c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.
— Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself—more birds than women flocking round his body!
— Homer, The Iliad
I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.
— Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
My soule, poore soule thou talkes of things/ Thou knowest not what, my soule hath sliver wings,/ That mounts me up unto the highest heavens.
— Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
When a man's eyes are sore his friends do not let him finger them, however much he wishes to, nor do they themselves touch the inflammation: But a man sunk in grief suffers every chance comer to stir and augment his affliction like a running sore; and by reason of the fingering and consequent irritation it hardens into a serious and intractable evil.
— Plutarch, In Consolation to His Wife
-(I)n memory, remorse wraps the self.
— Claudia Rankine, The End of the Alphabet: Poems
It is poor solace to speak of the passing of time and grief," the master said. His quiet voice had gone somehow bleak, though Araene could not decide where in his unchanging tone the difference lay. "We do not wish our grief to fade, for it marks the love and honor in which we held our lost kinsmen. Nevertheless, permit me to assure you that while you may find peace a barren desert, yet eventually it may bloom.
— Rachel Neumeier, The Floating Islands
. . . I understand that I was writing (recording) as well as seeking to right (to rectify) the wrong, and now, as I retell the tale, I realize that ‘I am still at the same subject’ still engaged in the same fearful and fierce activity–writing and seeking to right a mortal wrong. (86-87)
— Sandra M. Gilbert, Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve
Royal summoned mourners. They came from the village, from the neighboring hills and, wailing like dogs at midnight, laid siege to the house. Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men prostrated themselves: it was the art of sorrow, and those who best mimicked grief were much admired. After the funeral everyone went away, satisfied that they'd done a good job.
— Truman Capote, House of Flowers
for my grief's so greatThat no supporter but the huge firm earthCan hold it up: here I and sorrows sit;Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.(Constance, from King John, Act III, scene 1)
— William Shakespeare
In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband’s death—his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently—“shrewdly” and “reasonably”—she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection—a “hospital” infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance!
— Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow's Story
She felt that at some point she must finally and formally talk to Louisa about Hubert, and ask her to acknowledge that the worst possible thing had happened to her as well.
— Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child
We're not going to make it," I said.The words caught in my throat, choking me. What was it Leslie had said to me when we were discussing Shannon's and Antoinetta's disappearance? 'You're beginning to sound like one of the characters in your books, Adam.' She'd been right. If this were a novel my heroes would have arrived just in the nick of time and saved the day. But real life didn't work like that. Real life had no happy endings. Despite our best efforts, despite my love for Tara [his wife] and my determination to protect her, and after everything we'd been through at the LeHorn house, fate conspired against us. We were still nine or ten miles from home, and night was almost upon us. By the time we got there it would already be too late. I fought back tears. I had the urge just to lie down in the middle of the road and let the next car run over me.
— Brian Keene, Dark Hollow
Since she seen Fortune head in that big pot Miss Lydia say that room make her feel ill, sick with the thought of boiling human broth. I wonder how she think it make me feel? To dust the hands what use to stroke my breast; to dust the arms what hold me when I cried; to dust where his soft lips were and his chest what curved its warm against my back at night. From the poem "Dinah's Lament" (15)
— Marilyn Nelson, Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem
Kenny rested his hand on my leg, patting it delicately. His thoughts staying just that, thoughts, as we drove in silence, back to my prison of paradise, back to the one place I knew I could be happy, yet miserable, all in the same day.
— Holly Hood, Prison of Paradise
We talk about how he and Leanne are doing knowing full well there is no sufficient answer.p 294
— Michael Perry
I’ve been alive a long time, long enough to know that the more baggage you carry in life, the more unstable you’ll be, until eventually you get sick of carrying it, and then you just fall down.
— Rebecca McNutt, Bittersweet Symphony
In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night . . . You--only you--will have stars that can laugh! ...And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look at at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you . . .
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Then she said, with piteous defiance, "If I could love her, the Good Lord could, and he won't be too hard on an old lady who didn't have an easy life.
— Ruth Park, The Harp in the South
All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.
— Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.
— Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
I am vulnerability under scarred skin. Numbness crawling behind wine soaked lips. A cocoon of grief battling a chest full of hushed breaths, longing to escape the mod-podge of memories, that journal where I've been. Layer after layer they are sealed upon my person, encapsulating time in a vessel that has sailed one too many shores.
— Alfa H, Abandoned Breaths
When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change.
— Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk about leaking it everywhere.
— J. Courtney Sullivan, Saints for All Occasions
The one so loved that a single lyreraised more lament than lamenting women ever did;and that from the lament a world arose in whicheverything was there again: woods and valleyand path and village, field and river and animal;and around this lament-world, just asaround the other earth, a sunand a starry silent heaven turned,a lament-heaven of disordered stars -- :This one so loved.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
She wasn’t broken.She was made up of a thousand tiny little cracks.She was always trying to keep herself glued together.But it was hard, she felt too much.No matter what she did, her emotions seeped through,sometimes in drips, other times in floods,She felt everything,the heaviness of the clouds right before rain,the rush of the subway cars as they left the station,the feeling of goodbye as she watched someone walk away,wondering if it was the last time she would see them,the feeling of a kiss lingering on her cheek for hours.She felt the loneliness of the sun as it hung in the sky,shedding light on the day,without companion.And she longed to give as much as the sun.If she could brighten someone’s day,bestow warmth were there was cold,make someone smile, give someone hope,then for a minute, an hour, maybe even a day,the cracks would fill with loveand the pain would become only a voice,reminding her that her pain was important.She knew how fragile life was, how hard,and how precious.She wanted to feel it all.
— Jacqueline Simon Gunn
...we were different boys, we were brave new boys without a Mum. So when he told us what happened I don't know what my brother was thinking but I was thinking this:Where are the fire engines? Where is the noise and clamour of an event like this? Where are the strangers going out of their way to help, screaming, flinging bits of emergency glow-in-the-dark equipment at us to try and settle us and save us?There should be men in helmets speaking a new and dramatic language of crisis. There should be horrible levels of noise, completely foreign and inappropriate for our cosy London flat.
— Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers
This had always been the worst time when the quiet emptiness could leave him gasping for breath. She was there, his wife, a peripheral shadow moving across a doorway, or in the reflection of a window, and he had to stop looking for her. And the whiskey helped – helped him walk past her when the fire was doused. But occasionally she followed him up the stairs and that’s why he began to take the bottle with him, because she stood in the corner of their bedroom and watched him undress, and when he was on the verge of sleep, she leant over him and asked him things like, Remember when we first met?
— Sarah Winman, Tin Man
My inheritance is grief and sunlight and the ability to choose which to hold on to.
— Emily Henry, A Million Junes
Sometimes it's hard not to let other people's misery seep into your own bones.
— Gilly Macmillan, Odd Child Out
I drop on my back on the bed, panting and sweating. How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.
— Sherman Alexie, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
Grief ate at these doctors, distracting them from both their families and their patients. Many reported withdrawing from emotional involvement with their patients and that their patients had noticed they weren't fully present.
— Danielle Ofri, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
One celestial quake and the timeline belonging to her had imploded in the heavens like a dying star. It was like falling into oblivion, she thought wearily, the tattered remains of her life floated—unanchored in a vacuum of what was and what little remained.
— R. W. Patterson, Solace From Shadows: Where Mortality and Eternity Collide
Grief—in all of its agony—burrowed deep into her essence, its serrated edges killing her piece by piece.
— R. W. Patterson, Dark Night of the Soul: In the darkest of moments...a sacrifice to end a life...a rescue to save a soul.
I must acknowledge that though his adoption embodies graciousness, it is also a reminder this world is not as it should be. Brokenness permeates our world. Sure, beauty is born from ashes, but the ashes don't just magically disappear. Suffering and all that is wrong in this world still exists. This side of heaven, tragedy remains and the moments of her son becoming ours is a representation of joy and suffering deeply intertwined. Our son, the living proof and blessing that love is what makes a family, reminds us that adoption is born out of undeniable loss. Irrevocable loss of wholeness, of what was meant to be.To only acknowledge the beauty without giving voice to the tragedy, is to detract from adoption. In diminishing the tragedy of adoption, I decrease my son's story, along with others a part of the adoption circle. I would be choosing to ignore a massive portion of who he is.
— Natalie Brenner, This Undeserved Life: Uncovering The Gifts of Grief and The Fullness of Life
Just so you know, I realize that what happened is not in any way okay, but I think we're going to have to pretend like it is.Because it wasn't okay and never will be. We will power through it; I will continue to power through it-all the stagnant, soul-crushing grief-but it will never be okay that my mom is not here.
— Julie Buxbaum, Tell Me Three Things
There is nothing I can do to keep time from wedging more of itself between us.
— Will Kostakis, The Sidekicks
Still waters run deepest, they used to tell me.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Darling, no one would ever dream of performing an operation on a child without testing it first. And no one in a thousand years would take a child's daemon away altogether! All that happens is a little cut, and then everything's peaceful. Forever! You see, your daemon's a wonderful friend and com panion when you're young, but at the age we call puberty, the age you're coming to very soon, darling, daemons bring all sort of troublesome thoughts and feelings, and that's what lets Dust in. A quick little operation before that, and you're never troubled again. And your daemon stays with you, only...just not connected. Like a... like a wonderful pet, if you like. The best pet in the world!Wouldn't you like that? (Marisa Coulter)
— Philip Pullman, Northern Lights
A greater love was always with me. Guiding me and waiting for me to surrender myself so that the glory of grief could bring me back to joy, where it greeted me once again.” - Just Be
— Lindsa Gibson
You couldn’t make someone love you with a rune, and you couldn’t assuage grief with it either. So much magic, Clary thought, and nothing to mend a broken heart.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
I've made a discovery, and it's that grief isn't like sadness at all. Sadness is only something that's part of you. Grief becomes you, it wraps you up and changes you and makes everything--every little thing--different than it was before. I remember the me before we got the telegram saying he was gone, but it's like I'm remembering someone else. It feels like an earthquake has gone through me...
— Jodi Lynn Anderson, Midnight at the Electric
Half-broke hearts just didn't have much pep.
— Amanda Linsmeier, Déjà You: Stories of Second Chances
I can hear Isaac's smile. It softens his words, but they have a different meaning now. Between his mouth and my ears, they pass through everything that has happened since.
— Will Kostakis, The Sidekicks
The radiance of this beautiful scene shed a cruel light on every past horror, every insult tolerated, every unspoken retort, every gesture of rejection. Marianne was grieving, and her boundless grief made her regret every moment of cowardice in her life.
— Nina George, The Little French Bistro
I feel like I am a diluted version of myself. A piece of crayon that was left unused. An abandoned car that was forgotten by its owner. I feel like I am a roadside accident. People are just stopping by to see the damage, but no one is trying to help me. I want you to come back and stop me from burning my own fuel. I want you to put me back in the pack of crayons. I want you to make me whole again.
— Bhavya Kaushik
You wrote in a poem, “I love your body,” as if love was for you embodied in the senses, and yet more than the senses together, an enveloping sense itself sensuous, as if all the body made sense.
— David Plante, The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief
The wave of pure outrage blindsided me. I shouldn't be here, I thought. This is utterly fucked up. I should have been sitting in a garden down the road, barefoot with a drink in my hand, swapping the day's work stories with Peter and Jamie. I had never thought about this before, and it almost knocked me over: all the things we should have had. We should have stayed up all night together studying and stressing out before exams, Peter and I should have argued over who got to bring Jamie to our first dance and slagged her about how she looked in her dress. We should have come weaving home together, singing and laughing and inconsiderate, after drunken college nights. We could have shared a flat, taken off Interrailing around Europe, gone arm-in-arm through dodgy fashion phases and low-rent gigs and high-drama love affairs. Two of us might have been married by now, given the other one a godchild. I had been robbed blind.
— Tana French, In the Woods
LOVE IS LIKE A DESIGNER FASHION, ENJOY IT WHEN YOU HAVE IT. LET IT GO WHEN IT IS GONE BECAUSE A NEW ONE WILL COME.
— Linda Alfiori, The Art of Loving Again: How to More Intelligently Start Again After a Breakup, Divorce and The Death of a Loved One
My particular grief Is of so flood-gate and o'erbearing nature That it engluts and swallows other sorrows, And it is still itself.
— William Shakespeare, Othello
The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief.
— Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
Why shouldn't the living cords which lace our being together flick softly against a loved one in the very moment of their unraveling?...Sometimes, all the miles between are as nothing, sometimes, they are narrowed to the little silence between the beats of a heart.
— Colleen McCullough, Tim
Everything hurts. I don't know how to make it stop. It hurts when I breathe. It hurts when I think. I feel like I'm drowning, and it's my fault, and I don't know how to be okay. I don't know if I CAN be okay. I don't know if I should be allowed to be okay.
— Victoria Schwab, The Archived
We cannot escape most of the crises in our lives, nor should we. In fact, these events frequently provide the energy for movement on our spiritual journey, even when we are stuck along the way... we ask questions about our own life. We wonder about meaning. Our present view may become inadequate. We ask deeper questions. Even joyful experiences can propel us forward.
— Janet O. Hagberg, The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith
I wonder where it all comes from--this need to go to the place where the body has been laid to rest. It's the need to reconfirm how precious someone was and how irreplaceable, and the desire to reconnect with them on a different plane.
— Takashi Hiraide, The Guest Cat
The closet bond that we share with our brethren is that of grief. Every community knows sorrow.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire. I am saying this again because I want it to be true.
— Sebastian Barry
I saw her tonight. I didn’t mean to and I wasn’t prepared for it.I came across her sweet smiling face and I had no choice but to be confronted with all the emotions and memories I associated with her.It brought me back to this past summer when she passed from this world into the next and how I watched the minutes in the day pass and felt the sorrow of the approaching sunset knowing that darkness would soon follow.There is something profound about the first night after someone you love dies.Seeing her again and mourning the loss of her anew reminded me that we keep too much to ourselves and we let people go without them ever knowing how much they touched us, intrigued us, taught us, or moved us.I’m a firm believer in actions doing the telling, but people need to hear it as well.
— Donna Lynn Hope
My grandmother’s unkindness, for instance, was the result of repressed grief over three deaths: her parents, before she was twelve, and her firstborn child. I don’t recall ever seeing her smile. She was critical of everything and everyone. Table manners, posture, diction, wardrobe. My aunt, her mother’s staunchest defender, often reminded us that my grandmother suffered from accumulated sorrow, bottled up since childhood and cloaked in intellect and intolerance as she grew older. She was never able to grieve fully or mourn the amassed losses, my aunt had said. If we repress our grief, over time, it’s bound to harden the heart.
— Nancy Cobb, In Lieu of Flowers: A Conversation for the Living
I grief for the foolishness of my ignorance.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Every road leads to sorrow. All aspects that make life beautiful – friendship, love, art, and truth – will end. All aspects that make life hideous – pain, poverty, illness, betrayal, hate, crime, war – will also end. The fact that human life is a mere blip on a cosmic scale is no reason for personal angst as we came from nothingness and will return to the great void that birthed us.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.
— Gregory Maguire, Mirror Mirror
He stroked her back and kept a fierce grip on her like she’d fade away into one of the thousands of ghosts in this cemetery.
— Katherine McIntyre, Rising for Autumn
When had my sister's words become so barbed and poisoned? Grief had sharpened her tongue to a fine point.
— Connilyn Cossette, Wings of the Wind
And it's stupid to have rules about how long you're allowed to cry and when you're supposed to flip a switch and stop crying. You can't even think. All you can do is feel. So how the heck are you supposed to follow rules?
— Lynn Plourde, Maxi's Secrets:
There are cancers so insidious in their nature that their very pulsation is invisible. Such cancers leave the ivory whiteness of the skin untouched, and marble not the firm, fair flesh, with their blue tints; the physician who bends over the patient's chest hears not, through he listens, the insatiable teeth of the disease grinding its onward progress through the muscles, as the blood flows freely on; the knife has never been able to destroy, and rarely even, temporarily, to discern the rage of these mortal scourges; their home is in the mind, which they corrupt; they fill the whole heart until it breaks. Such, madame, are the cancers, fatal to queens; are you, too, free from their scourge?
— Alexandre Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask
Sometimes it is hard not to say "God forgive God." Sometimes, it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile?
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Grief is part of my human experience. There will always be loss during my lifetime. Loss has come in a variety of forms to me—such as death, divorce, losing a job, and selling a beloved home. Each event brought me new opportunities and experiences that would not have been possible otherwise.
— Lisa J. Shultz, A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Plus Sonnets from the Porte-Cochere by S. H. Bass
Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Susy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it—I didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
So it is with grief where, if all goes well, can come a strengthening of the inner world, of memory and definition.
— Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory
My soul hath thirsted after the strong living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God?' (Psalm 42:2) But the Psalmist also says, 'In death there is no one that is mindful of thee.' So it made me happy that I could be with my mother the last few weeks of her life, and for the last ten days at her bedside daily and hourly. Sometimes I thought to myself that it was like being present at a birth to sit by a dying person and see their intentness on what is happening to them. It almost seems that one is absorbed in a struggle, a fearful, grim, physical struggle, to breathe, to swallow, to live. And so, I kept thinking to myself, how necessary it is for one of their loved ones to be beside them, to pray for them, to offer up prayers for them unceasingly, as well as to do all those little offices one can. When my daughter was a little tiny girl, she said to me once, 'When I get to be a great big woman and you are a little tiny girl, I'll take care of you,' and I thought of that when I had to feed my mother by the spoonful and urge her to eat her custard. How good God was to me, to let me be there. I had prayed so constantly that I would be beside her when she died; for years I had offered up that prayer. And God granted it quite literally. I was there, holding her hand, and she just turned her head and sighed.
— Dorothy Day, The Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus
Alcohol was like a fun cousin I visited every once in a while but never planned a trip around.
— Abby Fabiaschi, I Liked My Life
Before I could catch it, my heart slammed straight down to my feet, leaving me with a massive hole in my chest. It was amazing how I could just be going along, doing okay, and then suddenly-wham-I missed her so much even my fingernails hurt.
— Jenna Evans Welch, Love & Gelato
Remember to add the most important ingredient to every recipe you make - your love!
— Diana  Silva, Molé Mama: A Memoir of Love, Cooking and Loss
Grief makes gravity heavier and air molecules denser, so breathing is accomplished in a shallow, half-hearted way.
— Dee  Williams, The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir
Raindrops fall from clouds of gray.The fragile flowers grow.Teardrops seem all I can say.They speak of endless woe.Your fingers wipe my grief away.A seed of love you sow.A hardened heart reverts to clay.You mold my love just so.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.
— Germaine Greer, The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause
If you shouldn’t blame yourself for minor things you did or didn’t do when someone dies, how can you start giving yourself credit for tiny things you did when something really good happens?
— Mark Rogerson, This Moonless Sky
But the place where we're most broken, most empty of ourselves... is the place where we can be filled in a way that is harder for people who haven't experienced a loss.
— Laurie Tomlinson, With No Reservations
Grief was a terrible and beautiful thing.
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life
The food in the hostel mess is worst of a kind. The grief in my words reach easily to those who have "been there and done that" Chapatti in the meal is either so uncooked or overly cooked and you can only expect dal in the ocean of water when you are ready to swim.
— Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade
I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force that has not power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.
— Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
I ... am left with the lingering feeling that the places we go in our minds to find comfort have little to do with where our bodies go.
— Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World
...yet he [Levon] somehow sings with the wounded humanity of a man without a tribe, a man who has known both love and grief and understands that one is the price of the other.
— Greg Iles, Mississippi Blood
Yes, she had changed her mind after sixty years and she would like to see George. I want you to find George. Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot him. I want him to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved and fine children out of him. Better than I had hoped for even. Tell him I was given back everything he took away and more. Oh, no, oh, God, no, there was something else besides the house and the man and the children. Oh, surely they were not all? What was it? Something not given back... Her breath crowded down under her ribs and grew into a monstrous frightening shape with cutting edges; it bored up into her head, and the agony was unbelievable: Yes, John, get the Doctor now, no more talk, the time has come.
— Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter
Her marble tears run down her marble face.A stranger is someone who has no handkerchief.Who has no words to say.Whose shadow mind is burningas he sits watching her handsand thinks how rare!to see a Romantalkwith no gestures at all.
— Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God
And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.
— Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
For the most part, you don't hold the people you love in your heart because they rescued you from drowning or pulled you from a burning house. Mostly you hold them in your heart because they save you, in a million quiet and perfect ways, from being alone.
— Jeff Zentner, Goodbye Days
You are afraid to suffer, but it were better to thank God for it, since the more you undergo down here, the less you will endure above. Grief is a portion of one's heritage taken in advance from Purgatory.
— Saint Lydwine of Schiedam
Revenge is an orphan in bad company she had learnt. Until it accepts the truth, it may never find grace.
— Sanchit Gupta, The Tree with a Thousand Apples
Time possesses emotional potency. For persons whom suffer from of bereavement, time possesses a healing capacity. Passage of time cures heartache by dimming the mind’s attunement to painful occurrences. For some people, the passage of time is akin to placing a welcomed physical boundary between themselves and past horrors. Passage of time allows us to forget and the ability to forget is medicinal. Time acts as a mental barrier between our present mental state and the pain that we once felt.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
I truly do not know, and that unnameable feeling that comes with not knowing: it must be worse than grief. It must.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
What peace it must be to know that someone is yours, no matter what - it is ordained, can never be otherwise.
— Ariel Levy
She closed her eyes, trying to remember the photos that had hung on the walls. She had passed these pictures every day, but now she only remembered them vaguely--her parents on their wedding day, her mother in a garden, her family at Knott's Berry Farm. How had she not memorized them? Or maybe she had once but she was beginning to forget. Did the house smell different because her mother's scent was gone? Or had she just forgotten how her mother smelled?
— Brit Bennett, The Mothers
Why should she dress in a cap and gown and sweat in the sun, when her mother was not there to pose in pictures with her and cheer when her name was called? In her mind, she only saw pictures they would never take, arms around each other, her mother gaining little wrinkles around her eyes from smiling so much.
— Brit Bennett, The Mothers
I'm bored of it all being miserable. I just want something to change. There's nothing wrong with that is there?
— Sharon Duggal, The Handsworth Times
He did touch people's lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they who really mourned him - or what they thought was him - with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
There will come a day, I promise you, when the thought of your son, or daughter, or your wife or your husband, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye. It will happen. My prayer for you is that day will come sooner than later.
— Joe Biden
A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter.
— Janet Fitch, Paint it Black
Then you go ahead and cry," Will said. That ended my weeping. Had he asked me not to cry, I would have not been able to stop, but his permission somehow quite my tears.
— Kathleen Grissom, The Kitchen House
His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help, or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.
— George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
Most people are ennobled by the actual presence of death. But how long do you suppose this nobility will last in him?
— Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck
He was never able to properly explain what happened to him that day. But he stopped being happy.
— Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
Do not cry,” she said fiercely, but her own tears flowed. “Do not cry, Finnikin. For if we begin, our tears will never end.
— Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock
That's just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don't get one without the other.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
He didn't sleep. His mother was too close. He could see every crease on her face, every worry line he'd ever given her.
— Claire Zorn, One Would Think the Deep
If God had not grievance to all, we will not have survived up to the time we repented
— Sunday Adelaja
Brian Doyle about the Irish custom of “taking to the bed.” He says “In Irish culture, taking to the bed with a gray heart is not considered especially odd. People did and do it for understandable reasons—ill health, or the black dog, or, most horrifyingly, to die during An Gorta Mor, the great hunger, when whole families took to their beds to slowly starve…And in our time: I know a woman who took to her bed for a week after September eleventh, and people who have taken to their beds for days on end to recover from shattered love affairs, the death of a child, a physical injury that heals far faster than the psychic wound gaping under it. I’ve done it myself twice, once as a youth and once as a man, to think through a troubled time in my marriage. Something about the rectangularity of the bed, perhaps, or supinity, or silence, or timelessness; for when you are in bed but not asleep there is no time, as lovers and insomniacs know. Yet, anxious, heartsick, we take to the bed, saddled by despair and dissonance and disease, riddled by muddledness and madness, rattled by malaise and misadventure, and in the ancient culture of my forbears this was not so unusual….For from the bed we came and to it we shall return, and our nightly voyages there are nutritious and restorative, and we have taken to our beds for a thousand other reasons, loved and argued and eater and seethed there, and sang and sobbed and suckled, and burned with fevers and visions and lust, and huddled and howled and curled and prayed. As children we all, every one of us, pretended the bed was a boat; so now, when we are so patently and persistently and daily at sea, why not seek a ship? p. 119-20Brian Doyle in The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart, p. 90-91
— Brian  Doyle, The Wet Engine: Exploring Mad Wild Miracle of Heart
We will talk of this again, when the grass has first withered on her grave. Then you'll hear him spouting about "the child too early torn from her father's heart;" then you'll see him steep himself in a syrup of sentiment and self-admiration and self-pity. Just you wait!
— Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck
I look up, and Jackson's eyes find mine. For a second, it almost feels like we're about to race into the hole to join you. Being buried alive has got to be better than whatever comes next.
— Adam Silvera, History Is All You Left Me
There is something embarrassing about someone else's grief. It is hard to know what to do around it. The right answer, always, is hugs.
— Adam Gidwitz, The Inquisitor's Tale: Or, the Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog
If you love someone and they vanish, you are left nodding like a zombie and throwing teacups at a wall.
— Corey Ann Haydu, The Careful Undressing of Love
Hospital waits are bad ones. The fact that they happen to pretty much all of us, sooner or later, doesn’t make them any less hideous. They’re always just a little too cold. It always smells just a little bit too sharp and clean. It’s always quiet, so quiet that you can hear the fluorescent lights - another constant, those lights - humming. Pretty much everyone else there is in the same bad predicament you are, and there isn’t much in the way of cheerful conversation. And there’s always a clock in sight. The clock has superpowers. It always seems to move too slowly. Look up at it and it will tell you the time. Look up an hour and a half later, and it will tell you two minutes have gone by. Yet it somehow simultaneously has the ability to remind you of how short life is, to make you acutely aware of how little time someone you love might have remaining to them.
— Jim Butcher, Small Favor
When people die,' she said softly, 'It doesn't necessarily mean you're ready to give them up.
— C.A. Belmond, A Rather Lovely Inheritance
Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!
— William Shakespeare, King Lear
Sometimes nature can take its course and shove it. Our commitment to protecting our cat or dog is life-long and sadly, sometimes, that includes protection from discomfort and pain, even if, in the vet's opinion, this means euthanasia.
— Nick Trout, Tell Me Where It Hurts: A Day of Humor, Healing, and Hope in My Life as an Animal Surgeon
Have you ever walked along a beach? You walk towards something in the distance. For the longest while it never seems to get any closer even though you are walking and walking. Then all of a sudden, you are there. You’ve arrived at last. That's what grief is like. Meanwhile we are running with you in the spray of the surf at the edge of the shore where the sand meets the sea. We are cheering you on.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
It was something new for her. New roads, new people, new places, new opportunities and new perspective. This is the one thing that inevitably moves a person through the grief. Growth heals grief.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
Another form of bargaining, which many people do, and she did too, is to replay the final painful moments over and over in her head as if by doing so she could eventually create a different outcome.It is natural to replay in your mind the details. Deep in your heart you know what is true. Your mouth speaks the words, “My cat has died,” but you still don’t really want to believe it. You go over and over and over it in your mind. Your heart replays the scene for you for the express purpose of teaching you to accept what has happened. While your heart tries to “rewire” your mind to accept it, your mind keeps looking for a different answer. It doesn’t like the truth. Like anything else, when you hear it enough, you finally accept that it is true.
— Kate McGahan, Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge
At night, with only the bedside lamp on, I would pretend to sleep and listened to Dad’s muffled crying in the semi-darkness, wishing that I could cry like him, that I could bring Stevan back from the dead by the strength of my tears. But they were regular tears carving the same slicing-hot trails down my cheeks, and in the end, I could not summon a distinct kind of grief for Stevan. Just the same grief that has gripped mankind for centuries, which time would inevitably ebb into a notch in one’s skin or a small limp in the way one walks or a bottled memory that would only resurface some nights. And soon, you’d struggle to remember how that person talked or how that person used to occupy a customized space in your life. And you don’t want to forget, but you don’t want to remember either, and there seemed to be no place where you could just exist.
— V.J. Campilan, All My Lonely Islands
She put her head in her hands and began to cry softly. He felt confused and bitterly unhappy. A part of him wanted to go to her, to hold and comfort her, but he wasn’t prepared to be pushed away in cold anger all over again. He waited in his chair and felt the room expand until there was an emptiness the size of the desert between them.
— Michelle Frost, Wisdoms of the Light
The child's heart beat: but she was growing in the wrong place inside her extraordinary mother, south of safe...she and her mother were rushed to the hospital, where her mother was operated on by a brisk cheerful diminutive surgeon who told me after the surgery that my wife had been perhaps an hour from death from the pressure of the child growing outside the womb, the mother from the child growing, and the child from growing awry; and so my wife did not die, but our mysterious child did...Not uncommon, an ectopic pregnancy, said the surgeon...Sometimes, continued the surgeon, sometimes people who lose children before they are born continue to imagine the child who has died, and talk about her or him, it's such an utterly human thing to do, it helps deal with the pain, it's healthy within reason, and yes, people say to their other children that they actually do, in a sense, have a sister or brother, or did have a sister or brother, and she or he is elsewhere, has gone ahead, whatever the language of your belief or faith tradition. You could do that. People do that, yes. I have patients who do that, yes...One summer morning, as I wandered by a river, I remembered an Irish word I learned long ago, and now whenever I think of the daughter I have to wait to meet, I find that word in my mouth: dunnog, little dark one, the shyest and quietest and tiniest of sparrows, the one you never see but sometimes you sense, a flash in the corner of your eye, a sweet sharp note already fading by the time it catches your ear.
— Brian  Doyle, The Wet Engine: Exploring Mad Wild Miracle of Heart
Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice- we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs.
— Yann Martel, The High Mountains of Portugal
Michiko Nogami (1946—1982)” Is she more apparent because she is notanymore forever? Is her whiteness more whitebecause she was the color of pale honey?A smokestack making the sky more visible.A dead woman filling the whole world. Michikosaid, “The roses you gave me kept me awakewith the sound of their petals falling.
— Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires
Folks write down the name of someone who fills them with frustration, disappointment, and/or resentment, and then I propose that their person is doing the best he or she can. The responses have been wide-ranging...One woman said, "If this was true and my mother was doing the best she can, I would be grief-stricken. I'd rather be angry than sad, so it's easier to believe she's letting me down on purpose than grieve the fact that my mother is never going to be who I need her to be.
— Brené Brown, Rising Strong
Sometimes the grief was nearby, waiting, just barely held back, and I could ignore it for a while. But at other times it was like a cup that was always full and kept spilling over.
— Lydia Davis, Can't and Won't: Stories