c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I used to think grief was grey and spacious and insubstantial, like a damp fog that surrounds you on every side, one that you can't get away from because it colours the air, and you breathe it in and out, and it has its own earthy smell that seeps into your ores. I thought of grief as a fleeting thing like fog, like a damp that eventually disperses. One day the greyness is slightly lighter; after a few weeks the damp no longer collects on your skin, the musty smell diminishes, somewhere in the distance a pale sun flashes from between tatters of mist, and the grief dissolves into melancholy and then memory. Never, not for a moment, did I think that grief could be as hard as a dagger, sharp and unrelenting. That it could strike again and again, always unexpected, hard, straight between my ribs, bright lights in my eyes, black and violet and pain so big that I gasp and stagger. I forget the dagger sometimes for a few moments, perhaps an hour, and that's the very worst--the stroke of the blade takes me by surprise, still just as hard, cruel, painful.
— Johanna Sinisalo, Enkelten verta
Do not forever with thy vailed lidsSeek for thy noble father in the dust.Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die,Passing though nature to eternity.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
My friend lost his mother when we were at college. I spent a lot of nights talking with him. Lot of nights." He pauses. "I know what it's like. You don't just get over it. And it doesn't make any difference if you're supposedly a "grown-up". And it never goes away,
— Sophie Kinsella, I've Got Your Number
Grief is one big, gaping hole, isn’t it? It’s everywhere and all consuming. Some days you think you can’t go on because the only thing waiting for you is more despair. Some days you don’t want to go on because it’s easier to give up than to get hurt again.
— Marieke Nijkamp, This Is Where It Ends
I'll never throw these small things away. There will never be a time when I don't want them, all the tiny parts of Cal that made a life.
— Cath Crowley, Words in Deep Blue
No one can be healed of death. All they can do is tame it. Death is a wild animal, sharp-fanged. I am just trying to build a cage to keep it locked in. It is there, beside me, drooling as it waits to devour me. The bars of the cage that protect me are made of paper.
— Antoine Leiris, Vous n'aurez pas ma haine
We were familiar with the line that separates grief from madness, and we know that sometimes the only way to stay on the right side of it is to scream.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
It never ends, the bruiseof being
— Kevin Young, Book of Hours: Poems
as if all the years haven't dulled that moment. She's staring at a spot of air in front of it, and I know, in that spot of air, is her son.
— Cath Crowley, Words in Deep Blue
The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Those with no one to blame are alone with their grief.
— Antoine Leiris, Vous n'aurez pas ma haine
Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats.
— C.S. Lewis
It's a small thing, a life.
— Antoine Leiris, Vous n'aurez pas ma haine
There is no right or wrong way to grief. There is only one way - your way!
— Mark   Alexander, Me, My Grief and I: Life goes on
I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away.
— Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward
Ben was taking her through the storm of grief. He was singing her through the rage and despair. He was singing her through the terrible loneliness, because there was no way to shut off grief, no way to cast it aside or fight against it. The only way to end grief was to go through it.As she realized that, his song began to change. It grew softer, sweeter, like the morning after a long cry, when your head still hurt but your heart was no longer broken.
— Holly Black, The Darkest Part of the Forest
That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died, I know that, and you've been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we've explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we're having now that a few months have gone by--- but now it's time for you to come back. You have been away long enough.
— Lydia Davis, Can't and Won't: Stories
When I could find something to laugh about for 30 minutes, my grief lightened just enough to make the day bearable.
— Sharon E. Rainey, The Best Part of My Day Healing Journal
[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.
— Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward
Her grief was a burden so heavy, he came close to collapsing under it, and yet he couldn't lay it down.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
Someone's boyfriend died in a rock-climbing accident in Switzerland: everyone gathered around her, on fire with tragedy. Their dramatic shows up support underpinned with jealousy- bad luck was rare enough to be glamorous.
— Emma Cline, The Girls
Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love.
— May Sinclair, The Token
Alas, I had always loved sorrow and grief, but only for myself, for myself; for them I wept in my pity. I stretched out my arms to them in my despair, accusing, cursing, and despising myself. I told them that I had done all this, I alone, that I had brought them corruption, contagion, and lies!
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Gentle Creature and Other Stories
She waited. She waited so excruciatingly long that she could physically feel the time pass; a binding in her chest, her breath shallow and raspy. Silence seemed to stuff itself in her ears like cotton balls.
— Daniel Younger, The Wrath of Con
I'm really all right, she would think, carefully, lightly, as she pulled the key from the ignition, trying not to examine the sensation too closely or lose it with any sudden movement, as if it were a thin-filmed shiny bubble poised in her chest.
— Tessa Hadley, Married Love and Other Stories
Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own.
— Lois Lowry, Looking Back: A Book of Memories
Well, well, my dear. Are we so brokenhearted as that? Is the loss of that terrible prince really worth your life?
— Serena Valentino, Poor Unfortunate Soul: A Tale of the Sea Witch
For a long time, there was grief. It pulled me down into suffocating darkness, and kept me anchored there. I went through the motions. I turned up at school. I ate food and watched TV and took algebra tests. But I didn't feel anything. It was easier that way.
— Lili Wilkinson, The Boundless Sublime
Only by the shuddering of the bed did Toby realize the girl was sobbing. Molly herself made no sound; it was as though her grief was trapped in a jar, her cries inaudible to anyone but her.
— Tess Gerritsen, Life Support
The black color is much deeper than to be overwhelmed by grief… Black hides everything within itself in the argument of elegance.
— Eyden I., Woman's Book: Only For Men
Sometimes I felt as if we were all wading around in grief, reluctant to admit to others how far we were waving or drowning.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
I used to want to be a cop for a brief time, a detective, solving crimes and upholding the law, ever since I stated watching crime shows in junior high. But being a cop, contrary to what many believe, isn't like the films or television shows that we see every day. If you're the cop who has to have the grim duty of telling a parent that their child was killed, or who loses their friend on a dangerous case, or who has to interview victims of horrible crimes, somehow I imagine that you just want to quit forever on some days.
— Rebecca McNutt
Know that I fought Trinity, with every part of me, I fought
— M.R. Field, Fractures
The fish will not blame you. You have to do this. I will not look at you and think you're a bad brother. Nobody will. You have to leave because this time you have to save yourself.
— Hannah Moskowitz
We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep…
— José Saramago, Blindness
That had day changed him. It had changed the entire village. Shaken by the death of a boy they had loved, each person found ways to be more worthy of the sacrifice he had made. They had become kinder, more careful, more attentive to one another.
— Lois Lowry, Son
In those first hours after he drowned, when the catastrophe was still confined to Calabash beach, and to Jake, Joe and me, its speed was impossible to reconcile with its scale. Nothing so big could happen this fast; it defied the laws of physics, it could not be true. Death is too much for the mind to register in a matter of minutes; the incalculable magnitude can only be absorbed by increment, day by day. As each day allows a new glimpse of its immensity, and the aftershock extends beyond the beach to reach hundreds of people all over the world, my comprehension slowly expands until its dimensions resemble a more accurate impression of the truth. But the bigger his death grows, the more inconceivable it becomes. It feels like an ambitious piece of performance art; a work of fiction, not real life. How strange that the truth of my own situation should be so much clearer to everybody else.
— Decca Aitkenhead, All at Sea
We are generally not programmed to imagine death, to handle death, to absorb grief, at least not in the immediacy of things, definitely not when the ‘thing’ has happened to another person.
— Neena Verma, A Mother's Cry... A Mother's Celebration
The crumbling under the ‘cold corpse’The deadness of ‘mortal separation’The moaning wails of ‘mourning’The push to ‘perform rituals’The spectacle of ‘sorrow’The goriness of ‘grief’AndThe ‘mercilessness’ of the ‘merciful’Who knows … ‘what’ and ‘why’ Who would ever want to know(Page 34)
— Neena Verma, A Mother's Cry... A Mother's Celebration
You are never lost in sorrow, it seems to me, ever. You do know the way. In fact, you don't think there's any other. Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road would through life, through the days of your life, like the old Roman ruins near the Tuileries or the rue d'Enfer -- underneath this life, but never really apart from it.
— Alexander Chee, The Queen of the Night
Only a few days after my encounter with the police, two patrolmen tackled Alton Sterling onto a car, then pinned him down on the ground and shot him in the chest while he was selling CDs in front of a convenience store, seventy-five miles up the road in Baton Rouge. A day after that, Philando Castile was shot in the passenger seat of his car during a police traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, as his girlfriend recorded the aftermath via Facebook Live.Then, the day after Castile was killed, five policemen were shot dead by a sniper in Dallas. It felt as if the world was subsumed by cascades of unceasing despair. I mourned for the family and friends of Sterling and Castille. I felt deep sympathy for the families of the policemen who died. I also felt a real fear that, as a result of what took place in Dallas, law enforcement would become more deeply entrenched in their biases against black men, leading to the possibility of even more violence.The stream of names of those who have been killed at the hands of the police feels endless, and I become overwhelmed when I consider all the names we do not know—all of those who lost their lives and had no camera there to capture it, nothing to corroborate police reports that named them as threats. Closed cases. I watch the collective mourning transpire across my social-media feeds. I watch as people declare that they cannot get out of bed, cannot bear to go to work, cannot function as a human being is meant to function. This sense of anxiety is something I have become unsettlingly accustomed to. The familiar knot in my stomach. The tightness in my chest. But becoming accustomed to something does not mean that it does not take a toll. Systemic racism always takes a toll, whether it be by bullet or by blood clot.
— Clint   Smith
Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.
— Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief
How long would our poem be?How much would it weigh?The first verse would be yours, of course−Age before beauty, you'd say.You would not rush so much as crest,a wave that spreads and breaksacross the eyes and ears to fillsome deeper, inner space.The next verse would be mine,self-conscious, yes, it's true,and full of fits and startsbut bits of music too.Would we share some lines then, just we two?Here's a place for my words;here, only yours will do,And would it matter, really,after all is said and done,who made which piece of glory?Who, this moon? Who, that sun?The pen drops from my hand,but there's still more to say.So I must write our final line,which is simplystay.
— Louise Hawes, The Language of Stars
. . . when the horror of his grief was new to him, and every object in life, however trifling or however important, seem saturated with his one great sorrow.
— Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret
...when I thought he loved me, when I thought we were joined not just for breath’s time, but for the long continuance, the hard candies of femur and stone, the fastnesses.
— Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap: Poems
The past is never dead. It's not even past
—  if it were there would be no grief or sorrow.
Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot - he could accept it all more easily than he dared to admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza's dream was something he could not endure.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Our divorce was an optical illusion, surely, because I am often still there, in my old home with my family. I can so easily fool myself, even without a scope, a lens, a patch of sky to measure my trauma, my blues, my perspective or my period of mourning. Suspension of disbelief can be a very real kind of haunting.
— Jalina Mhyana, Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes
I have a number of questions. If I had half as many answers, I’d be in great shape.
— Catherine Ryan Hyde
The end of this life is not the end of life.
— Kate McGahan, JACK McAFGHAN: Reflections on Life with My Master
She’s thinking about grief and trauma, how they can hide out inside a woman, how they can come back.The playwright follows her eyes, until he sees what she sees.The photographer’s framed image, the orphan girl lit up by the explosion, a girl blowing forward, a girl coming out of fire, a girl who looks as if she might blast right through image and time into the world“I know what’s happened,” the poet says.
— Lidia Yuknavitch, The Small Backs of Children
How should they know? I can't revealto a single friend what my soul conceals,whom I'm in love with or what I believe -my dreams, my thoughts - or why I grieve.
— Hristo Botev
Sweetheart, I’m telling you, you love someone like that, you love them the right way, and no time would be enough. Doesn’t matter if you had thirty years,” she tells me. “It wouldn’t be enough.
— Taylor Jenkins Reid, Forever, Interrupted
This is what it means to love someone. This is what it means to grieve someone. It’s a little bit like a black hole. It’s a little bit like infinity.
— Harriet Reuter Hapgood, The Square Root of Summer
She would always love him. But she would not cease to function because he was gone
— Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages
Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you're used to being full of joy. But it's not so bad when you're used to feeling full of pain. Hollow feels okay. Empty feels like a beginning. Which is nice, because for so long you have felt like you were at the end.
— Taylor Jenkins Reid, One True Loves
Suffering is so real & I walk amongst so many who have no idea how much my soul is aching to be healed.
— Nikki Rowe
You start to understand that grief is chronic. That it's more about remission and relapse than it is about a cure. What that means to you is that you can't simply wait for it to be over. You have to move through it, like swimming in an undertow.
— Taylor Jenkins Reid, One True Loves
You don’t have a monopoly on pain or loss. It’s a level playing field—we all lose—we all grieve. It’s what remains afterwards that defines us. Guilt is the poison we pump into our own veins. It’s self-inflicted torture.
— R. W. Patterson
I once thought that grief was chronic, that all you could do was appreciate the good days and take them along with the bad. And then I started to think that maybe the good days aren't just days; maybe the good days can be good weeks, good months, good years. Now I wonder if grief isn't something like a shell. You wear it for a long time and then one day you realize you've outgrown it. So you put it down.
— Taylor Jenkins Reid, One True Loves
When you lose someone you love, it's hard to imagine that you'll ever feel better. That, one day, you'll manage to be in a good mood simply because the weather is nice or the barista at the coffee shop on the corner remembered your order. But it does happen. If you're patient and you work at it.
— Taylor Jenkins Reid, One True Loves
I cried harder. I didn't want to, but I couldn't stop myself.I couldn't stop myself, so I thought about all the bad things and I fed it and fed it until I was crying so hard I had to gasp for breath between sobs.
— Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
It’s okay to cry. Giving in to the tears is terrifying,like freefalling to earth without a parachute. But it’s vital to our wellbeing as we process the deep anguish.
— Lynda Cheldelin Fell
Just as it is impossible to explain childbirth to a woman who has never given birth, it is impossible to explain child loss to a person who has never lost a child.
— Lynda Cheldelin Fell
We kept on cooking and walking the dog, taking the kids to the park, cleaning the kitchen, and letting Sara and Adam hate what was going on when they needed to. Sometimes we let them resist finding any meaning or solace in anything that had to do with their daughter's diagnosis, and this was one of the hardest things to do -- to stop trying to make things come out better than they were. We let them spew when they needed to; we offered the gift of no comfort when there being no comfort was where they had landed. Then we shopped for groceries.
— Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
The sad fact is there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, the unjust taking of a loved being. And even the luckiest of us will encounter at least one murder in our own lives: our own. It is our fate. We all live a murder mystery of which we are the victim.
— Yann Martel
But that slip of paper wouldn't disappear, ever, and neither would the image of his prostrate wife, and neither would the thought that if he could, it might greatly improve his life to end it.
— Jonathan Safran Foer
I find myself smiling, finally. I guess I do remember how to do it. You just turn the corners of your mouth up.
— Taylor Jenkins Reid, Forever, Interrupted
Brook, you don't sound like yourself."My reply came out of my mouth before I could choose it. "I am not the person I was three weeks ago and I will never be that person again."Surprised by my own response, I relayed it to my therapist who was helping me work through issues surrounding my brother's death. "Of course you're not," she said. "And one of the best things you can do for yourself is to know that you are a different person now.
— Brook Noel
Mourning leads not to resurrection.
— J. Rutger Madison, A Curse Upon the Saints
I said it grieved me to part from anything that mattered to me, yet I welcomed the grief because it meant I had felt deeply and needed to express it. 'I even had trouble leaving the Parthenon,' I told him ... 'because it was so beautiful and I knew I'd never see it again.
— Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found
Tears are the silent language of grief.
— Voltaire
Three, 300, or 3,000 - these are the number of unknown days, each far too little and yet too much at the same time, to see an irrevocably declined loved one languish and suffer, with that bittersweet release lingering in the doorway, but never quite being sent all the way in, to comfort and carry our loved one to that Better Place.” ― Connie Kerbs
— Connie Kerbs
it [In Memoriam] expressed exactly the nature of her own shock and sorrow, the very structure and slow process of pain, and the transformations and transmutations of grief, like rot in the earth-mould, like roots and other blind things moving in the grave.
— A.S. Byatt
The process of recovering from addictiveness happens at a deeper level of consciousness and through feeling our pain without using old addictive fixes. There is no escaping that getting in touch with our original pain is the touchstone to mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
— Christopher Dines, The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
The morning after Jim’s death, as I dried off after my shower, I wondered to what extent, if at all, Jim was…around. Could he be with us, unseen or unsensed by us, but able to observe? Most importantly at this moment, could he possibly see me naked?
— Kelly Wilson, Caskets from Costco
If he could sleep, she thought, sleep through the unhappy months, the heart's hunger, the months of death and cold and not having what you most want, and wake with time gone past and blurred and a new year coming. But perhaps it is too early in the year, she thought after that, and besides, he is not a bear.
— Naomi Mitchison, Travel Light
I had no idea if the photos [of Osama bin Laden's dead body] would ever be made public, and I didn't care.
— Mark Owen, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden
Three, 300, or 3000 - these are the number of unknown days, each too little and too much at the same time, to see an irrevocably declined loved one languish and suffer, with death lingering in the doorway, but never quite being sent all the way in, to comfort and carry our loved one to that Better Place.
— Connie Kerbs
If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
We are bidden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature's nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream. George Macdonald, in a passage I cannot now find, represents God as saying to men, 'You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you.' That is the conclusion of the whole matter. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God - to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response - to be miserable - these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows - that only food that any possible universe ever can grow - then we must starve eternally.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Perhaps that's what she caught, not Life Fatigue but just grief over a broken heart--and the bitterness that comes with being cheated too early of something true--like a young husband's love.
— Joseph G. Peterson, Wanted: Elevator Man
I am the mother of three children whose birth mother died of cancer when they were young. When I met them, they were ages twelve, ten, and eight, all grieving in very different ways. I have seen first hand the pain and confusion that accompanies childhood loss. But I have also seen the healing that can take place when children begin to understand who Jesus is and how much He loves them. By using our family's personal experience as a foundation, I hope this book will be a refuge for grieving children to express their sorrow, to feel understood in all their pain, and to come to know that God is their ultimate source of comfort, healing, hope, and joy here on earth, as well as in heaven.
— Kathleen Fucci
There are no books that will do it for us and there are no magic "right" words to say. It's the trying, the sharing and the caring - the wanting to help and the willingness to listen - that says "I care about you." When we know that we do care about each other, then, together, we can talk about even the most difficult things and cope with even the most difficult times." (On helping children with grief).
— Hedda Bluestone Sharappan
They say that animals are incapable of feelings and reasoning. This is false. No living thing on earth is void of either. They also say that man is the most intelligent — and the most superior — species on earth. This is also false. It is very arrogant to assume that we are the most intelligent species when we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It has been shown that both rats and monkeys learn from making errors, yet we have not. Our history proves this. All creatures on earth have the capacity to love and grieve the same way we do. No life on the planet is more deserving than another. Those who think so, are the true savages.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
But when she finally got the wings to fly she realized she had nowhere else to go to...
— Sanhita Baruah
Of course it's heavier, he thought. It's got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do.
— Stephen King, The Dark Tower
Grief is a form of validation
—  it says the wound mattered. It mattered. You mattered.
I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
She walked down the lawn and surveyed the world as they'd both seen it--the wild limbs of the leaning apple tree, the golden-brown evening sky, the black silhouettes of the mountains. The trunk and the branches of the tree had bent over the years, under the weight of the heavy fruit. One of the biggest branches had grown down from the canopy of the leaves, all the way to the ground and straight along the grass...the end of that same branch had begun growing up again, at a right angle, the wood bending toward the sky.
— Jonathan Corcoran
I couldn’t even tell if I had any sadness of my own, because I was so full of Abuelita’s sadness.
— Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World
I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me. And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed and in failing opened up a view of the world I had only begun to suspect, where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best
— Tobias Wolff
Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can’t short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can’t patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action.
— Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
The absence of life is not the same as material privation: we will never again see the same soul occupying the same space. The world refers to them as pets, but that is what we do, not really what they are. Affection pays for itself in proportion to the love we offer, and if the love we lavished on him was any indication, we are inconsolable. The suffering is more on our side now, for he led an enormously happy and productive life, and we are left to remember and agonize. It is all wretchedness now. Grief is the currency for death, leaving us in emotional debt perhaps forever, but love is the tax we happily pay toward the investment of another's company, and we would all rather pay it and be happy and poor than be rich in a friendless life. He is gone, and we are now beholden to him, but we are so much happier for his having been here than we deserve to be.On the death of Ted, beloved cat
— Michelle Franklin
And Emily had yet to shed a single tear. It troubled her all the way back to the city, and she rode with one hand sandwiched between her cheek and the cool, shuddering glass of the limousine window, as if that might help. She tried whispering 'Daddy' to herself, tried closing her eyes and picturing his face, but it didn't work. Then she thought of something that made her throat close up: she might never have been her father's baby, but he had always called her 'little rabbit.' And she was crying easily now, causing her mother to reach over and squeeze her hand; the only trouble was that she couldn't be sure whether she cried for her father or for Warren Maddock, or Maddox, who was back in South Carolina now being shipped out to a division.   But she stopped crying abruptly when she realized that even that was a lie: these tears, as always before in her life, were wholly for herself—for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing.
— Richard Yates
With their mother lying in a coma twenty miles away, they clung together drunkenly and wept for the loss of their father.
— Richard Yates, The Easter Parade
When his wife died, for a while it was the end of the world, because part of him had died with her. As the long, slow recovery proceeded, he had gratefully and guiltily accepted the return of equilibrium. But he had not paid attention to a parallel phenomenon: his reversion to what he had been before his marriage. Though changed by whatever he had learned during their years together, and by whatever healing had taken place, he had fallen back into the old patterns of withdrawal. Nursing the dreadful wound of her absence, he had failed to notice the subtler void opening up within himself.
— Michael D. O'Brien
There comes a point in one's life where the people whom we grew up admiring begin to die, leaving a great chasm in the world. This is awful enough to deal with without having anything so annoying as feelings getting in the way of personal equanimity. And then, possibly even more horribly, there comes a time in one's life when the people whom we grew up with or the people who are in our same age group begin to die. I have had the disagreeable business of having to watch colleagues only a few years my senior perish without warning, though premonition would not soften the blow. I am now realizing that I am entering this time, the dreadful gateway of existence, the one that leads to watching the ebb and flow of time, the great rote and sussuration of life and death, and being able to do nothing but welter in misery and pine over the dregs of hideous mortality. Death is an unaccountable business, one that robs the living of the peace we believe to be --perhaps mistakenly-- our birthright, one which asks the living to pay for the departed in the currency of feelings, leaving us to wallow in emotional debt. There is a loneliness about behind left behind as is there a thrill of horror for what lies beyond. The sum total of living is to sacrifice peace in favour of finding it, which makes little sense at all. I often wonder if the dead know we grieve for them, as the penury of pity only disconcerts ourselves. It is poor comfort, the business of mourning, for what is there really to mourn about excepting our own desire for reconciliation, something which no one, not even the dead, can furnish?
— Michelle Franklin
Grief, as in everything, should be experienced in moderation. There is a time to grieve heavily but then there is a time to set it aside and become happy in life again.
— Aleksandra Layland, The Feathered Crown: A Windflower Saga Novella
I miss him,” she whispered, her voice cracking. His heart constricted at the grief on her face. “I know, honey.” He lifted a hand to stroke the soft waves of her hair. A soothing, reassuring gesture, but to him it meant so much more. His muscles knotted with the need to cup her face between his hands and kiss her the way he’d been dying to for so long. He wanted to kiss away the sadness and the grief, replace it with the heat and tenderness burning inside him.
— Kaylea Cross, Extinguished
Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand,Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you planned: Only remember me; you understandIt will be late to counsel then or pray.Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leaveA vestige of the thoughts that once I had,Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.
— Christina Rossetti, Poems of Christina Rossetti
Grief isn't like a map you can follow. It's not a simple route with a destination. Sometimes you loop back and find yourself in the exact same place you left.
— Margo Rabb, Kissing in America
For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future. Like every wounded child I just wanted to turn back time and be in that paradise again, in that moment of remembered rapture where I felt loved, where I felt a sense of belonging. We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward .We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart's longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of our first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning--clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
To everyone in the foyer reading the lists, or on the sidewalks waving signs and photos of their families who’d disappeared, I said over and over again: “Everyone is dead.” If they insisted, showing me family photos, I’d calmly say: “Were there any children? Not a single child will come back.” I didn’t mince my words, I didn’t try to spare their feelings, I was used to death. I’d become as hard-hearted as the deportees who saw us arrive at Birkenau without saying a single comforting word. Surviving makes other people’s tears unbearable. You might drown in them.
— Marceline Loridan-Ivens, But You Did Not Come Back
Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us.
— Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition & the Life of Faith
I said that my mother is mad. I said that. But you might not see it. I mean, you might not think that anything I've told you proves she is mad. But there are different kinds of madness. Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow. Then one day, maybe many months after your decision to take your son out of school and isolate him in a house for reasons that got lost in your grief, one day that madness will stir in the chair, and it will say to him, 'You look pale.
— Nathan Filer
We have trauma, and we have grief. People die, and we find it baffling. Painful. Inexplicable. Grief is baffling. There are theories on how we react to loss and death, how we cope, how we handle loss. Some believe the range of emotions mourners experience is predictable, that grief can be monitored, as if mourners are following a checklist. But sorrow is less of a checklist, more like water. It's fluid, it has no set shape, never disappears, never ends. It doesn't go away. It just changes. It changes us.
— Mira Ptacin, Poor Your Soul
Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don't like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which irritates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck.
— Roger Zelazny
But remember this. When God wants to punish us, he gives us just ourselves to care for.
— Jonathan Odell, The Healing
What was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Strange how knowing our story had no happy ending had freed us to live in the moment. We weren’t guy and girl. We weren’t damaged and terminal. We were just now.
— Elizabeth Langston, Wishing for You
Tears are a wonderful thing; they wash, they warm, they are the rivers that run through our minds, seeking release. In their salinity they remind us that we came from the sea. Our cells know this, and go about their machinations, ceaselessly recreating the primordial brine. We are water, whether or not the Spirit of God once hovered formless and magnificent above the idea of us, in some ancient place before the Singularity uncoiled itself into space and time.
— Sean J Halford, Stronger Than Lions
In the grief that comes with recognizing what happened to us, we often feel there is nowhere to turn for solace…We do things to keep it away, such as becoming overly busy or using drugs or alcohol to numb our feelings. When we are caught up in resistance, we do not feel hope, but when we surrender to our sadness fully, hope trickles in.
— Maureen Brady, Beyond Survival: A Writing Journey for Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse
We are the voices in the shadows,Between the light and shade,Betwixt life and restful death,In the dark periphery of the unseen.We’re here, At the edges. We are the villainous punished,The innocent murdered or abandoned,Our lives ended by foul means, or unspeakable deeds.We are your lovers long gone; your siblings forsaken.Can you hear us?At the edgesFrom the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant
— Emmanuelle de Maupassant
On the way home I felt a great and simple sadness. I missed my dad. I missed him very much.
— Helen Macdonald
Now in the thriving season of lovewhen the bud relents into flower,your love turned absence has turned once more,and if my comforts fall soft as rainon her flutters, it is becauselove grows by what it remembers of love
— Lisel Mueller, Alive Together
Maybe there is no one way to deal with grief, but knowing that we're not totally alone is the best we can do.
— Ann Benjamin
He could offer only withness, but nothing else was asked.
— Sara Pennypacker
There werethings, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only hehad lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot--he forgot. The lighthad destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distantshadows.
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
I woke up to an ache in my chest, the smell of chocolate, and the sound of the ghost making a racket in the kitchen. Now, I'm not the sort to dwell on doom and sorrow. Life is too short for that. But I should at least try to describe the ache briefly: It is not the kind that comes from eating tacos too late at night. It's the kind that comes from being left behind. I think my heart is smart enough to know there's a place I should be filling with new memories, new jokes, and wondrous adventures with the one person I loved most of all. But that person is gone now. And so, my heart has a giant hole. I call it The Big Empty.
— Natalie Lloyd, The Key to Extraordinary
I recognized exactly where she was—that state where you’re able to hold it together as long as absolutely no one talks to you or touches you with any amount of sympathy.
— Jen Nadol, This Is How It Ends
I harken to the call of my heart, embracing the depth that flows liquid ambered and animal soft within my cells.The dark abyss of denial has always been a poor mans trade for the guiding light of emotional wisdom.This crust of mortal skin is baptised with tear streaked holy waters. I rise to my heart with an uncommon courage and wade soul deep.Tissue thin ripples of redemption drift across the pain towards my future self, bathing me in hope. I rise and step closer to all that I AM.Kristin Granger
— Kristin Granger
I harken to the call of my heart, embracing the depth that flows liquid ambered and animal soft within my cells.The dark abyss of denial has always been a poor mans trade for the guiding light of emotional wisdom.This crust of mortal skin is baptised with tear streaked holy waters. I rise to my heart with an uncommon courage and wade soul deep.Tissue thin ripples of redemption drift across the pain towards my future self, bathing me in hope. I rise and step closer to all that I AM.
— Kristin Granger
Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
I will die kissing your mad cold mouth,embracing the lost bouquet of your body,and searching for the light of your closed eyes
— Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
Should could no longer feel grief. She was now like a Geiger counter that had been subjected to too much radiation, no longer capable of giving any reaction, noiselessly displaying a reading of zero.
— Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem
The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that.
— Fredrik Backman
Grief and rage--you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.
— Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides
The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older - a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.
— Dennis Lehane, Mystic River
The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.
— Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
I am not wise enough to know if there is ever purpose in tragedy, if there is ever virtue in resisting it. If it cannot be overcome, then grief has beaten you, and you are right to say so.
— Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants
If there is something we need more than anything else during grief, it is a friend who stands with us, who doesn’t leave us. Jesus is that friend.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
Often it takes that “knife in our heart” to drive us to Him. Our faith, our very lives, depend on God, and when we enter the valley of grief, we need His help or we will never climb another mountain.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
When we grieve over someone who has died in Christ, we are sorrowing not for them but for ourselves. Our grief isn’t a sign of weak faith, but of great love.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
Grief turns us inward, but compassion turns us outward, and that’s what we need when grief threatens to crush us. The Bible says, “Carry each other’s burdens” [Galatians 6:2 NIV].
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
Grief which is not dealt with properly can cause us to lose our perspective on life.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
Grief comes with many losses. Whatever its cause, grief will come to all of us.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
But grief changes. It softens, adapts its shape to become a part of you. That kind of sorrow never gets any lighter, but you grow accustomed to the weight as you carry it on.
— Claudia Gray, Ten Thousand Skies Above You
To all the motherless daughters out there; may your heartache serve you in the best of ways. May your grief give you a better understanding of yourself, may your sentiment allow you to express and create, and may your love expand beyond what you ever thought possible.
— Kayko Tamaki
True sorrows do not pass like clouds or inclement weather...Sorrows are absorbed over time, and you reshape yourself around them. How you absorb them makes you what you are for good or ill. I think the only true and right way is to take our sorrows into us bravely and wholly, knowing they will hurt, and accepting that sometimes pain is unavoidable. It is when grief is suppressed or hidden that it does harm
— Isobelle Carmody, The Red Queen
Mama, I love you and miss you so very much. The absence of of your physical presence propels me further into understanding the spirit. I am inspired to be aware and mindful of everything around me because there-- you exist, always speaking to me and always with me.
— Kayko Tamaki
Those who do not care, escape the anguish of mourning but never know the delights of love. The meaning of life forever eludes them.
— Wayne Gerard Trotman
The old Old winds that blew When chaos was, what do They tell the clattered trees that I Should weep?
— Adelaide Crapsey, Verse by Adelaide Crapsey
The truth of it was he didn't want her. He wanted Mary Kate with every cell of his body. He missed everything about her. The feel of her sleeping at his side. Her gentle snores. Her soft brown curls tickling his nose enough to wake him from a sound sleep even on nights when he needed it most. Her smile. The smell of her. At odd moments he thought he had heard her laughter, or he'd catch a glimpse of her in the corner of an eye, but all of it was a lie, and every time it happened it was as if someone had ripped a deep wound in his chest. The pain was raw enough to make him want to take a razor to his wrist, but each time he considered acting upon the idea something stopped him, and so, he stumbled on barely alive and wishing for an end. At times he couldn't breathe, couldn't move without wanting to scream.
— Stina Leicht, Of Blood and Honey
I discover, too, that grief is different to different people. Comes in many guises. In shocked silences and closed doors around our village, as people try to shut it out. That a blank face or fleeting smile can hide the worst, most private kind of agony.
— Debbie Howells, The Bones of You