c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
There are some griefs so loudThey could bring down the sky,And there are griefs so stillNone knows how deep they lie,Endured, never expended.There are old griefs so proudThey never speak a word;They never can be mended.And these nourish the willAnd keep it iron-hard.
— May Sarton, Selected Poems
The sounds of a man crying is a piteous noise, almost worse than an infant's cry. Babies are either hungry, sick or bored, or need changing. This man was none of those things. He was wrapped in grief as deep as the ocean, and no one could do anything to help him.
— Samantha Hayes, Until You're Mine
I was feeling everything much too much. Everything was pulling at my eyes. I spent hours floating in pools. I sat on terraces and stared for afternoons at mediocre views. I was feeling overjoyed for happy couples. I would see or hear about people, usually people I hardly knew or didn't even like, getting together, finding each other after so much groping, and I would feel bliss. I was blindsided by familiar things.
— Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
They get quieter over the years. They still whisper to you sometimes, but the world gets louder. You can see it and hear it again. There's a gap in it, where they used to be. But you get used to the gap; so used to it that you can hardly see it. And then some days, out of nowhere, you're making the tea or banging out the washing or sitting on the bus and it's there again: that aching, empty space that will never be filled.
— Clare Furniss
Watching someone you love… die? There are no words for how broken that makes a person. It’s like waking up from a bad dream only to find out that it’s you reality, it’s like watching sunlight fade from the sky, like watching death suck the one you love dry, and being powerless to stop it. You may as well try to stop the waves from rolling in, or the sun from rising.In the end, the waves will roll, the sun will set, and death will come. The only thing you have a choice in? How you deal with it…when it does.
— Rachel Van Dyken, Toxic
Dying is a very solitary thing. The only thing we can do it be there when she wants us there.
— Lois Lowry, A Summer to Die
I realized that whilst crying over the loss, the living did not seem adequate because they were not my loved one. The room full of strangers hurt me profusely. Even as I saw thousands of young people; I felt incomplete and more saddened because the one I wanted to see was buried.
— Phindiwe Nkosi, Behind the Hospital
When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.
— Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
I can’t shake you.
— Sina Queyras, MxT
I let myself relax into the pattern of the recipe.
— Jael McHenry
I can't take this pain away for her. I can't make it better. It's all I want to do - make it better - make her feel better, but I understand grief. It's a bitch. Grief has to work itself out. It can either consume you or you can move on and at this point it's consuming her.
— Renee Dyer, Waking Up
It could be the sound of each name he knows/curling to ash in his chest’s aortic furnace one after another, year after year instructing him/in the patient work of letting go. Even still/there are things it is reluctant to unclasp./How the Osage orange trunks and bare limbs/glow in the scattered light like veins of fire.
— Bryan Penberthy
It preoccupies me until it's time to leave. It seems such the right expression of grief. I am sad, so in whatever small way I can, I will tear myself apart. They've taken what's on the inside and made it visible. If I thought it wouldn't be inappropriate I'd do it myself.
— Jael McHenry
They had not yet started out across a continent of grief that a lifetime of walking could not cover.
— Sebastian Junger, A Death in Belmont
The house cleared, I shut myself in, fastened the bolt that none might intrude, and proceeded—not to weep, not to mourn, I was yet too calm for that, but—mechanically to take off the wedding dress, and replace it by the stuff gown I had worn yesterday, as I thought, for the last time. I then sat down: I felt weak and tired. I leaned my arms on a table, and my head dropped on them. And now I thought: till now I had only heard, seen, moved—followed up and down where I was led or dragged—watched event rush on event, disclosure open beyond disclosure: but now, I thought.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Stop your weeping. Grief is for the dead.
— Brom, Krampus: The Yule Lord
It happened. It was awful. You aren't perfect. That's all there is. Don't confuse your grief with guilt."We stay in the silence and the loneliness of the otherwise empty dormitory for a few more minutes, and I try to let her words work themselves into me.
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
It’s not TIME that heals everything, it is SLEEP...Sleeping is the perfect answer to all doubts and troubles.Leaving the world of reality behind and disappearing in to a world of make-believe and imaginations, is a solace you get from nothing else...
— Sanhita Baruah, Uff Ye Emotions
Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.
— Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
What if you wake up one fine morning only to realize that the life you have been living since the last few days was nothing but a dream of yours?Would you go back to sleep then?I wake up each morning only to realize you're not by my side. And if this emptiness is nothing but a nightmare, let me wake up and go back to the time we were together...
— Sanhita Baruah
He saw her red eyes filled with tears of anger. "Tell me why this rage?" He asked holding her in his arms. "Why do you fence for yourself so much?She sighed and muttered, "Because all I really want is nothing but to be proved wrong.
— Sanhita Baruah
A grieving person's like a person treading in deep water--if they've nothing to hold on to, they lose hope. They slide right under.
— Susanna Kearsley, The Winter Sea
The bastard. How dare he? I was drowning in a fucking river that he was still attempting to save me from, and he was telling me he was going to push me back in and hold me under. My father's death had nearly destroyed me. Cal's death would finish me.
— T.J. Klune, Into This River I Drown
If you've been hurt and you've grieved and you've been through the mill, it takes a long time to get over it.
— Sara Sheridan
You don't have to tell me you're fine. I'm not fine. You're not fine either. We can be honest with each other about that, can't we?' I say. The sides of her face tense as tries to stop herself from crying, but she can't.There is something about her grief that makes mine less exclusive. Less like my world isn’t the only one falling apart.
— Dawn O'Porter, Paper Aeroplanes
And it didn't matter. It wouldn't make a fucking difference if I dropped to the floor and started crying like a baby. No point in panicking. No point in breaking. No point in anything at all.
— Lisa Henry, Dark Space
It seemed as if the valley were not always girded by woods, growing on the surrounding hills and facing away from the horizon, but the trees had only taken up their places now, rising out of the ground to offer their condolences. He almost waved away the tangible beauty of the hour like a crowd of persistent friends, almost said to the lingering afterglow, 'thank you, thank you, I'll be all right.' 
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
The heart aches in brokenness as daylight awakens the pain of knowing.
— Phindiwe Nkosi
The graces are restless today. They pweet and muss, shuddering their wings so that the feathers stick out at defensive angles. I feel that restlessness too. When the sea is fractious like this – when it chutters and schwaks against the moorings, when it won't talk but only mumbles – it's difficult to think.
— Kirsty Logan, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales
In all his imaginings, he had never envisioned her crying. He knew that her son had died, but he'd never expected that her pain might be anything he could recognize, almost as though he believed that Negroes had their own special kind of grieving ritual, another language, something other than tears they used to express their sadness.
— Bebe Moore Campbell, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine
'I think that's why his asking me to pull the plug hurt so much. He kept saying if I really loved him, I should have been able to do it. And I thought, if he really loved me, he would never have asked.' 
— Barbara Elsborg, Cowboys Down
Grief can be an incredible source of energy. For good.
— Peter Gould, Write Naked
For grief has always been so dear to you that you would make me writhing in pain in the brothel of your imaginations than to be playing with a bunch of balloons in the yard where I should have been.""And may be that's why, you'd rather talk to me about this, than to write a story about me where I could live happily.
— Sanhita Baruah
Eby knew all too well that there was a fine line when it came to grief. If you ignore it, it goes away, but then it always comes back when you least expect it. If you let it stay, if you make a place for it in your life, it gets too comfortable and it never leaves. It was best to treat grief like a guest. You acknowledge it, you cater to it, then you send it on its way.
— Sarah Addison Allen, Lost Lake
Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.
— Stephen King, Bag of Bones
I have become a sour woman. I take no joy in meat nor mead, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.
— George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress. A vermin-eaten saint scratching his filth for heaven is better off than you damned in clean linen. Progress doubles our tenure in a vale of tears. Man is a mistake, to be corrected only by his abolition, which he gives promise of seeing to himself. Oh, let him pass, and leave the earth to the flowers that carpet the earth wherever he explodes his triumphs. Man is inconsolable, thanks to that eternal "Why?" when there is no Why, that question mark twisted like a fishhook in the human heart. "Let there be light," we cry, and only the dawn breaks.
— Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb
Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.
— Joan Didion
Grief is not very different from illness: in the impetus of its fire it does not recognise lords, it does not fear colleagues, it does not respect or spare anyone, not even it
— Eleanor of Aquitaine, The Letter Collections Of Peter Of Blois: Studies In The Manuscript Tradition
The sun still, surprisingly, came up and shone down onto the cold, metal leftovers. No loud noises. No screams. No breaking glass. Just silence and sunshine. You would be forgiven for thinking that this all happened on another planet. It didn’t.
— pleasefindthis, I Wrote This For You
I didn't cry. Real things don't make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I'm like most civilised humans.
— Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.
— Joan Didion
Happiness is a choice, To make a choice is utilizing your freewill to choose. Courage is getting out of your own way to let Happiness happen in your life in Abundance!
— Sereda Aleta Dailey, The Art of Manifesting Abundance
We don't get to choose the things that happen to us in life. What we can choose is how to react to them, how we deal with them, and how we move on.
— Sarah Winter
(The death of his child) "was the first experience of his life, so far as we know, which drove him to look outside of his own mind and heart for help to endure a personal grief. It was the first time in his life when he had not been sufficient for his own experience.
— Elton Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln: Lessons in Spiritual Leadership
Lincoln matured best in sorrow.
— Elton Trueblood, Abraham Lincoln: Lessons in Spiritual Leadership
She loved your mother', Taliesin said gently. 'This is her farewell.' As he spoke, a chanted melody began inside the chamber, a song without words. Yet it spoke of the beauty in the heart of the flame, of the passing glory of the white bird on the wing, and the blossom of the sea spray under the shining prow. It sang of a mother with her baby, of the hard love between men and women, and the gentle rest that comes at last to all.
— Rosalind Miles, Guenevere, Queen of the Summer Country
Nothing stood between Sheryl's heart and skin. She was whole in her sorrow, perfectly connected inside and out, soul and body united, swaying with complete abandon to a dirge that only she could hear.
— Athol Dickson, They Shall See God
She's dead, you stupid cat. She's dead.
— Suzanne Collins
Living in this city, you developed a certain relationship with violence and news of violence: you expected it, dreaded it, and then when it happened, you worked hard to look away from it, because there was nothing you could do about it - not even grieve, because you knew that it would happen again and maybe in a way that was worse than before. Grieving is possible only when you know you have come to an end, when there is nothing more to follow. This city was full of bottled-up grief.
— Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here is too Great
In the monotony of everyday existence grief comes as a holiday, and a fire is an entertainment. A scratch embellishes an empty face.
— Maxim Gorky, My Childhood
I felt bad for trying to live a happy, full life, while my heart was buried in a dead man’s chest.
— Kristen Hope Mazzola, Crashing Back Down
Isn’t it tragic that sometimes it takes grief to understand what we have held so dear?
— Priscille Sibley, The Promise of Stardust
Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling myself forward when I felt like a building with legs.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
I try to remember everything, every thing, but sometimes I forget something. I don’t even know what it is sometimes, but I know it’s not coming to me, something about him isn’t coming to me and when that happens, when a piece is missing, it makes me crazy. I don’t know what to do with that.
— Adam Berlin
I will bear this grief, I will endure it. I will reach a point where it doesn't kick me down an abyss whenever I turn my back on it.
— Jim Beaver, Life's That Way
And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all -- we shake our fists at the big, beautiful, indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress.
— Aimee Bender, The Color Master: Stories
Rage and grief are savage companions, but despair is the final undoing.
— Mia Farrow, What Falls Away: A Memoir
I'll remember you, he thinks, and as the gun carriage, with its coffin and its dented helmet pass him by, he closes his eyes.Nothing will bring them back. Not the words of comfortable men. Not the words of politicians. Or the platitudes of paid poets.
— Anna Hope, Wake
Although it seems shocking to say so, grief is a funny thing. On the one hand, you're numb, yet on the other, something inside is trying desperately to claw its way back to normal: to pull a funny face, to leap out like a jack-in-the-box, to say "Smile, damn you, smile!
— Alan Bradley, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches
Man only likes counting his grief, he doesn't count his happiness. But if he were to count properly, he'd see that there's enough of both lots for him.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
Eustasia Johannsen was ready. Anyone could see that. Everything about her ancient self gave evidence to it: Her skin, wrinkled and transparent... But mainly, it was her eyes. They were drawn into her face as if her memories occupied more of her sight than what was actually in front of her.
— Clare Vanderpool, Navigating Early
The cross, therefore, is always ready; it awaits you everywhere. No matter where you may go, you cannot escape it, for wherever you go you take yourself with you and shall always find yourself. Turn where you will—above, below, without, or within—you will find a cross in everything, and everywhere you must have patience if you would have peace within and merit an eternal crown.
— Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ
I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant—step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word.
— Paul Harding, Enon
I pulled a dirty black sweatshirt from the laundry basket on my son’s floor and tried to drink in his scent, to savor the essence of my sweet boy. I inhaled it long and hard, wanting to permanently implant all of him in my brain, to make him last forever.
— Shelley Ramsey, Grief: A Mama's Unwanted Journey
Like young fern shootsmy child's fingers curled.I did not expect,in the fifth month, frost.
— Lian Hearn, Heaven's Net is Wide
It’s a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck.
— Mark Slouka
He wept bitter tears over the death of his enemy. It was his enemy, after all, who knew him best and kept him up at night.
— Donna Lynn Hope
... being with people who don't understand is worse than being alone with her grief.
— Kerry Cohen Hoffmann, It's Not You, It's Me
my soul has shadows – nooks and crannies where griefs, like cobwebs, collect
— John Geddes
My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport. 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
I force myself to think of anything but the one thing that I'm actually always thinking about. And that is so exhausting that I sleep more than I ever have.
— Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s
I somehow make it through the first month. I dress and brush my teeth when they tell me to. And I experience the hollow feeling of complete loss, which is emptiness.
— Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s
I made an attempt to reach him in his grief. I said, "I've had this pain. To tell you it will go away would be a lie. It will never go away. But, if you live long enough, it will cease to torture and will instead favor you. As we rely on the bitterness of strong tea to wake us, this too will become something you can use.
— Eli Brown, Cinnamon and Gunpowder
Regardless of what you've been through we all process energy differently.
— Turcois Ominek
For me, adoption was grief in reverse.
— Jody Cantrell Dyer, The Eye of Adoption: The True Story of My Turbulent Wait for a Baby
Listen with your heart, not your brain. the heart only knows TRUTH!
— Sherri Bridges Fox, I Will See You Again: A Mother's Story and Sacred Journey After Finding Her Son's Lifeless Body
It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
When someone you love...when they die, you want it undone. You'd do anything to have them back, and it's easy to believe that if only this had happened or that had happened, everything would be fine. And that's what makes you angry. What makes you hate. You don't want to believe that sometimes bad things happen just because they do.
— Elizabeth Scott, Heartbeat
I was angry with him before. I’m not really sure why. Maybe I was just angry that the world had become such a complicated place, that I have never known even a fraction of the truth about it. Or that I allowed myself to grieve for someone who was never really gone, the same way I grieved for my mother all the years I thought she was dead. Tricking someone into grief is one of the cruelest tricks a person can play, and it’s been played on me twice.
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
How can it be that there is such a colossal gap between what we think we know about grief and mourning and what we actually find out when it comes to us?
— Jim Beaver, Life's That Way
Sometimes there aren't words, Benny knew. Sometimes there are hurts so deep that they exist in a country that has no spoken language, a place where all landscapes are blighted and no sun ever shines. Benny had left his footprints in the dust of that place.
— Jonathan Maberry, Fire & Ash
When we share in each other's grief and pain, we lighten it. Or maybe we just give each other permission to feel it fully and, through that act of acceptance, the grief becomes more bearable. Because, like the rain, tears too have an end. And with deep emotions, we are open to each other in unexpected ways.
— Karpov Kinrade, When the Heart Falls
Grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels....
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitoes.
— Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier
I've attempted to flood the path with light where I could, and where I could not I've wanted at least to hold up a candle so that others coming this way might not stumble too painfully.
— Jim Beaver, Life's That Way
I tell you hopeless grief is passionless,That only men incredulous of despair,Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight airBeat upward to God’s throne in loud accessOf shrieking and reproach. Full desertnessIn souls, as countries, lieth silent-bareUnder the blanching, vertical eye-glareOf the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, expressGrief for thy dead in silence like to death— Most like a monumental statue setIn everlasting watch and moveless woeTill itself crumble to the dust beneath.Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet;If it could weep, it could arise and go.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The times might be unpleasant, repulsive. The ghastly chaos, the abhorrent uncivility might be intolerable, might force us into argument or leave us panic-stricken.On such occasions people build within themselves a conviction, that the world outside is diabolical. The whimsical insults test our level of endurance causing us to plead for mercy, wanting us to be pitied than exploited and victimized. Often this grief and shame form a delusion within us that there no longer exists good in this world, that good people are fictitious and that goodness has lost its definition altogether. But such is not true because there are still people who are virtuous, unselfish, willing to help and possessing the ability of restoring our faith in humanity, to disregard them, their presence would be as heinous as the deeds of the people who are unlike them. The times might be unpleasant, repulsive but we’ll come out it, unharmed and liberated.
— Chirag Tulsiani
Cooper's tremendous love and energy and unchained freedom had captured life itself. Now, as the last shovelful covered him forever, I knew I would always carry a big piece of Cooper Half Malamute with me until I too was covered by the earth.
— Peter Jenkins, A Walk Across America
Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face.
— Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing
Grief keeps coming back with the same things in its hands — you know this. You know that the hands of grief are memory. Again and again, grief holds the same few things.
— Lindsay  Hill, Sea of Hooks
I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it springs, I think, from a negation of death, as if by summoning and arranging these subjective images one were in some way cheating the objective fact. It is, I believe, an entirely instinctive process, and the distress it brings with it is an incidental, a by-product, rather than a masochistic end.
— Gavin Maxwell, Ring of Bright Water
The man raised the violin under his chin, placed the bow across the strings, and closed his eyes. For a moment his lips moved, silently, as if in prayer. Then, with sure, steady movements, he began to play. The song was like nothing Abbey had heard anywhere else. The notes were clear, sweet and perfect, with a purity of tone that not one violin in ten thousand could produce. But the song was more than that. The song was pain, and loss, and sorrow, an anthem of unrelenting grief for which no words could be sufficient. In its strains Abbey heard the cry of the mother clutching her lifeless child; of the young woman whose husband never returned from war; of the father watching his son die of cancer; of the old man weeping at his wife's grave. It was the wordless cry of every man, woman and child who had ever shaken a fist at the uncaring universe, every stricken heart that had demanded an answer to the question, “Why?”, and was left unsatisfied.When the song finally, mercifully ended, not a dry eye remained in the darkened hall. The shades had moved in among the mortals, unseen by all but Abbey herself, and crowded close to the stage, heedless of all but the thing that called to them. Many of the mortals in the audience were sobbing openly. Those newcomers who still retained any sense of their surroundings were staring up at the man, their eyes wide with awe and a silent plea for understa
— Chris Lester, Whispers in the Wood
I root through your remains,looking for the black box. Nothing leftbut glossy chunks, a pimp’s platinumtooth clanking inside the urn. I play youover and over, my beloved conspiracy,my personal Zapruder film
— Erin Belieu
All I have besides food is grief.
— Jael McHenry, The Kitchen Daughter
Just as a snowflakewent on to feed a puddle that filled a stream and then the river, thepumpkin patch is a gathering of molecules from my old goats, chickens,and cats, feeding the underworld of dirt creatures. And somewhere, myfather’s ashes mingle with birds, air, and sea.
— Katherine  Dunn, Misfits of Love: Healing Conversations in the Barnyard
The digging continues ... Ground Zero it looks more and more like a construction site. Too much of the horror is gone. No fire. No smoke ... What was war becomes peace, becomes peaceful. But in the coil of my testicles there's an angry residue and in places I can't even name, places inside my throat and behind my chest, I'm sad, and sometimes worse than sad, less than sad, a cavity of empty.
— Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing
The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins with love and ends with grief.
— Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds
Love is love, and loss is loss. We all love, and we all die, and everyone suffers the pain of grieving. The trick is to enjoy what you have while you have it.
— Lynsay Sands, Tall, Dark & Hungry
Dysphagia is the medical term for not being able to swallow, and I know that there are two kinds of dysphagia: oropharyngeal and esophageal. But maybe there is also a third kind of dysphagia that comes when your heart breaks into pieces. I can't swallow because I have that kind.
— Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s
A beloved daughter who now spent holidays alone.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Slowly, painfully, I let go. It was like prying my own fingers off the edge of the cliff. And that hurt too-particularly the falling part, and not being sure what was at the b
— Robin McKinley, Shadows
Can you become a man without becoming your father?
— Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men
Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse.
— John Donne, Alchimie der Liebe. Gedichte, zweisprachig
Rest in peace? Please, God, no. Haunt me, Sofia. You said you'd haunt me.
— Helen Maryles Shankman, The Color of Light
My experience is that God will meet us anywhere. Grieving badly and under the covers? He's there. Sitting at the cemetery, wishing it were you? You're not alone. Sitting on your child's bedroom floor still in your nightgown in the middle of the afternoon? He's holding you up. God will meet you anywhere
— Shelley Ramsey, Grief: A Mama's Unwanted Journey
Grief is like a journey one must take on a winding mountainside, often seeing the same scenery many times, a road which eventually leads to somewhere we've never been before.
— Gladys M. Hunt
Just days after Joseph died, we sat down to eat dinner at the dining room table. We each sat there, choking down our food, tears streaming down our faces, and no one speaking. There was no one in his chair; his side of the table had a gaping hole. A large part of the nightly conversation was missing. Everything felt wrong.
— Shelley Ramsey, Grief: A Mama's Unwanted Journey
Many people tried comforting us with words. But there are no consoling words! I really just wanted people to be quiet. I appreciated those who cried with me, hugged me, and offered a brief prayer, but words were unnecessary.
— Shelley Ramsey, Grief: A Mama's Unwanted Journey
Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she'll know how to find me. She'll look for the cardinal, drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Whereever the cardinal is, I will be.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
She looked around for a place to be. A small place. The closet? ... It was both small and bright, and she wanted to be in a very small, very bright place. Small enough to contain her grief.Bright enough to throw into relief the dark things that cluttered her.Once inside, she sank to the tile floor next to the toilet. On her knees, her hand on the cold rim of the bathtub, she waited for something to happen…inside.
— Toni Morrison, Sula
As I lay in my bed unable to sleep I challenged Him: Pull out another miracle. Send him back. You can do that. You’re God. At that point in my grief, I envisioned how utterly fantastic it would be for others to see what a mighty and awesome God we serve. They could witness a modern-day miracle! I was convinced the only way for this to happen was for God to send Joseph back. It would be a win/win situation! Dozens would come to know Jesus—and —I’d have Joseph home in time for supper.
— Shelley Ramsey, Grief: A Mama's Unwanted Journey
I stood there, staring at my clothes. What does a mama wear to her son’s funeral? I looked over my wardrobe.There were outfits purchased for work, church, and casual weekends but nothing to wear to the burial of my seventeen-year-old son.
— Shelley Ramsey, Grief: A Mama's Unwanted Journey
For several decades, I said I believed in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit and had put my confidence in Him. The hot crucible of grief was my place to back up what I said I believed and admit to myself who my God really was: The God I claimed to know, or a false god who can be manipulated into resolving the external circumstances of my life.
— Shelley Ramsey, Grief: A Mama's Unwanted Journey
Bereavement seemed to work on him as a kind of blanket allergy, making him edgy and irritable to all the outside world. And of course it was reciprocal; the world receded on him.
— Peter R. Pouncey, Rules for Old Men Waiting
Closure is just as delusive-it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.
— Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
Adam's lips are set in a grime line. I can't tell if he's about to cry or about to punch the guard. For his sake, I hope it's the former. For you own, I hope the latter.
— Gayle Forman, If I Stay
In the end I didn't know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.
— Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
— Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye
There are places I cannot visit. Places of unbearable sadness, grief, mourning. They say places are made by people. I say places are defined by the memories they conjure—the lunge of a curse, a shared and shattered history, a loved one drowned and lost in the ocean of forgetting.
— Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn't appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya's death was unable to affect it: to her, he was still alive.She was mad, but no one had noticed. Now, at last, she had found Tolya. Her joy was like that of a mother-cat when she finds her dead kitten and licks it all over.A soul can live in torment for years and years, even decades, as it slowly, stone by stone, builds a mound over a grave; as it moves towards the apprehension of eternal loss and bows down before reality.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
A long while yet will you keep that great mother's grief. But it will turn in the end into quiet joy, and your bitter tears will be only tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart and delivers it from sin.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
It has taken me four years to figure this out.If we live long enough, we all will experience this.Don’t ever predetermine how you think that you should feel on an anniversary of a tragic event in your life, such as a death of a loved one, or on a holiday after such an event.Each year starts out with 365 days, and I will be damned if I am giving up even one of them to misery.
— JohnA Passaro
Tearless grief bleeds inwardly
— Christian Nestell Bovee
I am convinced it is, then our churches are filled with believers who are hurting, to one degree or another, whether visible or unseen. Some come every Sunday clinging to a thread of hope that somehow the church will be the body of Christ that supports them, offers a word of hope, and helps them find a way to walk through the storm with God instead of without God.
— Glenn Pemberton, Hurting with God
Scott is gone.I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward.
— Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
He would roam about the world carrying his recollections with him, and perhaps some day he would come to forget them, for one can live only by forgetting; but when his grief should dissolve with the years he would be left an empty man, like a smiling automaton, incapable of any affections other than meterial ones.
— Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Luna Benamor
All my life I'd been a believing Christian. ... But that instant in the ER--the instant Annette [his wife] died--I seemed to feel my religious faith die
— William M. Bass
A whole Gothic world had come to grief...there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled...
— Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
Grief is a stern teacher, but I am confident I could not have learned some lessons in any other way. For that, I am grateful. Grateful to God for loving me enough to stretch me and push me and crush me, to refine me in the furnace of affliction, to force me to stretch my faith beyond what I could see. God loves me more than I can possible comprehend. He watches over me. He watches over all of us. But if the way were easy, how could we grow into who He wants us to be? How could our faith become unshakable?
— Jennifer Beckstrand, Kate's Song
To kill was to be doomed. To kill was to die, yourself.
— Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself
I felt like the sky around me was closing me in. Trapping me in some sort of bubble where time stands still and grief would linger on forever.
— Molli Fields, Returning Home
For someone grieving, moving forward is the challenge. Because after extreme loss, you want to go back.
— Holly Goldberg Sloan, Counting by 7s
I believe that sometimes, the moment you say goodbye could be as painful as a lifetime worth of pain that you can experience while living with the memories of your loved ones. I couldn’t stop myself from hallucinating about all those things that could have happened, while you were walking away from me today. I stopped walking and turned my head, expecting for you to do the same. I stayed there, motionless, and waited – for you to turn once, to smile, or wave. But you didn’t. You just continued walking away from me, while I stayed there watching your silhouette becoming smaller, and smaller with time, until it disappeared completely. There was nothing else to wait. “What happened?” she asked me when I turned my head again towards the platform.“She let me go, finally,” was all I could say.
— Bhavya Kaushik
In truth, nothing was the same. She forgot about the stars… and taking notice of the sea. She was no longer filled with all the curiosities of the world and didn’t take much notice of anything… other than how heavy… and awkward the bottle had become.
— Oliver Jeffers, The Heart and the Bottle
To this day, she’s still sad. Because there’s not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I’m just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn’t hurt me at all.
— Tom Perrotta, The Leftovers
Contrary to what a lot of people believe (or hope), comfort doesn’t take the pain away. Comfort slides in beside the pain, pulling up a chair so that we have something more than sorrow in our hearts. Comfort gently expands our spirits so that we can breathe again. Comfort opens our eyes so that we can see possibility again. And on those days, whether it is the next day or five years removed, on that day when grief rears its dark head again, comfort helps us remember that pain is not all there is
— Peggy Haymes, Strugglers, Stragglers and Seekers: daily devotions for the rest of us
The dirty secret she’d learned about grief was that nobody wanted to hear about your loss a week after the funeral. People you’d once considered friends would turn their heads in church or cross to another side of a shopping mall to avoid the contamination of your suffering. “You might imagine I’m coping day by day,” she murmured. “But it’s more a case of hour by hour, and during my worst times, minute by minute.
— Susan Dormady Eisenberg, The Voice I Just Heard
I look at people who aren’t us and I hate them.
— Kristin Hannah, Night Road
I slept and I woke. She gave me a ring made from a leaf, a cluster of golden berries, a flower that opened and closed at the stroking of a finger....And once, when I startled awake with my face wet and my chest aching, she reached out to lay her hand on top of mine. The gesture was so tentative, her expression so anxious, you would think she had never touched a man before. As if she was worried I might break or burn or bite. Her cool hand lay on mine for a moment, gentle as a moth. She squeezed my hand softly, waited, then pulled away.It struck me as odd at the time. But I was too clouded with confusion and grief to think clearly. Only now, looking back, do I realize the truth of things. With all the awkwardness of a young lover, she was trying to comfort me, and she didn't have the slightest idea how.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
Be still, my soul, be still; the arms you bear are brittle,Earth and high heaven are fixt of old and founded strong.Think rather,--call to thought, if now you grieve a little,The days when we had rest, O soul, for they were long.Men loved unkindness then, but lightless in the quarryI slept and saw not; tears fell down, I did not mourn;Sweat ran and blood sprang out and I was never sorry:Then it was well with me, in days ere I was born.Now, and I muse for why and never find the reason,I pace the earth, and drink the air, and feel the sun.Be still, be still, my soul; it is but for a season:Let us endure an hour and see injustice done.Ay, look: high heaven and earth ail from the prime foundation;All thoughts to rive the heart are here, and all are vain:Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation--Oh why did I awake? when shall I sleep again?
— A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad
In our springtime there is no better,there is no worse.Blossoming branches burgeon as the must.Some are long,some are short.'Stay upright.Stay with life.
— Cyril Pedrosa, Three Shadows
That first shrink I saw when I got back to Clayton Falls told me no one is a lost cause, but I think that’s bullshit. I think people can be so crushed, so broken, that they’ll never be anything more than a fragment of a whole person.
— Chevy Stevens, Still Missing
I managed to ask a question that had been burning inside me. “Do you still love her? Rose?” Along with not knowing what it felt like to be in love, I also didn’t know how long it took to recover from love.Adrian’s smile faded. His gaze turned inward. “Yes. No. It’s hard to get over someone like that. She had a huge effect on me, both good and bad. That’s hard to move past. I try not to think about her much in terms of love and hate. Mostly I’m trying to get on with my life. With mixed results, unfortunately.
— Richelle Mead, Bloodlines
On April 18, 1906, when that earthquake hit San Francisco and took David from her, Vivien began to speak the language of grief. She understood that grief is not neat and orderly; it does not follow any rules. Time does not heal it. Rather, time insists on passing, and as it does, grief changes but does not go away. Sometimes she could actually visualize her grief. It was a wave, a tsunami that came unexpectedly and swept her away. She could see it, a wall of pain that had grabbed hold of her and pulled her under. Some days, she could reach the air and breathe in huge comforting gulps. Some days she barely broke the surface, and still, after all this time, some days it consumed her and she wondered if there was any way free of it.
— Ann Hood, The Obituary Writer
At Abraham's burial, his two most prominent sons, rivals since before they were born, estranged since childhood, scions of rival nations, come together for the first time since they were rent apart nearly three-quarters of a century earlier. The text reports their union nearly without comment. "His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, facing Mamre, in the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites." But the meaning of this moment cannot be diminished. Abraham achieves in death what he could never achieve in life: a moment of reconciliation between his two sons, a peaceful, communal, side-by-side flicker of possibility in which they are not rivals, scions, warriors, adversaries, children, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. They are brothers. They are mourners. In a sense they are us, forever weeping for the loss of our common father, shuffling through our bitter memories, reclaiming our childlike expectations, laughing, sobbing, furious and full of dreams, wondering about our orphaned future, and demanding the answers we all crave to hear: What did you want from me, Father? What did you leave me with, Father? And what do I do now?
— Bruce Feiler, Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths
Even as she listened to murmurs of support, she heard the relief in other people’s voices, the immense gratitude that it wasn’t their child who had died. She heard I’m so sorry until she despised those words as she had never despised anything in her life, and she discovered an anger in her soul that was new.
— Kristin Hannah, Night Road
And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again.
— Orson Scott Card, Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card
But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.
— Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness
I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. Dana cried over Mrs. Hilton. My eyes filled during the nightly news. Obviously we were grieving for ourselves, but we were also thinking that if they were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it? We were grieving for them, too. I understand that later you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.
— Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief
Although it was autumn and not summer the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and slender in the shape of felled cypresses, were the same, and there was the same sense of everything drenched and jewelled and the same ultramarine glitter on the sea. I felt inexplicably lightened; it was as if the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had temporarily taken over from me the burden of grieving.
— John Banville, The Sea
Weeping is terrible for the complexion,' said Leonie, holding Shayndel close, 'but it is very good for the heart.
— Anita Diamant, Day After Night