c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
And yet I was filled with grief. In the beginning of all love there is grief, because at that moment you’re closest to the ghost of parting. You know how easily it could all slip away, how easily it could evaporate into eternal, never-to-be-consummated longing.
— Edeet Ravel
I think that's what people do with the holidays. They wrap it up all neatly with a turkey and clever gifts and lots of eggnog and laugh and laugh, but at the end of the day there are always people missing from the table. And you have to either sit with those empty chairs and laugh, or you can choose not to come to the table at all. I would rather come to the table.
— Julie Buxbaum, The Opposite of Love
The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death.
— Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife
No one has ever held me so tightly. It's a shock to matter this much. It isn't like arms are around me, it's more like a house, as if he has made a house around me. As he did around Tommy.
— Kelle Groom, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl
My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn't yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly
— John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van
Stories aren't facts, Cait, they're not details. Stories are feelings. You've got your feelings, haven't you?""Too many," I said."Well, that's all you need." He put his hand on mine. "Cry yourself a story, love. It works. Believe me."So that's what I did, I cried myself a story.And this is it.
— Kevin Brooks
We don’t have to be on the battlefields of the world to experience strife and conflict. We need only to open our eyes each morning and read the headlines, we need only to turn a keen ear when our phones ring with bad news, we need only to open our hearts to those next door—and maybe even in our own homes—to notice those with grieving hearts.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
The facade of grief may be indifference, preoccupation, anger, cheerfulness, or any variety of emotions. But if we try to understand it, we may learn how to cope with it.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
I can't recall the sound of your voiceStill, I bring flowers and meet the skyask it to hold me, too.
— Drew Myron
You will live in me always. Your words, your heart, your soul are all part of me. My heart is full of your memories. Thank you for the gift of your life. I will never forget you.
— Amy Eldon
...It is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.
— Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning
For days and days, the rain beat its fists on the roof of our house— evidence of the terrible mistake God had made. Each morning, when I woke I listened for the tireless pounding, looked at the drear through the window and was relieved that at least the sun had the decency to stay the hell away from us.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
Besides a burial service is rather lovely. Makes you feel uplifted, the grief is real. It makes you feel awful but it does something to you. I mean, it works it out like perspiration.
— Agatha Christie, By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Grief, we know where we've been. We know where we want to be.
— Wylie R. Weeks
On grief. We know where we've been. We know where we want to be.
— Wylie R. Weeks
I will always wear this scar. It's called love.
— Wylie R. Weeks
She scanned the Starveil posts, her mood darkening. Spartan had been a part of her life since elementary school. Losing him felt like having a piece of herself torn away. No amount of fix-it fics or alternate universes could change the fact her one true character had died.
— Danika Stone, All the Feels
Not thou, White rose, but thy Ensanguined sister is The dear companion of my heart's Shed blood.
— Adelaide Crapsey, Verse by Adelaide Crapsey
One of my pa...friends... isn't doing very well.""...Is your friend dying?""...Yes honey, he is.""That's sad.
— Justin Madson, Breathers
Death might be a blessing if it means you never have to face this kind of grief.
— Carol Cassella, Oxygen
It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life -- and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving! My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Oh Lady, let the sad tears fall To speak thy pain, Gently as through the silver dusk The silver rain. Oh, let thy bosom breathe its grief In such soft sigh As hath the wind in gardens where Pale roses die.
— Adelaide Crapsey, Verse by Adelaide Crapsey
As hard as it is, grieving can be a gift, if we use it to examine our own lives and come closer to those we love.
— Amy Eldon, Angel Catcher: A Grieving Jrl, revised: A Journal of Loss and Remembrance
This was a normal town once, and we were normal people. Most of us worked at the plastics factory on the outskirts of town. Then one day there was an accident... something escaped from the factory, a yellow gas. It floated over the town so fast that we didn't see it, didn't realize... and then it was too late, and Dark Falls wasn't a normal town anymore.
— R.L. Stine, Welcome to Dead House
For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?
— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
Sometimes I just needed to talk about it, even though it singed like touching the end of a match. I just needed to feel that pain for a moment, to know that it was real. It was my pain. I had earned it by living through it.
— Shelly Crane, The Other Side Of Gravity
By day, Ian was like the stars, there but not there. At night was when the beasts of grief came for her.
— Eleanor Morse, White Dog Fell from the Sky
I am amazed how little women cry nowadays, and then apologetically. I worry when shame or disuse begins to steal away such a natural function. To be a flowering tree and to be moist is essential, otherwise you will break. Crying is good, it is right. It does not cure dilemma, but it enables the process to continue instead of collapsing.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés
My mother was lost to me, but I wasn’t lost. She had anchored me, to Amma, my father, Link, Gatlin, before she left. I felt her in the streets, my house, the library, even the pantry.
— Kami Garcia, Beautiful Creatures
She told me that the brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, that skin, so protective in the beginning because it has to be to protect our organs, saga eventually - because the organs aren't so hot anymore either - and sharp edges become blunt, that the pain of letting go of grief is just as panful or even more painful than the grief itself.
— Miriam Toews
I'm glad for the rain...It's good camouflage.
— Lisa Schroeder, Chasing Brooklyn
... I have waited for this day, and grief faded with time.Or did it? Perhaps grief never leaves us but is merely drowned out by a flood of life overwhelming it. Perhaps the wound that bled once is bleeding still, and I did not notice it until now.
— Claire North
We’ve run out of comforting things to say.
— Suzanne Young, Hotel Ruby
If I had known what trouble you were bearing;What griefs were in the silence of your face;I would have been more gentle, and more caring,And tried to give you gladness for a space.I would have brought more warmth into the place,If I had known.If I had known what thoughts despairing drew you;(Why do we never try to understand?)I would have lent a little friendship to you,And slipped my hand within your hand,And made your stay more pleasant in the land,If I had known.
— Mary Carolyn Davies
It may be difficult, but thru sorrow, it’s important to find happiness in our memories and be very thankful to have them!
— Wendy Card
And grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away, and the person so real, so beloved, becomes a dim, slightly out-of-focus shadow.
— V.C. Andrews
See that's exactly why I don't want a dog." "Why?" "Because it'll just die." "Everybody dies, Brooklyn." Like that makes it okay or something.
— Lisa Schroeder, Chasing Brooklyn
Ill lose myself in the pain. It might not make sense. But it works.
— Lisa Schroeder, Chasing Brooklyn
Diggy wished he could cut sentences out of his head the way he could cut them out of a book, then cut them in half and word by word and letter by letter until they were bits of nothing that drifted from the scissors' edges, gravity not even interested enough to pull them down.
— Rebecca Petruck, Steering Toward Normal
After Lucca died, everything shut down. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't talk. Somehow they got me on the plane and back home.
— Lisa Schroeder, Chasing Brooklyn
There was healing in the tyranny, and tyranny in the healing.
— Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey
And yes, being lovesick is like being in mourning. Because you die, because your future dies and you with it...There is a hurting time. It lasts for so long. But it gets better. I know that now.
— Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop
I wondered what those mountains behind them might tell me, what advice they would give, if they could talk. What they would tell me about love, and about loss, and about how this wild place could heal as naturally as it could kill.
— Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey
When the dream that was no longer can be, you have to dream a different dream.
— Christina Rasmussen, Second Firsts Live Laugh and Love Again
There is no greater intimacy than sitting with someone traversing that tenuous boundary between worlds, sitting vigil with a spirit trembling on the border, reaching toward the new and releasing the old.
— Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey
All that grieved me - that I was half one thing and half another and nothing wholly - was the sorrow of my childhood, but the strength and use of my life after I grew up.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
In this waiting, there is witness.
— Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey
The line between the living and the dead may not be much of a line at all, but the terrain is not for the weak of heart.
— Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey
Do you ever miss it, not being a doctor anymore?" I shook my head, frowned a little. "I really don't. Something delicate and essential broke inside me when Isabella died. It will never be repaired, Kyle, at least I don't think so. I couldn't be a doctor now. I find it hard to believe in healing anymore.
— James Patterson
He would only be here one more night.And then back on deployment, whispered the dark part of my soul. He might never come back. You might be the last woman he ever has.
— Sofia Grey, His Temporary Fix
Take heart now in one true thing: You will gain traction. You will grow upwards even when you think you’ve been slammed back down into that same dark hole. It will start looking like a different hole, one that might still have youcurled up and crying, but that crying will be more transformative than only desperate screams of despair. Your pain can be turned to good account. You’re not alone. You’ve gotthis handbook. Keep us with you.
— Deborah Pardes, Climbing Out from Under: A Handbook for Heartbreak
Minute by minute, then hour by hour, then day by day. Work is solace," he said, "friends are comfort. Life is for the living. You and I know that, even though we spend so much time with the dead - maybe because of that we know we have to live. Chale has been a great help to me.""That's good," she said, thinking of the priest she'd suggested Morris talk to. "You can ... you know, anytime.""Yes." His lips curved. "I know. You're work, and a friend, so have been both solace and comfort.
— J.D. Robb, Indulgence in Death
The real satire starts when I’m shockingly mocked,not mockingly shocked.
— Munia Khan
Gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go. I'd wanted to slip across the borders of this world into that wood and bring back the hawk White lost. Some part of me that was very small and old had known this, some part of me that didn't work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams. And that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father. His death had been so sudden. there had been no time to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all. He could only be lost. He was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead. I know now what those dreams in spring had meant, the ones of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world. I'd wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.
— Helen Macdonald
Humor shares an edge with hilarity.
— Shannon Huffman Polson
His mother was as frosty as the polar icecaps. His sister was gone. Who did he have that cared about him? Who would remind him that he mattered?
— Sofia Grey, His Temporary Fix
Was it really just an hour ago that he’d licked me into nirvana at the top of the hill? We’d been buying condoms and planning an afternoon of hot sex, and now we were on a witch-hunt. Seeking retribution. Out for blood.
— Sofia Grey, His Temporary Fix
Honoring a life is honoring the wide open space of wilderness and unknowing where the sacred dwells.
— Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey
Resurrection does not come without crucifixion, and you cannot celebrate Easter without living Good Friday.
— Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey
Suffering is a jealous and lonely state. It can't abide the company of anything else. It is greedy
—  it demands all of one's energies.
Icy fingers walked down my spine, and I realized I was trembling. I wanted this to stop. Wanted Jas to stop before he made this whole situation a million times worse, but I couldn’t speak.
— Sofia Grey, His Temporary Fix
Are we meant to be pilgrims of the depths?
— Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey
Tears are part of the leeway of the common areas of a hospital, since so many have to do their crying away from the patient's bed. You don't care who sees you cry in the lobby: it was port of entry for all the sorrows, and one gave up all one's previous citizenship at the border.
— Paul Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir
What is known might sometimes sustain us, but what is unknown will save us.
— Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey
Grief would weave itself among the threads of love and life and hope, and I was starting to believe that what came of it all would still one day be beautiful.
— Shannon Huffman Polson, North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey
No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
I want to tell him that I don't know what i feel. I want him but i'm frightened to want him. I don
— t want my happiness to be entirely dependent on somebody else's to be a hostage to fortunes I cannot control.
Sometimes for our sanity own sanity we just have to look at the bigger picture.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
When someone we love is snatched from us, it often feels very hard to make plans.Sometimes people feel like they have lost faith in the future, or they become superstitious.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
You can do the impossible, because you have been through the unthinkable.
— Christina Rasmussen
[W]e’ve learned that grief can sometimes get loud, and when it does, we try not to speak over it.
— Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family
I know you are afraid
—  you are afraid to get hurt again. But I also know that you are not meant to grieve forever.
Creosote made Mandy think of the thrill of rushing through a garden sprinkler as a kid, of playing washer toss in the backyard, of spending nights in the neighbors’ huge in-ground swimming pool when she was twelve, throwing glow sticks in the turquoise water during Canada Day block parties. She thought of Jud for a moment, how he’d loved doing all those things when he was a kid, but how, as he got older, it was all about popularity, sports, a life of illusion… and without warning, a totally different kind of memory filled her mind – the dull feeling of her head hitting the concrete walls near the wood shop at her old high school, the sounds of kids laughing, the sharp smell of sawdust, the buzzing of electric sanders nearby, the sound of Jud laughing while he beat her up… without realizing it, she’d started crying noiselessly.
— Rebecca McNutt, Super 8: The Sequel to Smog City
The voice of grief is rather convincing, isn’t it? It tells you you’re “too old,” “not good enough,” or “not worthy enough” for another chance at life, that starting over is impossible. This voice in your head is the first thing you hear in the morning and the last thing you hear at night. It drives with you to work. It stays with you at lunch. Its message is so consistent that because of its repetitive power, you may be inclined to believe it. But, as persuasive as the voice of grief is, everything it says is a lie.It’s all a pack of lies.Do you want the truth? If you do, then start listening to life calling to you inside your grief.How? Every time you are yearning to be held and loved, to laugh again, listen to your yearning. Do not listen to your fear . . . Listen to life calling you, “I am here, come on over. Take a chance on me. I am your life, and you’re all that I’ve got.
— Christina Rasmussen, Second Firsts Live Laugh and Love Again
Grief doesn't arrive on schedule, as much as we'd like to.
— Dave Eggers, The Circle
Sorrowers tend to avoid what they are most fond of and try to give vent to their grief.
— Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
I had to see the beauty of my future so I could create it. I gave airtime to my dreams, and they spoke to me.I recognized grief’s voice and turned the volume down. Was it easy? No.Was I scared? Yes.Did fear get in the way? Heck, no. And it never will.My life is worth more than that. Your life is too.
— Christina Rasmussen, Second Firsts Live Laugh and Love Again
Can you imagine how lonely she must have felt when she received that phone call? Your lover has just died, your companion has abandoned you, but don't you dare make an inappropriate sound, because your family is around. No one to touch you the way he did, no one to understand you, no one to hug you to sleep, but don't dare allow your face to show a glint of grief. The cutting pain of feeling alone amid loved ones.
— Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
Our loved ones pass away or simply leave our lives forever too soon, and we think to ourselves, “I wasn’t ready for you to leave. It just wasn’t time,” because we’re never truly ready, because it’s never truly time. So we keep them in our memories.And when we regret that we don’t have more memories of them, maybe our minds give us more gifts; gradually we find ourselves remembering them being with us in times and places that they couldn’t have been, and gradually we stop correcting ourselves because, well, we want them to have been there.
— Dathan Auerbach, Penpal
Not yet," he wailed, as raw as the earth. "But you lay as though already dead, and I cannot go on without you. Do not leave me; do not die!" And I felt a grief from him to melt the mountain ice. Grief to drown in. Grief to both rend my heart and mend it at once.
— Tosca Lee, Havah: The Story of Eve
Come on, get up, get up, you can't just sit! But he was still crying and that had to be finished.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
I destroyed that doll, hoping the sacrifice would somehow reverse time and bring my father back. I was a mad scientist and an angry child.
— Walter Mosley
No parson in the world ever pictured heaven so beautifully as they did, in their innocent talk
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
You think knowing things will solve your private little griefs?
— Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues
It was good. It was like something inordinately beautiful and out of this world. Like I’d found an actual planet that I didn’t know had been there all along. Planet Heroin. The place where there was no pain.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
The end of times?" said Nanny. "Look, Tiff, Esme tol' me to say, if you want to see Esmerelda Weatherwax, then just you look around. She is here. Us witches don't mourn for very long. We are satisfied with happy memories - they're there to be cherished.
— Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd's Crown
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
— Albert Camus
Joanna Macy writes that until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it—grieving is a sign of spiritual health. But it is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair.
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
He was now working his way through the many shades of grief. Sadness made everything gray, he'd learned, but there were different types of gray, some darker than others. There were dark spots in his memories he wasn't brave enough to enter.
— Lauren DeStefano, A Curious Tale of the In-Between
My heart is broken and I grieve, for I have known love. Your heart is broken and you grieve, for you have not.
— Jesikah Sundin, Elements
It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like--how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you--how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another--and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.
— Margo Rabb, Kissing in America
Ice upon ice, and yet, inside, she melted and mourned all the same.
— Katherine McIntyre, Soul Solution
Grief lets you indulge in it, so that it can feed itself.
— Sreesha Divakaran
This was not [him]. It was a thing, with all the [him]-ness gone from it. Death takes the person and leaves his shell behind, like a hollowed-out tree.
— Anne Ursu, The Real Boy
The Triumph Of AchillesIn the story of Patroclusno one survives, not even Achilleswho was nearly a god.Patroclus resembled him; they worethe same armor.Always in these friendshipsone serves the other, one is less than the other:the hierarchyis always apparent, though the legendscannot be trusted--their source is the survivor,the one who has been abandoned.What were the Greek ships on firecompared to this loss?In his tent, Achillesgrieved with his whole beingand the gods sawhe was a man already dead, a victimof the part that loved,the part that was mortal.
— Louise Glück
absencelooks like a lake bed flooded with skysounds like cotton howlingtastes like tear-stained pillowssmells like churning bile and burnt hairfeels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying
— Beth Morey, Night Cycles: Poetry for a Dark Night of the Soul
We live, oblivious of the reality that grief is an incessant stream that flows into our life time and again and brings all those boulders back, which we had discarded in the hope of never meeting again.
— Balroop Singh
Well, the gold fish in the bowl lay upside down bloatingFull in the sky and the plains were bleached white with skeletonsVarious species grouped together accordingTo their past beliefsThe only way they ever all got together wasNot in love but shameful grief
— Don Van Vliet
In the chain of events, it is arbitrary to be sentimental about the passing of any one link.
— Johnny Rich, The Human Script
But in all of the sadness, when you’re feeling that your heart is empty, and lacking, You’ve got to remember that grief isn’t the absence of love. Grief is the proof that love is still there.
— Tessa Shaffer, Heaven Has No Regrets
He actually did it, didn't he?" Marsh said, shaking his head in wonder. "That bastard. There are two things I'll never forgive him for. The first is for stealing my dream of overthrowing the Final Empire, then actually succeeding at it."Vin paused. "And the second?"Marsh turned spike-heads towards her. "Getting himself killed to do it.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Final Empire
Death will paint everything a different shade of remorse. You’ll feel guilty that you’re still breathing.	But you can’t stop.You’ll feel guilty for wanting to laugh again. 	And it will be awful the first time that you do. You’ll feel guilty for just about everything at first.And someday, at some point, you’ll start to feel guilty . . . for forgetting to feel guilty.But of all Heaven’s lessons, guilt isn’t one of them. You don’t need to hold on to it. It doesn’t need to be a practice and it shouldn’t be your life. 	Heaven would never approve of your guilt.Because Heaven has no regrets.
— Tessa Shaffer, Heaven Has No Regrets
God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.
— C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Most encounters, however, have a sequel; this is their promise. The encounter with happiness has no sequel. All is there instantly. Happiness is what pierces grief.
— John Berger
I can tell you that it's okay to feel whatever it is you're feeling right now. It's okay to miss him and it's okay to hurt and it's okay to feel lost-just as long as you come to me, or your friends, or your family, when all those feelings try to overwhelm you. Because in amongst all those feelings, some of you are going to be angry, and some of you will need someone to blame. It's okay to be angry. I can't tell you if it's right or wrong to feel blame, but what I can say is don't be angry for too long and don't hold on to the blame forever. That kind of anger can take away a piece of you, a piece of you that you might not get back.
— Samantha Young, Fall from India Place
I won't lie to you. This changes things. It may even change you. I know it will change me.""I guess it's a reminder of the uncertainty in life and the foolishness of merely existing when the world is pleading with you to live. If you take anything from this, please take that. We take life for granted. We have to stop that. We have to start living.
— Samantha Young, Fall from India Place
You can't make anything if you're lost to yourself. You'll want to again, it's who you are. Wren, grieving is hard. Complex. Takes its own time.
— Amy McNamara, Lovely, Dark and Deep
Why it is that life can change so quickly?""How it's possible for a heart to stop beating so suddenly, instantly breaking all the hearts that were ever connected to it? But the truth is there is no sense in what happened to Jarrod. None that I can see. I wish I had a better answer, but I don't.
— Samantha Young, Fall from India Place
Thankfully, our disappointments matter to God, and He has a way of taking even some of the bitterest moments we go through and making them into something of great significance in our life. It’s hard to understand it at the time. Not one of us wants that thread when it is being woven in. Not one of us says, 'I can hardly wait to see where this is going to fit.' We all say at that moment, 'This is not the pattern I want.
— Ravi Zacharias
Om is the presence which steals away. It steals away the ordinary mundane existence of strife, struggle and duality; it steals away anxiety, aggression, fear, grief and sorrow; it steals away the debris of anger, hatred, confusion and ignorance, to fill us with the nectar of joy, immortality and life eternal.
— Banani Ray, Glory of OM: A Journey to Self-Realization
Our relationship had been doomed form the start, because it was based on grief, and unlike love, grief eventually passed.
— Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns
...and then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate. Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't.
— Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version
Even in death, her mother was winning.
— Noorilhuda, Catharsis
Aurora, you're a child, live like one, don't act like one. Enjoy the innocence, dump the immaturity.
— Noorilhuda, Catharsis
The dead should not have to answer to the claims of the living, even the sharpest grief.
— Emily Croy Barker, The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic
She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible threat.....The counselor couldn't prove otherwise.
— Noorilhuda, Catharsis
He also knew the language of The Klingons, but the army had no use for it.
— Noorilhuda, Catharsis
When we start rating each other’s lives and afflictions, we lose a bit of our humanity, compassion and perspective.
— Ariana Carruth
The list of lifesavers left him numb, clueless - the action, indifferent.
— Noorilhuda, Catharsis
Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don't share it there's a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.
— Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life's search for love and wisdom
— Jalaluddin Rumi
Nothing big ever happens, good or bad, unless the floor falls out first.Let your longing wind you down through that spiral. And know that falling can be the most wickedly awesome and totally safe thing you’ve ever done. Down, down, down, because when you hit that solid ground you’ll know.You might touch down softly, or you might land in an ungraceful thud. But land you will and when you’re ready, you can stretch your shaky legs, dust yourself off tossing your head back to the heavens and proclaim ‘Here I am! All that I am, and all that I will be.”And your heart will still love what it loves. And you will remember that was good in you, and in her. And these memories will comfort and will serve you as you move through life, open to love – wherever and whenever it finds you.
— Jeanette LeBlanc
I miss you so much in these wee morning hours,when the depth of the night sets my spirit free.When the forest is dark, and there doesn’t have to be anything in the worldbut the beauty I pull out of it.I miss you throughout the day,as I come across glories and wonders that could easily overwhelm me,but just dull because you’re not here to enjoy them.
— Edward Fahey, The Mourning After
She had dreams that shamed her in the morning, dreams where Ronan gave her a white powdered cake, yet spoke in Arin's voice. I made this for you, he said. Do you like it?The powder was so fine that she inhaled its sweetness, but always woke before she could taste.
— Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Crime
I have this strange feeling none of this is really happening. Like I'm standing far away from myself. Like nothing is real. Have you ever had a feeling like that?
— A. Manette Ansay, Sister
Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly?
— W. Somerset Maugham
Your thoughts can torture you-but not the dead. They've moved on.
— T.L. Shreffler, Sora's Quest
The risk of all friendship is, alas, a little grief.
— Alison Croggon, The Naming
People imagine that missing a loved one works kind of like missing cigarettes. The first day is really hard but the next day is less hard and so forth, easier and easier the longer you go on. But instead it’s like missing water. Every day, you notice the person’s absence more.
— Anne Tyler
To lose what we never owned might seem an eccentric Bereavement but Presumption has its Affliction as actually as Claim --
— Emily Dickinson, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson
The women cried with one another, and it didn't seem to matter whether you were Jewish or Christian, you just mourned.
— Harry Bernstein
How do you circumvent a mind bent upon lying to get away from the truth?
— Noorilhuda, Catharsis
If you can get to be you, why can't I get to be me?
— Noorilhuda, Catharsis
I ask you, what would you do if you could erase one bad memory and retain all that was beautiful in your life? Would you not move heaven and earth - and get loads of therapy - to have that?
— Noorilhuda, Catharsis
What I've always taken away from his words is the sense that we all have something that confines us, that seeks to define us, label us, belittling us in the process, shortchanging our potential. Can it be that that is our sanctuary, our refuge, our way to liberty?
— Noorilhuda, Catharsis
He wrote to his father every day. His platoon called his dad a girlfriend.
— Noorilhuda, Catharsis
No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief.
— Becky  Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
You don't understand," Alecto replied vacantly. "It isn't that I want to die... I just don't want to exist.
— Rebecca McNutt, Smog City
Everybody dies, and everybody loses people they love-everybody-and that is not an excuse for you to fucking die. I love you, and I need you to be my mother, and I need you to have a life. So get over yourself.
— Cynthia Hand, The Last Time We Say Goodbye
Don't love deeply, till you make sure that the other part loves you with the same depth, because the depth of your love today, is the depth of your wound tomorrow.
— نزار قباني
As long as they talk about you, you're not really dead, as long as they speak your name, you continue. A legend doesn't die, just because the man dies.
— Rod Serling
Sometimes you hide away a memory because it is so precious that you don’t want to dilute it with the attempt to recount it.
— Joshua Gaylord, When We Were Animals
There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.
— Julian Barnes, Levels of Life
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
Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.
— Julian Barnes, Levels of Life
Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.
— Julian Barnes
I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn't you think so? Doesn't it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never - I never thought it would be this small, did you?
— Dan Chaon, Stay Awake
Grief demands answers but one doesn't always get them.
— Kavita Kané, Sita's Sister
The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?
— Julian Barnes, Levels of Life
Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.
— Joan Didion
... when she called to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come upon my aunts' old music-master, she was moved to very real grief, and shuddered to think of that other grief, so different in its bitterness, which Mlle. Vinteuil must now be feeling, tinged with remorse at having virtually killed her father.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Every day my anxiety is higher,every day the grief more mortal.Today more than yesterday terror exalts me…
— Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems
By all accounts Rafe's life had been shattered by the loss of his brother Peter. But whereas she turned away from drink when Draven died, Rafe had simply upended a barrel of brandy on his head and hadn't taken that hat off since.
— Eloisa James, The Taming of the Duke
Sometimes I am all right. Is this what they call letting go? I have let go, if letting go means I am all right sometimes.
— David Sheff
Jesus might not think so, but maybe the dead are best left that way.
— Chris Scofield, The Shark Curtain
Life has only three states-Happiness,Grief and Emptiness.The extreme state of life is emptiness.
— Deshwal Sachin
Someday you will wake up feeling 51 percent happy and slowly, molecule by molecule, you will feel like yourself again.
— Amy Poehler
In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, -- he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
At least I rescued your poor hot dog.
— R.L. Stine, Ghost Camp
A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me.
— Rebecca McNutt
Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing and you were in the best possible place in the world for it - in a beautiful place of worship, surrounded by grace. Take this time, every minute of it. Let things work themselves out here in India.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it… this place, she decided, was called Smog City.
— Rebecca McNutt, Smog City
I felt myself becoming angry too easily. I once saw a couple at a restaurant, and I could tell from their mannerisms that they were having some type of disagreement. I got mad at the guy and wanted to tell him, "Come on – appreciate your wife!
— Jeremy Camp, I Still Believe
Grief is like a roller coaster. Somedays we feel up and other days we feel down.
— Louise Suzanne Boyd, Journey to the Rainbow
Many people think that crying is a sign of weakness, they're wrong - it is a sign of healing.
— Louise Suzanne Boyd, Journey to the Rainbow
I took his razor from the shower floor, bits of his black hair still caked between the blades. I took his toothbrush from the sink counter and sucked on the bristles, trying to find the taste of him, but there was only the flavor of watery mint toothpaste....I pulled the sheets off the bed with the idea that I could gather up the imprint of him and save it. I thought, I can unfurl the sheets on our old bed at home. I can lie in the creases formed by his body. I can sleep with him again.
— Cristina Henriquez, The Book of Unknown Americans
The road of grief is often long and lonely and many stones need to be moved out of the way, but it is not without its lighter moments.
— Louise Suzanne Boyd, Journey to the Rainbow
Most of us go through this journey of grief at different speeds
— Louise Suzanne Boyd, Journey to the Rainbow
Home is where I take up such a tiny portion of the memory foam; home is a splintered word. His pillow is a sweat-stained map of an escape plot, also a map of love’s dear abandon. (When did he give way, at which breath?) Forgiveness may mean retrospectively abandoning the pillow and abandoning the photograph of someone with curious eyes, kissing my toes, poolside. I paint my toes Big Apple Red. I don’t know what to do about the shock of red nails on clean, white tiles except get used to it. (And when he gave way, was there room for feelings or the words for feeling?) While I brush my teeth, I can see him in my periphery at the other sink. The outline of him lulls and stings. (And when he gave way, was it the end of the beginning of suffering?) I draw his profile near, I make him brush his teeth with me, he spits and makes a mess. I could love another face, but why?
— Karen Green
With emotions ranging from fear, grief and anger to happiness and relief, the process of bringing home a child who needs in-home care can be complicated
— Charisse Montgomery, Home Care CEO: A Parent's Guide to Managing In-home Pediatric Nursing
Solitude and retirement cherish grief, employment and exertion are the only means of dissipating it.
— Lord Melbourne
I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old...drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.I used to be a poet and my words were gold.
— Roman Payne
I know I could have saved your ashes to put into the ocean, but I wanted you to have the journey, all the way with the currents, to the open sea. And I know that when I finally get to see the waves washing on the shore, to hear them, I will feel you there.
— Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
Zhuangzi's wife died. When Huizu went to convey his condolences, he found Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. "You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old," said Huizu. "It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing - this is going too far, isn't it?"Zhuangzi said, "You're wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn't grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there's been another change and she's dead. It's just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter."Now she's going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don't understand anything about fate. So I stopped.
— Zhuangzi, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
Grief is better than happiness, because in grief a person draws close to God. Your wings open. A tent is set up in the desert where God can visit you. Wealth that arrives in grief is what we spend in joy. The soul is greater than anything you ever lost.
— Bahauddin, The Drowned Book: Ecstatic and Earthy Reflections of the Father of Rumi
A walk is a walk and must be taken; breakfast and dinner come when they are due. The routines of the living are inviolable, no hiatus called on account of misery, spiritual crisis, or awful weather.
— Mark Doty, Dog Years
What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over.
— Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling
Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter’s death and to that sorrow she’d added a long life of entitlement and disappointment, of privilege and pride. And the dagger she’d fashioned was taking a brief break from slashing her insides, and was now pointed outward.
— Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder
Love was holding someone's hand when you wanted to escape.
— Krista Van Dolzer, The Sound of Life and Everything
His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.
— Tana French, Broken Harbour
Grief doesn't have a face.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Such a funny thing death is for mortals. You cry. You morn. You grieve. You get angry. But death is not always tragic, dear one. Sometimes death is the ultimate expression of love.
— R.K. Ryals, Mark of the Mage
Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.
I hope I’m the ghost that belongs to her.
— Courtney Summers, This is Not a Test
I’ve seen a lot of stuff… maybe I’ve seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I’ve seen what they can do, how evil they can be… I’ve seen the Holocaust and I’ve seen Jonestown, I’ve seen the Vietnam War and I’ve seen Hiroshima… I’ve seen the Chernobyl disaster… I’ve seen the World Trade Center attack… I’ve been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive,” Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding.
— Rebecca McNutt, Smog City
The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom; no one can sound its depths.
— Primo Levi, If Not Now, When?
You hold an absence at your center, as if it were a life.
— Richard Brostoff
The accumulation of grief over one lifetime is more then one heart can bear."Robert explained."Only the heartless could withstand more.Or the very young,those too naive to truly understand loss.
— James Rollins, Bloodline
What I think is that there is no perspective in grief, or in love. How can there be, when one person becomes the center of the universe - either because he has been lost or because he has been found?
— Jodi Picoult
Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs.
— Ambrose Bierce
I've never seen grief like it. Grief like that, it's like an animal. She's not eating. She's not sleeping. She's whimpering. She's sluggish. She's not herself
— Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here
Harsh, bitter laughs exploded from her like shrapnel, and she didn’t care who was cut in the process.
— Katherine McIntyre, Poisoned Apple
Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.
— Siri Hustvedt
The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.
— David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
Grief. This is what it does to people. It makes them strangers to themselves.
— Allen Zadoff
In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
The deeper the grief, the more radiant the love.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
An English teacher at school once said to her, 'Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically.' Nothing she has ever experienced has prepared her for the pain of this. Most of the time her heart feels as though it's waterlogged and her ribcage, her arms, her back, her temples, her legs all ache in a dull, persistent way: but at times like this the incredulity and the appalling irreversibility of what has happened cripple her with a pain so bad she often doesn't speak for days.
— Maggie O'Farrell, After You'd Gone
We lose the understanding that death always begets life of some sort, and that life is always an opportunist, persistently standing ready to build something out of the smoldering ashes and raise something up out of the tangled carnage.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
It seemed everyone knew their place in it, but I was in the mood where I would rather be alone and look a houseplants.
— Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead