c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid.Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.
— Mark  Lawrence, Prince of Fools
Ah, grief makes us precise!
— Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
The only way to end grief was to go through it.
— Holly Black, The Darkest Part of the Forest
Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. […] It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.
— Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Then he holds her and for a moment I hear total silence; that totally silent part of a cry that announces that the most horrible grief is going to follow. And it does, and he's muffling it, but I can hear and I want someone to come over and jab her with a sedative because its pitch pierces my soul.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
Now I know that grief is a whetstone that sharpens all your love, all your happiest memories, into blades that tear you apart from within.
— Claudia Gray, A Thousand Pieces of You
Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.
— Alison Bechdel
It's better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won't get it.
— Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl
The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away.
— Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.
— Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories
For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
How could she just leave me here to live without her? I miss her so much. I love her. I want her to grow up and become who she was meant to be. I wanted her to grow up with me.
— Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
Losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
Her grief still burdened her, and she knew she would bear it the rest of her days.
— Dana Fuller Ross, Independence!
I hate that I'm so numb and empty and disconnected from most of these people but even I can see worth in stupid little moments like these. These people aren't even my family, but I can see their value and if I can see it in something this small, when I feel this bad, then---Then why didn't he?
— Courtney Summers, Fall for Anything
we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Heart weeps.Head tries to help heart.Head tells heart how it is, again:You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.Heart feels better, then.But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.Heart is so new to this.I want them back, says heart.Head is all heart has.Help, head. Help heart.
— Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance
When you lose your parents, the sadness doesn't go away. It just changes. It hits you sideways sometimes instead of head-on. Like now.
— Jude Watson, In Too Deep
Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.
— Stephen King, Lisey's Story
Life Lesson 3: You can't rush grief. It has its own timetable. All you can do is make sure there are lots of soft places around -- beds, pillows, arms, laps.
— Patti   Davis, Two Cats and the Woman They Own: or Lessons I Learned from My Cats
It was the meanest moment of eternity.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
It may be a cat, a bird, a ferret, or a guinea pig, but the chances are high that when someone close to you dies, a pet will be there to pick up the slack. Pets devour the loneliness. They give us purpose, responsibility, a reason for getting up in the morning, and a reason to look to the future. They ground us, help us escape the grief, make us laugh, and take full advantage of our weakness by exploiting our furniture, our beds, and our refrigerator. We wouldn't have it any other way. Pets are our seat belts on the emotional roller coaster of life--they can be trusted, they keep us safe, and they sure do smooth out the ride.
— Nick Trout, Tell Me Where It Hurts: A Day of Humor, Healing, and Hope in My Life as an Animal Surgeon
Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.
— Elizabeth McCracken
Forgive my grief for one removedThy creature whom I found so fairI trust he lives in Thee and thereI find him worthier to be loved.
— Alfred Tennyson
Grief loves the hollow
—  all it wants is to hear its own echo.
Seems," madam? Nay, it is; I know not "seems."'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly: these indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play: But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Someone might as well roll up the whole sky, pack it away for good.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.
— Gail Caldwell, Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
When a relationship of love is disrupted, the relationship does not cease. The love continues; therefore, the relationship continues. The work of grief is to reconcile and redeem life to a different love relationship.
— W. Scott Lineberry
I had problems a therapist couldn't solve
—  grief that no man in a room could ameliorate.
I do not believe that grief is ever so great that it can not be contained within.
— Judith McNaught, Once and Always
While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.
— Samuel Johnson
I'm not prepared for Rue's family. Her parents, whose faces are still fresh with sorrow. Her fiver younger siblings, who resemble her so closely. The slight builds, the luminous brown eyes. They form a flock of small dark birds.
— Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire
Grief, she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.
— Orson Scott Card, Xenocide
Tears of grief are unique. They contain chemicals that aren't found in the more mundane droplets of moisture that bathe the eyes, as if our tears wash us free of some noxious cause of sorrow. And tonight, after crying until I am empty, I have a rare glimpse of my own interior landscape - wounds piled like tiny skeletons into the reef of conscious adult life. I am aground amid my conquered traumas, stranded as a consequence of my achievements.
— Carol Cassella
Grief wraps around people, takes them to a place they would not go otherwise.
— Patti Callahan Henry, Between The Tides
...grief had no mercy, time limit, or expiration date.
— Rebecca Yarros, Full Measures
Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so long he refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair
I wonder if I cry whether my tears would be gray.
— Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It
Some grief shows much of love,But much of grief shows still some want of wit.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
He'd lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Choice
I loathe a friend whose gratitude grows old, a friend who takes his friend's prosperity but will not voyage with him in his grief
— Euripides
Tears have always been easier to shed than explain.
— Marty Rubin
But Balthamos couldn't tell; he only knew that half his heart had been extinguished. He couldn't keep still: he flew up again, scouring the sky as if to seek out Baruch in this cloud or that, calling, crying, calling; and then he'd be overcome with guilt, and fly down to urge Will to hide and keep quiet, and promise to watch over him tirelessly; and then the pressure of his grief would crush him to the ground, and he'd remember every instance of kindness and courage that Baruch had ever shown, and there were thousands, and he'd forgotten none of them; and he'd cry that a nature so gracious could ever be snuffed out, and he'd soar into the skies again, casting about in every direction, reckless and wild and stricken, cursing the air, the clouds, the stars.
— Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.
— Seneca
I tried to shut out the feelings that were hurting my heart with a thousand tiny pinpricks, which was somehow worse that having it broken all at once.
— Morgan Matson, Second Chance Summer
For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms.
— Lurlene McDaniel, Hit and Run
moving on means we have to protect ourselves.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on
— Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same
Wait.” Stefan’s voice was hard suddenly. Bonnie and Elena turned back and froze, embracing each other, trembling. “What is your—your father—going to do to you when he finds out that you allowed th
— L.J. Smith, Midnight
He sought...to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it--that disgusts me
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Someone carries my belief that raises hope in me, but flame didn’t last for long
— Durgesh Satpathy, Equating the Equations of Insanity: A Journey from Grief to Victory
Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.
— Sophocles, Antigone
I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it.
— David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
— Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Then, instead of telling her that where there was life there was hope, or to let a smile be her umbrella, or that it was always darkest just before the dawn, or anything else that had just lately fallen out of the dog's ass, she simply held her. Because sometimes only holding was best. That was one of the things she had taught that man whose last name she had taken for her own--that sometimes it was best to be quiet; sometimes it was best to just shut your everlasting mouth and hang on, hang on, hang on.
— Stephen King, Lisey's Story
Food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate. 
— Alan D. Wolfelt
A selfish person can still love someone else, can't they? Even when they've hurt them and let them down.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
When things get really bad, you take comfort in the placeness of a place.
— Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake
We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. I know, he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aidbeing ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbellyof a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times Istayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that Iwould not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that myfather worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to comehome to a house that felt too big for us.
— Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper
Edgar, do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone? There's no rule book that says how to do this." She laughed, bitterly. "Wouldn't that be great? No decisions to make. Everything laid right out for us. But there's no such thing. You want facts, don't you? Rules. Proof. You're like your father that way. Just because a thing can't be logged, charted, and summarized doesn't mean it isn't real. Half the time we walk around in love with the idea of a thing instead of the reality of it. But sometimes things don't turn out that way. You have to pay attentin to what's real, what's in the world. Not some imaginary alternative, as if it's a choice we could make.
— David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.
— James Thurber
When stupidity reaches its highest level, we act rubbish knowingly
— Durgesh Satpathy, Equating the Equations of Insanity: A Journey from Grief to Victory
If he didn’t love so deeply, he couldn’t grieve so deeply. But he’s drowning in it.
— Dee Henderson, The Protector
The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it.
— Rob Sheffield, Love Is a Mix Tape
It's like she has her heart in her hand and it's broken. She's holding it out and showing me all the little pieces. Or maybe it's my heart.
— Nyrae Dawn, Façade
Your tale is of the longest," observed Monks, moving restlessly in his chair.It is a true tale of grief and trial, and sorrow, young man," returned Mr. Brownlow, "and such tales usually are; if it were one of unmixed joy and happiness, it would be very brief.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Her free hand was clenched in a fist. I held still, waiting for her to say something, to tell me she should have never left me here, where her friends might look to me for help.Finally she looked at me. Her eyes were hard, but she'd let no tears fall. "This is where we blame those who are responsible, Cooper, she told me, her voice very soft. "The colemongers, and the bought Dogs at Tradesmen's kennel. We'll leave an offering for him with the Black God when all this is done, and we'll occupy ourselves with tearing these colemongers apart. all right? We put grief aside for now.
— Tamora Pierce, Bloodhound
When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, "Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends"(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds, "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me." (III,ii, 371-380)
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.
— John Banville
There are degrees of obsession, of awareness, of grief, of insanity.
— Nina LaCour, We Are Okay
I do hope that when the day comes, whether in 1, 10, or 100 years, I don’t want you to think of me and feel sad.
— Esther Earl, This Star Won't Go Out: The Life and Words of Esther Grace Earl
Which would you choose if you could:pleasure for yourself despite your friendsor a share in their grief?
— Sophocles, Ajax
His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.
— William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
[F]or grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have never known, as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed.
— Pericles
I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it - assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks you from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But on that day, ... almost a year after Khader's death, I couldn't understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I'd too long denied. I couldn't understand it, so i tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can't bite down on assassin grief and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss.
— Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
I see what grief does, how it strips you bare, shows you all the things you don't want to know. That loss doesn't end, that there isn't a moment where you are done, when you can neatly put it away and move on.
— Elizabeth Scott, Heartbeat
It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me...was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn't have gone through and couldn't get back to the place I hadn't meant to leave. Actually, it was other way round: I hadn't gone anywhere and nothing was changed, so far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery.
— William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she thinks about him now, it is more as a lost possibility than as a man. She has forgotten his breath, his musculature.
— Anita Shreve, Body Surfing
I stood there feeling the lightness of my bones, knowing now this was not only lack of sleep that had transformed my bones into feathers, but my body's recognition that soon I would be leaving this place I had inhabited for one year, this place made entirely of grief.
— Anne Spollen, The Shape of Water
She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.
— Fay Weldon, Worst Fears
Try to be thoughtful, don't make the poor man say it;see how human he is,he has children of his own,it is your job t
— Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, Slamming Open the Door
There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief - but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.
— David Mitchell, Slade House
It's funny how sometimes you don't see the obvious things coming. You think you know what life has in store for you. You think you're prepared. You think you can handle it. And then-boom, like a thunderclap-something comes at you out of nowhere and catches you off guard.
— Cynthia Hand, The Last Time We Say Goodbye
What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they’ll be people again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented cows rooting at the trough.
— William Styron, Set This House On Fire
Loving someone means that you will inevitable grieve for them
—  love is an engraved invitation for grief.
That was the thing about being bereaved. People were overcome with sympathy. They did things for you without even considering whether or not it was the right thing to do.
— Brenna Yovanoff, The Space Between
Sorrow can be a bully.
— Amy Waldman, The Submission
The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that? Instead, she said, "I love you." She did. She loved him. But even that didn't feel like anything anymore.
— Ann Hood, The Knitting Circle
Synthesis is the gateway to Transcendence, because once you accept that you are forever changed and that life is forever different, you have to ask, "What are you going to do about that fact? Will the change be for the better or for worse?" It's the loss itself that becomes the catalyst for meaning. (pg 273)
— Ashley Davis Bush, Transcending Loss
Mrs. Sussex said Byron’s loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub: he didn’t want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she’d never been there.
— Rachel Joyce, Perfect
My hands are dying.
— Courtney Summers
There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.
— Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness
What people resist is not change per se, but loss.
— Ronald A. Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World
[I]t wasn't history that was too fragile, but me.
— Jessi Kirby, Moonglass
...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?
— Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden
Every hour that passed added to her grief, because it bore her further away from the living man, and because it was a tiny foretaste of the eternity she would have to spend without him. Again and again she found herself forgetting, for the space of a heartbeat, that he was gone forever and that she could not turn to him for comfort.
— J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy
Have I thought long to see this morning’s face,And doth it give me such a sight as this?
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
After breakage/there is always sleep.
— David Rivard, Wise Poison
So this, Harriet thought, gazing at her black-clad reflection, was what bearing up looked like. The eyes in the mirror stared at her, somehow, while fixing themselves far
— Jude Morgan
But 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
…nothing remained but loneliness and grief…
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
She has never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James. He thought of pushing open the half-closed door and kneeling before his wife, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and helping her upstairs. He raised his hand, stroking the wood of the door, planning to say something to calm her. But what wisdom could he offer Gus, when he could not even heed it himself? James walked upstairs again, got into bed, covered his head with a pillow. And hours later, when Gus crept beneath the sheets, he tried to pretend that he did not feel the weight of her grief, lying between them like a fitful child, so solid that he could not reach past it to touch her.
— Jodi Picoult, The Pact
…determined to enjoy her luxury of grief uncomforted.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
There is a feeling of disbelief that comes over you, that takes over, and you kind of go through the motions. You do what you're supposed to do, but in fact you're not there at all.
— Frederick Barthelme, Elroy Nights
I rose and moved towards him. You would have done the same yourself. It is an ancient matter. Something propels you towards sudden grief, or perhaps also sometimes repels. You move away. I moved towards it, I couldn't help it.
— Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
I love the friendly faces of old sorrows
— I have no secrets that they do not know.
I'd long thought that a surfeit of sensitivity could be a killing thing, too much insight malignant in its own right. The best survivors--there are studies that show it--are those blessed with an inordinate ability to deny. And keep on marching.
— Jonathan Kellerman, Blood Test
…I’m afraid of what the digital age will do to the world, to the things we think are important… it’s almost like people want to believe in some illusion that they’re robots and forget altogether that they’re real, living people… but everything these days is disposable, even people themselves, and that’s why I’m afraid for the world,” Mandy confessed, looking depressed and worried.“So am I… but I’ll still watch all of it as the world dooms itself, because I want to see how it ends, and whether or not they’ll be intelligent enough to forget all of this digital illusion afterwards,” Alecto explained. “I’m sure that they’ll be able to realize how wrong it all is… even though the idiots outnumber most people these days, there are still enough intelligent people to fight against it.
— Rebecca McNutt, Smog City
I was tired of well-meaning folks, telling me it was time I got over being heartbroke. When somebody tells you that, a little bell ought to ding in your mind. Some people don't know grief from garlic grits. There's somethings a body ain't meant to get over. No I'm not suggesting you wallow in sorrow, or let it drag on; no I am just saying it never really goes away. (A death in the family) is like having a pile of rocks dumped in your front yard. Every day you walk out and see them rocks. They're sharp and ugly and heavy. You just learn to live around them the best way you can. Some people plant moss or ivy; some leave it be. Some folks take the rocks one by one, and build a wall.
— Michael Lee West, American Pie
A poor old Widow in her weedsSowed her garden with wild-flower seeds;Not too shallow, and not too deep,And down came April -- drip -- drip -- drip.Up shone May, like gold, and soonGreen as an arbour grew leafy June.And now all summer she sits and sewsWhere willow herb, comfrey, bugloss blows,Teasle and pansy, meadowsweet,Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;Clover, burnet, and thyme she smells;Like Oberon's meadows her garden isDrowsy from dawn to dusk with bees.Weeps she never, but sometimes sighs,And peeps at her garden with bright brown eyes;And all she has is all she needs --A poor Old Widow in her weeds.
— Walter de la Mare, Peacock Pie
But grief is a walk alone. Others can be there, and listen. But you will walk alone down your own path, at your own pace, with your sheared-off pain, your raw wounds, you denial, anger, and bitter loss. You'll come to your own peace, hopefully, but it will be on your own, in your own time.
— Cathy Lamb, The First Day of the Rest of My Life
Han spotted a child‟s homespun dolly in the ditch, pressed into the mud. He reined in, meaning to climb down and fetch it so he could clean it up for his little sister. Then he remembered that Mari was dead and had no need of dollies anymore.Grief was like that. It gradually faded into a dull ache, until some simple sight or sound or scent hit him like a hammer blow.
— Cinda Williams Chima, The Exiled Queen
Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.
— Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting
You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. "There are worse diseases than cancer.""Did he show you slides?"We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.
— Philip K. Dick, VALIS
That Woman is in love with her own grief.
— Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere
Grief embraced him and welcomed him back, showering tears upon his arrival.
— Faraaz Kazi
Love is infinite. Grief can lead to love. Love can lead to grief. Grief is a love story told backward just as love is a grief story told backward.
— Bridget Asher
The only way out is through
— Robert Frost
They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty,” they’d joke.Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.
— Melina Marchetta, The Piper's Son
Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.
— Mary Doria Russell, Children of God
I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw everyday and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever - that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. (...) The time at length arrives when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity; and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Her only weapons were her tears.
— Eiji Yoshikawa, Taiko: An Epic Novel of War and Glory in Feudal Japan
And wilt thou have me fashion into speechThe love I bear thee, finding words enough,And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough,Between our faces, to cast light on each? -I dropt it at thy feet. I cannot teachMy hand to hold my spirits so far offFrom myself--me--that I should bring thee proofIn words, of love hid in me out of reach.Nay, let the silence of my womanhoodCommend my woman-love to thy belief, -Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed,And rend the garment of my life, in brief,By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude,Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
She'd not known grief would come in waves, brought on by the smallest of things. Nor had she realized that ordinary acts of living would continue even after the loss of a love and that it would remain possible to get caught up in the moment of a simple pleasure before remembering.
— Tess Thompson
Violet said nothing, though big pearly tears, like a child's, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn't understand them really, he would receive reverently, and out of him would come then the advice, the warnings, the clever decisions she could never have made.
— John Crowley, Little, Big
They'd crossed over to that continent where grieving parents lived. It looked the same as the rest of the world, but wasn't. Colors bled pale. Music was just notes. Books no longer transported or comforted, not fully. Never again. Food was nutrition, little more. Breaths were sighs. And they knew something the rest didn't. They knew how lucky the rest of the world was.
— Louise Penny
She closed her eyes, silently continuing the pleas that she be given words that might soothe, words that would begin the healing of bereaved parents. She had seen, when she entered the kitchen, the chasm of sorrow that divided man and wife already, each deep in their own wretched suffering, neither knowing what to say to the other. She knew that to begin to talk about what had happened was a key to acknowledging their loss, and that such acceptance would in turn be a means to enduring the days and months ahead.
— Jacqueline Winspear, Messenger of Truth
[Philip's death was] beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.... He was truly a fine youth. But why should I repine? It was the will of heaven and he is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity. (Alexander Hamilton letter to Benjamin Rush about the death of his 19-year old son from mortal wounds inflicted from a duel.)
— Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
That's the worst of sorrow . . . it's always a vicious circle. It makes one tense and hard and disagreeable, and this means that one repels and antagonises people, and then they dislike and avoid one--and that means more isolation and still more sorrow.
— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
And when I stand in the receiving linelike Jackie Kennedywithout the pillbox hat,if Jackie were fat and had taken enough Klonopinto still an ox,and you w
— Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, Slamming Open the Door
Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost and Horror Stories
Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.the Tai Chi instructor
— Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Fatigue Artist
Grief dares us to love once more.
— Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
When someone you love dies, you get a big bowl of sadness put down in front of you, steaming hot. You can start eating now, or you can let it cool and eat it bit by bit later one. Either way, you end up eating the whole thing. There's really no way around it.
— Ralph Fletcher, Fig Pudding
I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling action after action had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an harrow to the string then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead through to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once now so many culs de sac.
— C.S. Lewis
There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and terrible silence of grief in a widower's lonely bedroom.
— Dean Koontz, Phantoms
A rule without exceptions is an instrument capable of doing mischief to the innocent and bringing grief -- as well as injustice -- to those who should gain exemptions from the rule's functioning.
— Derrick A. Bell
It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one's nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.
— Anna Comnena, The Alexiad
You are a most effective killer, Michel. Is it true you wept like a child when they killed your sister? That you cried out in agony as if the sword had pierced your own heart? Such compassion. Does your handiwork not bring you to tears as well?
— P.A. Minyard, The Beloved
I can't stop thinking about what he felt like against my body, against my lips. I can't remember anything else, anything before that. And I realize in this moment that I've finally done it. That horrible, awful thing I swore I would never do.The frosting. The cigarettes. The blue glass triangle. The shooting stars. The taste of his mouth on mine in the hall closet. Gone. All I can think about is Sam. Matt is – erased. My whole body is warm and buzzing. Sam is smiling next to me, because of me. And I've never felt so lonely in all my life.
— Sarah Ockler
Even now I cannot believe that I am still alive and writing this account of the emperor's death. I put my hands to my eyes, wondering if what I am relating here is not all a dream - or maybe it is not a dream: perhaps it is a delusion and I am mad, the victim of some extraordinary and monstrous hallucination. How comes it that when he is dead I am still numbered among the living?
— Anna Comnena, The Alexiad
I wonder if I were to have an X-ray at the little hospital, would the machine see my grief? Is it like rust, arheum about the heart?
— Sebastian Barry, On Canaan's Side
For in this world of ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely grief.
— Marcel Proust
People talked so foolishly, I thought, about the ennobling effects of suffering. No doubt the philosophy that tells you your soul grows through grief and sorrow is right--ultimately. But I don't think this is the case at first. At first, pain beyond a certain point merely makes you lifeless, and apathetic to everything but itself.
— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted, let yourself go and you started embellishing your own sobs.
— Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
I knew I was being an idiot. But I figured if I kept being an idiot, if I didn't actually accept the truth, then the truth would become false.
— Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first) which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick, rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself-Oh, yes!-in every other way.
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Grief is a peculiar emotion.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?
— Yukio Mishima, Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
Violent death erase[s] more than the semblance of life.
— P.D. James
Snapping shut his mobile, Dalgliesh reflected that murder, a unique crime for which no reparation is ever possible, imposes it own compulsions as well as it's conventions. He doubted whether Macklefield [the murder victim's Will attorney] would have interrupted his country weekend for a less sensational crime. As a young officer he, too, had been touched, if unwillingly and temporarily, by the power of murder to attract even while it appalled and repelled. He had watched how people involved as innocent bystanders, provided they were unburdened by grief or suspicion, were engrossed by homicide, drawn inexorably to the place where the crime had occurred in fascinated disbelief. The crowd and the media who served them had not yet congregated outside the wrought-iron gates of the Manor. But they would come, and he doubted whether Chandler-Powell's [owner of the Manor where the murder was committed] private security team would be able to do more than inconvenience them.
— P.D. James, The Private Patient
In the libraryI search for a good book.We have many books,says Mrs. Rose, the librarian,and ALL of them are good.Of course she says that. It's her job.But do I want to read about TrucksTrains and Transport? Or evenHorsesHouses and Hyenas?In the fiction cornerthere are pink boksfull of princessesand girls who want to be princessesand black booksabout bad boysand brave boysand brawny boys.Where is the bookabout a girlwhose poems don't rhymeand whose Granny is fading?Pearl, says Mrs. Rose, the bell has rung.I go back to classempty-handedempty headedempty-hearted.
— Sally Murphy, Pearl Verses the World
I think grief and fear are going to come to him suddenly. They'll be undiluted and words won't work. We're all going to get hit and won't know how to hit back. I wish I knew the answers, how to help myself and the people who will hurt all around me.
— Kaui Hart Hemmings
It had been many months since I'd shed tears for Tomaso, but grief is like that. It's not a continuous process; it comes in waves. You can keep it at bay for a time, like a dam holding back a lake, but them something triggers an explosion inside of you, shattering the wall and letting loose a flood.
— Paul Adam, Paganini's Ghost
…and they limp and halt, they’re all wrinkled, drawn, they squint to the side, can’t look you in the eyes, and always bent on duty, trudging after Ruin, maddening, blinding Ruin. But Ruin is strong and swift—She outstrips them all by far, stealing a march, leaping over the whole wide earth to bring mankind to grief.
— Homer, The Iliad