hot-blooded men, always ready to go to war at the slightest provocation....Why do men behave the way they do, warring?""What do you think?" he asked."Maybe because they've got no sense of grief?
— Nuruddin Farah, Links
There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There's no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman's excuse was that no one told him that the concentration camps were wrong. We've all seen the pictures of the drowning polar bears. Are we so ethically numb that we need to be told this is wrong?
— Lierre Keith, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in the excess of grief.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
She was no longer wresting with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
— George Eliot
Grief made fools of us all. There was shock in it, but there could hardly be surprise.
— Lia Mills, Fallen
All the accounts of the burial of Jesus are somber, laced through with the silence of grief, the shock that violence does to one's soul, even experienced vicariously in the body of another who is loved. They are written as though they are dirges, laments hidden in the silences and spaces between the words.
— Megan McKenna, And Morning Came: Scriptures of the Resurrection
We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in order to determine the provision made within it.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice
I don't get as much fan mail as an actor or singer would, but when I get a letter 99% of the time it's pointing out something that really had an impact. Like after 'My Own Private Rodeo' all these people wrote to me and said Dale's dad inspired them to come out. And this was when it was still illegal to be gay in Texas and a few other states. Another one that really stuck with me was this girl who survived Columbine. See, "Wings of the Dope," the episode where Luanne's boyfriend comes back as an angel, aired two weeks after the shooting. About a month after that, I got a letter from a girl who was there and hid somewhere in the school when it was all going on. She said the first thing she was gonna do if she survived was tell a friend of hers she was in love with him. She never did. He ended up being one of the kids responsible for it. So you can imagine how - you know, to her, it felt wrong to grieve almost, and she bottled it up. But she saw that episode and Buckley walking away at the end and something just let her finally break down and greive and miss the guy. I remember she quoted Luanne - 'I wonder if he's guardianing some other girl,' or something along that line, because she never had the guts to tell the kid. That really gets to people at Comic Con.
— Mike Judge
Beware! Balance rules the cosmos. It is not concerned with good or bad. You can be struck by misfortune and be buried in grief if that is what it takes to restore the imbalance you have wrought unto the world.
— Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
Like many people whose lives had formed around a particularly painful incident, she had grown used to providing ellipses around the event of her brother's death to keep conversations comfortable. At some point the subconscious logic of this had spread to the rest of her life so that she rarely talked about things she had been deeply affected by. It wasn't hard to do.
— Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing
The pains in my heart don't go away these days. The heartaches are chronic; they layer on top of each other from one day to the next, thickening like a callus.
— Eva Lesko Natiello, The Memory Box
Thus heaven's gift to us is this: That habit takes the place of bliss.
— Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin
116. "I have heard that on the day the world was born,the bird of love was released to fly.It searched all the three worldsbut could not find a fit resting place.So it turned and entered the inmost heart,favoured it and never flew elsewhere.The three worlds asked it then,'Why are you attached to the human heart?''Suffering," it replied, "is the only hope for humans.Where there is sorrow, there I dwell.'Where there is grief in the world, love has its dwelling.
— Mir Sayyid Manjhan Shattari Rajgiri, Madhumalati: An Indian Sufi Romance
Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.
— Lydia Millet, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
We live and we die, but we are made of sterner stuff. The carbon atoms in our fingernails, the calcium in our bones, the iron atoms in our blood -- all the countless trillions of atoms of which we are made -- are ancient objects. They existed before us, before the Earth itself, in fact. And after each of us dies, they will depart from our bodies and do other things. Forever.
— Keith Heyer Meldahl, Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail
Jeanne’s sisters thought nothing of themselves.... Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper and froze them in tight-lipped containers....Helen was the baker of the family. What she felt could not be purchased. She grieved from scratch.
— Allegra Goodman, Apple Cake
He'd wanted to - he didn't know. Break bottles. Break windows, crash cars. Burn down the world. Find solace at the bottom of countless more bottles of wine, this time consumed in solitude. In the end he did none of these things; while he knew the shapes and forms of rage and grief, he had, in truth, nothing more than gentleness inside to sustain him.
— Michael Montoure, Counting From Ten
A grieving son was given the opportunity to write parting words on a card at his mother's funeral. He quoted the verse, "And morning came and Jesus was standing on the shore.
— Megan McKenna, And Morning Came: Scriptures of the Resurrection
Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire
— Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing
In our springtime there is no better,there is no worse.Blossoming branches burgeon as they must.Some are long,some are short.Stay upright.Stay with life.
— Cyril Pedrosa
Aron Moss wrote a wonderful article on this topic in which he explains, ”We don't really want answers, we don't want explanations, and we don't want closure. … We want an end to suffering … but we shouldn't leave it up to God to alleviate suffering. … He is waiting for us to do it. That's what we are here for.
— ARON MOSS
To fuel yet another war this time against Iraq by cynically manipulating people's grief, by packaging it for TVspecials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain itof meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillagingof even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to itspeople.
— Arundhati Roy, Come September
She'd never been religious. She hadn't allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.
— Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days
The captain’s eyes betrayed what his countenance must conceal: the anguish of an ancient being who must honour his birthright by living beyond those whom he would have given much to keep.
— Michelle Franklin, Khantara: Vol 1
Consider in his spiritual martyr this being who lies with closed eyes, dislocated like the victim of a brutal accident who no longer requires care or rescue. Count the stabbing wounds of the hideous disappointment in the human imagination. Auscultate this pensive desert where alternate the rale and the silence. Feel pity for the grief that calls not only for death, but for a disgracied death, and receive, o World, this weight of trampled dream in the paradise with no conscience of your vain eternity !
— Anna de Noailles, L'Offrande
Grief is like a splinter deep into every fingertip
—  to touch anything is torture.
People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you.
— Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange
There is greater clarity in the still waters of sadness, something not found in the babbling brooks of more sought after emotions.
— Shaun Hick
There is the scent too. Wonder follows it; wonder about how a boy can smell like that when he probably has no idea. He smells like the woods in the winter or the rain when it first falls, or maybe it’s just the way he always smells and there is no way to define it.
— Christy A. Campbell, A Halo Sun
Funerals seem less about comforting the souls of these dearly departed than aboutcomforting the people they leave behind.
— Rin Chupeco
If you try to hold people to your standard of conduct you will go mad with disappointment and grief.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
And in a way, this was how he had come to see his death, as a series of small ones taking place over the course of his life and leading finally to the main event, which would be so anti-climatic, so undramatic (a sudden violent seizure in his long abused heart, a quick massive flooding of the brain) it would go unnoticed. It was the small deaths occurring over an entire lifetime that took the greater toll.
— Paule Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there.
— Larry Watson, Let Him Go
Someone dies, there oughta be something. It oughta shake the world! You're not supposed to walk away!
— Lisa Henry, Sweetwater
She pulls her hand away and Damian feels the sensation of falling, a somersault into a foreign abyss where a girl with eggplant hair and a hoop in her brow waits in the darkness.
— Christy A. Campbell, A Halo Sun
Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in the stars but rather closer to the earth her boots stand upon.
— Larry Watson, Let Him Go
My friends love me terribly, and their grief will be a screaming storm if I die.
— Tessa Gratton, The Strange Maid
Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.
— Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach?Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you.
— Don DeLillo, The Body Artist
I know already that I can survive it. That's the sorrow of it all. That whatever comes I'll survive it. I mean, even if the worst were to be true, would it really be the worst?
— Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love
Modern anxiety is expressed in the longing for what most people fear, even as modern grief is expressed in the unconsummated mourning for what they never really had.
— Joseph Roach, It
I watch and listen, helpless to help. There is no point in saying "This, too, shall pass," For a time we do not even want it to pass. We hold on to grief, fearing that its lifting will be the final betrayal.
— Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love
Alex had cooked, and coaxed, and helped Mark form borders around the shapeless days. Alex had given meaning to the word "servant".
— Davis Bunn, Lion of Babylon
I picture Cully tromping through that high, deep snow. That's how I feel physically from all of this. Moving through grief like it's a thick drift, exhausting but enlivening. It makes your muscles ache. It makes you feel you've inhabited your body completely.
— Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Possibilities
The afterlife is mostly a dream state where you confront the good and evil within you. The text repeatedly explains that the images the deceased sees and the sounds one hears are hallucinations created by one's own thoughts.
— Paul Lowe, Beginner's Guide to the Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Buddhist View of the Afterlife
My mother always pouted that it was actually her paintings and not her charm, her beauty or her sass that made him fall in love with her. He'd always insisted that it was definitely her sass. I knew the truth. He fell for all those things, and when she died, it was like someone had extinguished the sun, and he had nothing left to orbit.
— Tammara Webber, Breakable
Death wins nothing here,gnawing wings that amputate––then spread, lift up, fly.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
I suppose that the human mind can only stand so much grief and anguish. After that the fuses blow.
— Fynn, Mister God, This is Anna
There need not be a purpose to a person's death, other than that they have lived the length of their days on this Earth and now begin the longer part of their existence.
— Brian M. Holmes, What Are You Crying About? Defeating Grief for Christians
He had pulled out of that grief, eventually – out from under the suffocating weight of it. Suffering had formed him: made him silent and deliberate, thoughtful: deep.
— Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist
Sorry doesn’t make anything better. It’s just a word to fill the space of a loss of words.
— Shari J. Ryan, When Fully Fused
My pain builds like storm clouds―massive, dark, and heavy with teardrops. Moisture falls torrential as if my world is a violent, eternal downpour; however, at long last the source runs dry and the bitter storm does cease. Blue skies dare to glow where the gloom has dissipated. I breathe it in, hoping to cleanse my inner soul. A laden heart tells me the truth: the clear sky is an illusion. Old pain rushes back like a flood, providing means for clouds to form and expand once again until it is too much to bear and the heaviness turns to rain. I cannot find refuge from this woe. It is my never-ending heartache.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
Pattie saw grief. Her eyes focused on a version of her own young self, and so many other children in Vietnam who grew up without parents, some abandoned because of their ethnicity, others because of tragedy. And her arms reached out wide.
— Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s
My grief lies all within
—  and these external manner of laments are merely shadows of the unseen grief that swells with silence in the tortur'd soul.
There are some who would vow that life isn’t fair. They believe the worst is yet to come, that evil will always conquer good, and that we have no control over our fate. It’s true, there are storms that shake our foundations and monsters that threaten to tear us limb from limb. We will make terrible mistakes. We will fall short of our expectations. No one is exempt from pain and fear. But life, and what comes after, is a beautiful mixture of darkness and light, sacrifice and salvation. There is no fine line between the two, for both are needed. Where there is grief, there will be joy. Where there is heartbreak, love will follow.
— Rebecca Harris
Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows, which shows like grief itself, but is not so; or sorrow's eye, glazed with blinding tears, divides one thing entire to many objects: like perspectives which, rightly gaz'd upon, show nothing but confusion:
— William Shakespeare, Richard II
What was I going to do? The choices seemed basic and slim: Die. Exist. Live. I wanted to die, but with two young children to care for and a husband, that wasn't an option. Exist. I could do that. I was doing that now. but how flat and lifeless. How dreary and endless the long march would be until I met Charlotte again. The only option that resonated with me was to live. But how? I wanted to want to live. That was the best I could do in that moment.
— Sukey Forbes, The Angel in My Pocket: A Story of Love, Loss, and Life After Death
Grief does not change you. It reveals you.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Grief is one illness that defies all remedies
—  it must ever run its course.
it's easy to be forgetful when you're grieving, even forget those things that you believe most people wouldn't.
— Liz Fichera, You Are Here
In Louisiana, one of the first stages of grief is eating your weight in Popeyes fried chicken. The second stage is doing the same with boudin. People have been known to swap the order. Or to do both at the same time.
— Ken  Wheaton, Sweet as Cane, Salty as Tears
I am not alive if I am only a wispy memory in someone’s fickle brain . . .
— Brian M. Holmes, What Are You Crying About? Defeating Grief for Christians
I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was young and stupid and broken. I knew from watching movies that broken people hopped on buses and disappeared. New York seemed far away, geographically, mentally.
— Ken  Wheaton, Sweet as Cane, Salty as Tears
Grieving the loss of a loved one—whether human or animal—is not only permissible, it is essential.
— Linda Bender, Animal Wisdom: Learning from the Spiritual Lives of Animals
The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience
I had met death before, in different forms--I knew quite well the pattern of my grieving. First came shock, and then tears, and then a bitter anger, followed by a softer grief that time would wear away.
— Susanna Kearsley, The Splendour Falls
The aftermath of someone’s death is vertiginous, a murky, shimmering mass; to look at it head-on is to see only the fog of emotion. One must approach it sideways, entering it by way of an exhumation of facts and retrospections . . .
— Nicole Rudick
And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job--where the machine seems to run on much as usual--I loath the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Tears aren't for the people we've lost. They're for us. So we can remember, and celebrate, and miss them, and feel human.
— C.J. Redwine, Deception
But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me 'she goes on.' But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
The point is to turn your grief into love. The roses are helping you find grace.
— Holly Lynn Payne, DAMASCENA - The Tale of Roses and Rumi
Secrets are festering parasites to a relationship, devouring their hosts from within, leaving behind a empty hollow husk of what once was.
— Mark W. Boyer, Devlyn Lycurg: Book One: Prelude Into Darkness
Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain...
— Lorrie Moore, Bark: Stories
When people mentioned it to me, they thought they were talking about some casual relative of mine. For most people that's what an uncle was. They had no idea how I felt about Finn. No idea that hearing them talk about AIDS, like that was the important part of the story--more important than who Finn was, or how much I loved him, or how much he was still breaking my heart every single hour of every single day--made me want to scream.
— Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home
Only parents and torturers and the janitors of holocausts are asked to stand the sound of so much human grief.
— Martin Amis, London Fields
There is nothing more painful than the untimely death of someone young and dear to the heart. The harrowing grief surges from a bottomless well of sorrow, drowning the mourner in a torrent of agonizing pain; an exquisite pain that continues to afflict the mourner with heartache and loneliness long after the deceased is buried and gone.
— Jocelyn  Murray, Khu: A Tale of Ancient Egypt
Their's not to make reply,Their's not to reason why,Their's but to do and die.
— lbid
Bitterness*Broken men Walk away from broken sonsWho stab them in the gutIn angerAnd bitternessFor crimes they are both not guilty ofLife is a bitch sometimes-------------------------2014©rassool jibraeel snyman – 16/5/2014“The Poetic Assassin
— rassool jibraeel snyman
Loss reshapes us and teaches us to fill ourselves with something new. If we resist, we feel as you do. Hollow. Empty.
— Ash Krafton, Wolf's Bane
She takes another sip of her drink. She looks around the bar. I look at the fine muscles in her neck, at the two points of her clavicle. Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face. Maybe she should do what I do. She could stand next to me and the students could draw our lines. I order another bourbon, count the count.
— Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing
2.15 GRIEFAll the grief of every man,Remove himself – he only can,For this grief that be within,Be caused by his own thinking.[110]	- 2
— Munindra Misra, Eddies of Life
By showing that you don't have to lose yourself, maybe someone else will feel some sort of comfort.
— Lea Michele
She should have died on that day. Perhaps, in a way, she had.
— Anne Cassidy, Looking for JJ
Sorry. Don't need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.
— Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark
There was this constant urge in me to tear my insides apart,I didn't know why. By the time I made my mind that it was impossible for meto do, there alighted the fear, haunting me with the words that rangconstantly in my head, "You're not brave enough".I didn't feel devastated, I felt the urge to be devastated.
— Sanhita Baruah
so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more thananything else.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your souls means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it.
— Paul Harding, Tinkers
'Nothing can make death easier,' Cala said, 'but silence can make it harder.' 'Speaking helps not,' Maia said.
— Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor
'The grief didn't fade, but it changed into something I could carry around with me, a noose I wore around my neck. It wasn't until I saw you that the knot loosened.' 
— Sara Bell, The Devil's Fire
I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.
— Shannon Celebi, Small Town Demons
After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin…The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don’t know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers.
— Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
His face looked almost as gray as his suit, and the pouches beneath his eyes looked like little bags for holding all the sadness that his head couldn't hold.
— Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, The Grooming of Alice
…There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can’t know, is kind.	I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly…I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored.	I suspect that the ease of Wally’s death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he’s all right now.And yet.	And yet he’s gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily hourly presence. 	My experience of being with Wally… brought me to another sort of perception, but I can’t stay in that place, can’t sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he’s all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he’s gone.	And doubt. And the fact that we can’t understand, that it’s our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing?	We need our doubt so as to not settle for easy answers. Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves…Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see.	 Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind.
— Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
He answered the phone to his daughter with a broken but joyous heart, ready to speak with her of astonishment and wonder.
— Patrick Ness, The Crane Wife
How will I go on without her?!The answer was very simple: one day at a time.
— Jeff Erno, Dumb Jock
Alvin didn't cry, didn't curse, didn't holler.... He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only I did.... Only I cracked, alone, later in the one place in our house where I knew I could go to be apart from the living and all that they cannot not do.
— Philip Roth
The state of mind above which my distraction floats like fog is suddenly perfectly clear, though the right word for it is less immediately available. Grief is too sharp and immediate; maybe it’s the high pitch of the vowel sound, or the monosyllabic impact of the word, as quick a jab as knife or cut. Sadness is too ephemeral, somehow; it sounds like something that comes and goes, a response to an immediate cause which will pass in a little while as another cause arises to generate a different feeling. Mourning isn’t bad, but there’s something a little archaic about it. I think of widows keening, striking themselves- dark-swathed years, a closeting of self away from the world, turned inward toward an interior dark. Sorrow feels right , for now. Sorrow seems large and inhabitable, an interior season whose vaulted sky’s a suitable match for the gray and white tumult arched over these headlands. A sorrow is not to be gotten over or moved through in quite the way that sadness is, yet sorrow is also not as frozen and monochromatic as mourning. Sadness exists inside my sorrow, but it’s not as large as sorrow’s realm. This sorrow is capacious; there’s room inside it for the everyday, for going about the workaday stuff of life. And for loveliness, for whatever we’re to be given by the daily walk.
— Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain.
— Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
We are born into a realm of constant change. Everything is decaying. We are continually losing all that we come in contact with. Our tendency to get attached to impermanent experiences causes sorrow, lamentation and grief, because eventually we are separated from everything and everyone we love. Our lack of acceptance and understanding of this fact makes life unsatisfactory.
— Noah Levine, Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries
In some aspects losing a child is like a wall, but instead of getting over it, you must carry the wall with you, wherever you go, for as long as you live.The wall is immovable.You can’t go anywhere until you learn to move the wall.You are just stuck in the same place, forever.You can tug and tug all you want, there are days that the wall will not move.And there are days that it moves ever so slightly.Over time I have realized that in order to move forward, knowing that I must bring this wall with me, that the best way to do so is to metaphorically flood the soil near the wall with water, and have the wall float with me, instead of me having to carry it.Every act of love and kindness turns to water.Water and love can penetrate and move anything.It just takes time. I need to turn my wall into a raft.
— JohnA Passaro, Again
For as long as it takes for the sorrow and pain to transfer into acceptance. I’ll stay here. With you. By your side. I won’t leave.”“Promise?”“Vow.” I placed his hands gently on the piano. “I vow.
— Rachel Van Dyken, Toxic
The boy in the tree sobs uncontrollably when I tell him about the Hermit and my mother, yet his eyes light up each time I mention Hannah. And every single time he asks, “Taylor, what about the Brigadier who came searching for you that day? Whatever became of him?” I try to explain that the Brigadier is of no importance to my story, but he always shakes his head as if he knows better.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road