c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Goodbyes are not easy, but I'm ready to move on. I'm not reluctant, Emma, not holding back. I don't have answers to the questions, but I have some good questions. I have loved life, but I believe that life is to be loved, it is a gift.
— Madeleine L'Engle, Certain Women
The memory of the pain did not destroy the reality of the pleasure
—  grief did not obliterate joy.
The kindness sent from one compassionate soul to another during the time of loss of one held so dear allows the sorrow-filled heart to open wide, filling the space of emptiness that grief may have created with a renewed sense of peace, compassion, and love.
— Molly Friedenfeld, The Book of Simple Human Truths
One of the worst things about burying a child is the stress of wondering.
— Leslie A. Gordon, Cheer
.....what happened to my little brother had to fit into my life, not consume or define it.
— Leslie A. Gordon, Cheer
I was disinterested in everything, even in Ethan. Even, I was ashamed to admit, in Ella. I didn’t know where else I wanted to be but I knew it was anywhere except on this earth, in my body, living my life.
— Leslie A. Gordon, Cheer
When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don't try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power. Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They're sacred. they are part of each person's journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am all alone. That's the one fear you can alleviate.
— Glennon Doyle Melton, Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed
If, as a culture, we don’t bear witness to grief, the burden of loss is placed entirely upon the bereaved, while the rest of us avert our eyes and wait for those in mourning to stop being sad, to let go, to move on, to cheer up. And if they don’t — if they have loved too deeply, if they do wake each morning thinking, I cannot continue to live — well, then we pathologize their pain; we call their suffering a disease.We do not help them: we tell them that they need to get help.
— Cheryl Strayed
Well, every one can master a grief but he that has it.
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
It was as if she had reached into her own pocket and discovered a small pebble, as hard as a diamond, that she had forgotten belonged to her.
— Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child
Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out...though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love.
— J.K. Rowling
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
— Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
We are all of us exposed to grief: the people we love die, as we shall ourselves in due course; expectations are disappointed and ambitions are thwarted by circumstance. Finally, there are some who insist upon feeling guilty over the ill they have done or simply on account of the ugliness which they perceive in their own souls. A solution of a kind has been found to this problem in the form of sedatives and anti-depressant drugs, so that many human experiences which used to be accepted as an integral part of human life are now defined and dealt with as medical problems. The widow who grieves for a beloved husband becomes a 'case', as does the man saddened by the recollection of the napalm or high explosives he has dropped on civilian populations. One had thought that guilt was a way, however indirect, in which we might perceive the nature of reality and the laws which govern our human experience; but it is now an illness that can be cured.Death however, remains incurable. Though we might be embarrassed by Victorian death-bed scenes or the practices of mourning among people less sophisticated than ourselves, the fact of death tells us so much about the realities of our condition that to ignore it or try to forget it is to be unaware of the most important thing we need to know about our situation as living creatures. Equally, to witness and participate in the dying of our fellow men and women is to learn what we are and, if we have any wisdom at all, to draw conclusions which must in their way affect our every thought and our every act.
— Charles Le Gai Eaton, King of the Castle: Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World
I wished for someone to hold me up. Suddenly someone was there.
— Christie Watson, Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away
I’m not sure about all the particulars that led to this moment. Do I believe life is a series of dots to be connected…or that no one can outrun destiny…or that all roads lead to truth and coincidence is a lie to distract us? The reason I was in this place no longer mattered. The harsh reality stared me in the face and demanded an immediate decision. Walk away and blame it on my age. Or stay and try to help a woman who had slowly become my friend over the last few weeks.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Perfect Glass
I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.
— Anne Enright, The Gathering
In a matter of moments, I awakened to a life that wasn’t mine. It was like peering into a dark hidden world that I wasn’t supposed to know about and that my mind didn’t want to believe existed.
— Mike Ericksen, Upon Destiny's Song
My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, "David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now,' my mind repeating Schrodinger's Cat, Schrodinger's Cat.
— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries
I draw in a ragged breath, the kind you take when the pain is too deep to cry, when you can't cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist. I want to do something to make this better, even though I know that nothing can change the fact of my father gone and under ground.
— Ally Condie, Reached
He missed him like he would miss the sun if it fell out of the sky.
— Gary D. Schmidt, First Boy
He would be able to suffer what his son had suffered. He would be able to suffer and his suffering would for an instance displace his grief.
— Simon Lelic, A Thousand Cuts
Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father's decay lodged in me.
— Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries
There is a phantom that flies with the banshees. It strangles the throat, pierces the heart and consumes the body with pain that only time and tears can expel.
— Susan   Denning, Far Away Home
He felt it deep, like a stone too big to heft out of the garden. He just had to how around it and make do.
— Gary D. Schmidt, First Boy
It’s not okay,” I tell her. This gets her attention; it’s not what she was expecting. “You don’t have to be okay.” “What do you want from me?” Her voice is ragged, desperate. “I want you to let yourself be broken. Let yourself hurt.” She shakes her head again. “I can’t. If I let it out, it’ll never stop.” “Yes, it will.
— Jasinda Wilder, Falling into You
She closes her eyes, and I can see the moisture. She’s deep-breathing again, and I notice her hands are clutched around the opposing wrists, nails digging in deep, hard, scratching. Pain to replace pain.
— Jasinda Wilder, Falling into You
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly. Amen.
— Aaron Freeman
You can’t hold it in forever,” Colton said, apropos of nothing. “Yes, I can.” I had to. “You’ll go crazy. It’ll come out, one way or another.” “Better crazy than broken.” I wasn't sure where that came from, hadn't thought it or meant to say it. “You’re not broken. You’re hurting.
— Jasinda Wilder, Falling into You
Let…it…go,” he whispers, his voice a fierce, harsh sound in my hair. “No. No!” The last word is screamed. “You have to. You can’t bleed it out. You can’t keep pretending, drinking it down.
— Jasinda Wilder, Falling into You
When words can't make it better, hold my hand and don't let go.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
The door slams in response, and I laugh. I'm glad she can laugh. It means she really is coping. I know she’s internalizing a lot, though. Putting on a show for me. She’ll have new scars on her wrists soon.
— Jasinda Wilder, Falling into You
Sadness pulses out of us as we walk. I almost expect the trees to lower their branches when we pass, the stars to hand down some light. I breathe in the horsy scent of eucalyptus, the thick sugary pine, aware of each breath I take, how each one keeps me in the world a few seconds longer. I taste the sweetness of the summer air on my tongue and want to just gulp and gulp and gulp it into my body--this living, breathing, heart-beating body of mine.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
I don't even know how long she sobs. Time ceases to pass, and she cries, cries, cries. Clutches me and makes these sounds of a soul being ripped in two, the grief so long denied taking its toll. Fermented grief is far more potent.
— Jasinda Wilder, Falling into You
That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.
— Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
Women eat ice-cream, men toast marshmallows.
— Dianna Hardy, Cry Of The Wolf
The train blows, just when I was forgetting. Forgetting that I am here alone. And I wonder if those cars got held up by its passing, just as I have yours.
— Kellie Elmore, Jagged Little Pieces
How do you say what's in your heart if your heart is something you haven't known for years? How do you give yourself completely when all you've done is bury yourself in grief? How do you come back from the dar when it's all you can remember?
— T.J. Klune, Into This River I Drown
There is a club in this world that you do not join knowingly.One day you are just a member.It is “The life changing events club.”The fee to join the club is hurt beyond belief, payable in full, up front for a lifetime membership.The benefit of the club is a new found perspective on life, and a deep understanding that you may not be happy about your current situation, but you can be happy in your current situation.The only rule to the club is that you cannot tell anyone that you are a member.The club does not provide a directory of its members, but when you look into a member’s eye, you can tell that they too are part of the club. Members are allowed to exchange that brief eye contact that says: “I didn’t know.”Being a member of this club is the last thing that anyone initially wants in their life.Being a member of this club is the best thing that ever happens to a person in their life, and there is not a person in the club that would ever give up their membership.If you really look and know what you are looking for you can spot the clubs members; they are the ones that provide a random act of kindness and do something for someone who can never repay them for what they have done. They are the people spreading joy and optimism and lifting people’s spirits even when their own heart has been broken.I have paid my dues; my lifetime membership arrived today, not by mail, but by a deep inner feeling that I cannot describe.It is the best club that I never wanted to be part of. But I am glad that I am a member.
— JohnA Passaro, 6 Minutes Wrestling With Life
They should make earplugs for people who are grieving, so we don't have to hear the stupid things people say, but I'd look like a dork in them." -Corinna
— Carole Geithner, If Only
For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--
— Lauren Oliver, Requiem
He was like the other half of myself,' says Boris...Ulrich says, 'You haven't lost {him}, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinons, or your hair has turned like his.'There are no more facts about him -- that part is over. Now is the time for essential things...Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son.'You'll live astride the line that separates life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them; you'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgment falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.
— Rana Dasgupta, Solo
But I understood, now, that we don’t live only for ourselves. We’re connected by millions of shared experiences and dreams and nightmares, all tied together with compassion. I learned that even when we’re going through our darkest winter, spring is waiting to appear.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Glass Girl
I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What.
— John Green, Looking for Alaska
We all think when we’re young that we want excitement and highs and passion. To hell with ordinary.”I smiled and she chuckled. “But when we find ourselves in these adult bodies,” she said. “When we wise up a little, or get slapped in the face by life, we realize we just want all things to be equal.” She put the heels of her hands together near her heart like the Yoga prayer position. “And we want to understand them better.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Glass Girl
Sam was your brother, and Trick was your friend, but what they did had nothing to do with you. You don't have to choose. Just because me and your dad couldn't live together, didn't mean you had to stop loving one of us, did it? Doesn't work like that. Love doesn't work like that.
— C.J. Flood, Infinite Sky
You can't tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy.He wasn't even sixteen but his coffin's the same size as a man's would be.It's not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did; that's what the faces here say.I think about him, in there, with all that space, and I want to stop them. I want to open the box and climb in with him. To wrap him up in a duvet. I can't bear the thought of him being cold.And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb: Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love?
— C.J. Flood, Infinite Sky
Most kids grow sullen and angry when they’re working through issues, but Thanet mustered up another kind of bull-headed strength. The kind that sees beyond circumstances to what really matters. How could anyone hurt a soul that lovely?
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Glass Girl
Every moment of our lives we make choices. Most we don’t even know we’re making, they’re so dull or routine or automatic. Some are beyond explanation—like my mom choosing Wyatt’s memory over Dad and me.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Glass Girl
Pruned my subconscious. Discovered new shoots.
— Sally Jo Martine
He felt split in two, one crazy man eating hair and one rational man watching a crazy man eat hair. He chewed and swallowed the last pieces of his father's life. He felt like he was building a museum of pain, a freak show, where he was the only visitor viewing the only mutant screaming the only prayer he knew: Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back Daddy...
— Sherman Alexie, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories
Wyatt told me once that if tenderness were a disease, I’d be terminal.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Glass Girl
Hearing my brother’s words coming out of Henry, this stranger in a strange town, made me feel wild with all the loss—wild and wired with no place to put those feelings.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Glass Girl
I had had my night of weeping...I had purged myself of useless emotions that terrible night, now every nerve every sinew, every thought was bent on a single purpose
— Elizabeth Peters
The ice cold fear I’d felt, not knowing if Wyatt was alive, pressed into the wall with other girls and surrounded by guys who were unspeakably brave, hit my body again in a wave. This was trauma—the gift that keeps on giving.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Glass Girl
Book-club night stopped abruptly when Caleb died. For almost a year and a half, as if by some type of tacit agreement, they all knew they couldn’t be in the same room at the same time. It was as if their collective grief would multiply, rebounding endlessly within any closed space like an image in a house of mirrors, until the pain would overcome them all.
— Francis Guenette, Disappearing in Plain Sight
We bumped into other silent lines of kids going in the same direction. We looked like we were much younger and our lines were headed to the cafeteria or recess or the carpool line. Or it could’ve been a fire drill. Except for the stone-faced police officers weaving between us with rifles.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Glass Girl
It was the first time I discovered that some girls actually sneak out of the house during slumber parties and meet up with boys. I would’ve never known if I hadn’t gone to the bathroom at midnight and caught Macy and Adrienne climbing through the bathroom window. They had on eyeliner, perfume, and cut-off shorts. Their only goodbye a glare that promised retribution if I didn’t keep my mouth shut.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Glass Girl
Experience teaches that the fire of mental grief is intensified by being confined to its own hearth.
— Fr James Groenings
It was the first time in years I didn’t wonder if my father was out there, looking at it too.
— Ally Carter, Out of Sight, Out of Time
You know, through pain, you learn a lot about yourself--things you thought you never knew you wanted to learn. And it's kind of like those animals that regrow a part of their body--like a starfish. You might not feel it. You might not even want to grow, but you will. You'll grow that part that broke off, and that growing, that blooming--cannot happen without the pain.
— Kelle Hampton, Bloom: Finding Beauty in the Unexpected--A Memoir
(...) and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death was Augustus Water.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
There is a point when the anguished soul finally despairs. A moment in life when the heart, the will, even the spirit crumbles. Some say that after much grief and drowning in tears, it is possible to pick up the pieces and carefully repair what was shatt
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
Will my eyes adjust to this darkness? Will I find you in the dark – not in the streaks of light which remain, but in the darkness? Has anyone ever found you there? Did they love what they saw? Did they see love? And are there songs for singing when the light has gone dim? Or in the dark, is it best to wait in silence?Noon has darkened. As fast as they could say, ‘He’s dead,’ the light dimmed. And where are you in the darkness? I learned to spy you in the light. Here in this darkness, I cannot find you. If I had never looked for you, or looked but never found, I would not feel this pain of your absence. Or is not your absence in which I dwell, but your elusive troubling presence?It’s the neverness that is so painful. Never again to be here with us – never to sit with us at the table…. All the rest of our lives we must live without him. Only our death can stop the pain of his death.
— Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son
...there's the suffering from love and the suffering from grief - either pain permanently scars the soul...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.
— Lauren Oliver
...you must never partly love or stop half way - because then, you become superficial and cannot be deeply hurt or loved...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
The death of loved ones often awakens the death inside of us.
— Sandra Chami Kassis
Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Why are the photographs of him as a little boy so incredibly hard to look at? Something is over. Now instead of those shiny moments being things we can share together in delighted memories, I, the survivor, have to bear them alone. So it is with all the memories of him. They all lead into blackness. All I can do is remember him, I cannot experience him. Nothing new can happen between us.
— Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son
...beneath torrents of spring rain, buds come to life - and we do too, beneath torments of tears...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
May the beauty of the flowers remind us of the beauty of our loved one's spirit
— Steve   Butler, We Do Remember You
...all winter the acorns and red Maple leaf moldered in silence - in the same way grief is gnawing at me - slowly, imperceptibly... consuming...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Sorrow fades," he muttered as he retrieved the last fragment, "grief dies, but Art lives forever.
— Kenyon Gambier, The Mad Masquerade
...it is love, imperfect and unordered, that keeps them apart, even as it holds them somehow together...
— Judith Guest
Shhh, Eena, it’s going to be okay. I promise, you’ll get through this.”	She didn’t fight him, but grabbed onto his shirt, weeping softly into it as before. He began to hum faintly, a familiar Earth tune. Soon he was singing the words in that deep, consoling voice of his. The song itself was meant to be comforting, and his tender manner made it that much more effectual. 	Eena recognized the song. She fell asleep to the soothing l
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Eena, The Return of a Queen
For the human memory is short, and even when we write it in stone we quickly forget and the stones crumble and even those stones then forget.
— Stant Litore, Strangers in the Land
Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Whatever he goes through, I feel. Whatever I go through, he feels. It’s what happens when two people become one: they no longer only share love. They also share all of the pain, heartache, sorrow, and grief.
— Colleen Hoover, Hopeless
Don't lick your wounds unless you care to taste the sting a second time.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
My life has become a dismal sigh fettered by pangs of grief and anguished weeping.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
I wish I believed him. He's looking at me like he can see where I begin.
— Amy McNamara, Lovely, Dark and Deep
I have discovered that sitting still leaves little spaces for the grief to get in, so I stay busy.
— Veronica Roth, Insurgent
My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was pain no words can render.
— Charlotte Brontë
An explosion in space makes no sound at all.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is 'acquainted with Grief', we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.
— Emily Dickinson
What Karen wants to do - needs to do - is cry, but she can't. Here, alone, when she could howl, beat the sofa cushions, scream; now, somehow, she is unable. It's for fear that if she gives in to it, she'll lose all sense of who she is. She is afraid that if she falls apart in private, then she'll fall apart completely. That if she crumbles, like a house in an earthquake, she will disappear down some deep, dark crevasse, and never be able to pull herself out and put herself back together again.
— Sarah Rayner, One Moment, One Morning
Well, it is a particular sin to permit grief for what is gone to poison the praise for what blessings remain to us.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion
Gonzo's father told his son to grieve without reservation or embarrassment until he could grieve solemnly and inwardly, and then finally to hang up his tears and wear them only occasionally, as befits the true men of the heart. Grief is not a thing to be ashamed of or suppressed, he told Gonzo. Nor yet is it a thing to cherish. Feel it, inhabit it and leave it behind. It is right, but it is not the end.
— Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World
Larkin gets it, got it, the lies we live just to tread through time.
— Amy McNamara, Lovely, Dark and Deep
Reading Aloud to My Father I chose the book haphazardfrom the shelf, but with Nabokov's firstsentence I knew it wasn't the thingto read to a dying man:The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,and common sense tells us that our existenceis but a brief crack of lightbetween two eternities of darkness.The words disturbed both of us immediately,and I stopped. With music it was the same --Chopin's Piano Concerto — he asked meto turn it off. He ceased eating, and dranklittle, while the tumors briskly appropriatedwhat was left of him.But to return to the cradle rocking. I thinkNabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.That's why babies howl at birth,and why the dying so often reachfor something only they can apprehend.At the end they don't want their handsto be under the covers, and if you should putyour hand on theirs in a tentative gestureof solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;and you must honor that desire,and let them pull it free.
— Jane Kenyon, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems
Sorrow spoken lends a little courage to the speaker.
— Walter Wangerin Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow
I don’t cry for humans. I cry for things that are so beautiful I just can’t stand it, like Bonnie in front of me, all crusty from rolling in the sand, with a mouthful of half-chewed hay and eyes that knew everything I’d ever thought or felt or been.
— Judith Tarr, Living in Threes
It was a look that suggested emotions happening just past your line of sight: a grief so deep you'd never be able to see it, a love so fierce it could swallow itself completely.
— Leslie Jamison, The Gin Closet
The grief of children was unconditional, fueled by the implicit belief that it would last forever; for a child, grief was not grief unless it was eternal.
— Andrew  Taylor, The Four Last Things
I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last bath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony,until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner.
— W.G. Sebald
I wish I could have shown you that engineheart- the system of pieces and parts that moved us forward, that moves us forward still. One day, a few weeks after my son’s death, I took the bolt off the casing and opened it up. Just to see how it worked. Opening that heart was like the opening the first page of a book- there were characters (me, the Memory of My Father), there was rhythm and chronology, I saw, in the images, old roads I’d forgotten- and scenes from stories where the VW was just a newborn. I do know that it held a true translation: miles to words, words to notes, notes to time. It was the HEART that converted the pedestrian song of Northampton to something meaningful, and it did so via some sort of fusion: the turtle that howls a bluegrass tune at the edge of Bow Lake becomes a warning in the VW heart…and that’s just the beginning- the first heart layer. It will take years and years of study, and the energy of every single living thing, to understand the tiny minds and roads in the subsequent layers, the mechanics at work to make every single heartmoment turn together… The point is, this WAS always the way it was supposed to be. Even I could see that the Volkswagen heart was wired for travel-genetically coded. His pages were already written-as are mine and yours. Yes, yours too! I am looking into your eyes right now and I am reading your life, and I am excited/sorry for what the road holds for you. It’s going to be amazing/really difficult. You’ll love/loathe every minute of it!
— Christopher Boucher, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Novel
How to read this book:Even after I was told my father was dead, I believed (I still believe) that I could fix everything- that if I logged enough miles in my VW and kept telling stories through the countless dead ends and breakdowns, I could undo the terrible tree events…not that I should have expected to with this particular power, which is incomplete (as I was forced to sell a few stories and procedures for time-of-money), full of holes. Sure, the book turns on, lights up; its fans whirr and the bookengine crunches. But some of the pages are completely blank; others hang by a thread. the book’s transmission is shot, too, so don’t’ be surprised if the book slips from one version to the next as you’re reading .Finally, the thermostat’s misked, so you should expect sudden changes in temperature, the pages might get cold, or it may begin to snow between paragraphs, or you may turn the page and get hit with a faceful of rain or blinding beams of sunlight.So go ahead. Do it-open the book. See? You see me, right? And I see you. See? I am reading your face, your eyes, your lips. I know the sufferdust on your brow. I can see you reading, and I can tell, too, when you are here, when you are absent, what you’ve read and how it affects you. There is no more hiding. I see your chords- your fratures, your cold gifts, where and when you’ve hurt people…your stories are written right there on your face!
— Christopher Boucher, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Novel
People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Sometimes I guess it just feels better to know that you have someone to help you when you can’t even help yourself. ~ Willow Mosby (Exposing ELE)
— Rebecca Gober
My grief has burrowed into me like a dark thing that eats away at my life.
— Morgan Rhodes, Falling Kingdoms
Sometimes what a person expresses in their eyes is more than all the books you could read on suffering.
— Shannon L. Alder
This rose of pearl-coated infinity transformsthe diseased slums of a broken heartinto a palace made of psalms and gold.
— Aberjhani, Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black
People were freaked out, but they showed it in weird ways. Back home, people would have been weeping and doing a lot of very public group hugs. At Wexford people just aggressively pretended nothing had happened.
— Maureen Johnson, The Name of the Star
Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.
— Colson Whitehead, Zone One
Grief shared was grief lessened.
— Karen Marie Moning, Kiss of the Highlander
The very nastiest and coarsest, I can't tell you. It is not grief, not dullness, but much worse. It is as if all that was good in me had hidden itself, and only what is horrid remains.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
By standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of another’s solitude, we may mediate the love of God to a person who needs something deeper than any human being can give.
— Parker J. Palmer
The ticking of the clock has gotten so loud." - 74
— Robin Romm, The Mercy Papers
And then I feel guilty, because I know all these offers are made in vain. I know I cannot get my mother back healthy for a day. ... My mom is sick, sick and dying, and no bargaining will change that. And it's in all the books, bargaining, which makes me embarrassed. Look at me grieving my textbook grief. - 150
— Robin Romm, The Mercy Papers
Pain and grief have been kept buried for ages, bred in secrecy and shame, wrapped by an ongoing conspiracy of smiles and well-being. Pain and grief are most healing and ecstatic emotions. Yes, sure, they can be hard, yet what makes them most devastating is the perverted idea that they are wrong, that they need to be hidden and fixed. The greatest perversion I can conceive is the idea that illness and pain are a sign that there is something wrong in our life, that we have unresolved issues, that we have made mistakes. In this world everyone is bound to get ill, experience pain and die. The greatest gift I can give to myself and the world is the joyful acceptance of this. Today I want to be real, I will not hide my pain as well as my happiness. I will not care if my gloomy face or desperate words cause concern or embarrassment in others. I do not need be fed with reassuring words about the beauty of life. The beauty of life resides in the full acceptance of All That Is.
— Franco Santoro
I would have been glad if it had been the Lord's will to let one of my children live.
— Karen Cecil Smith, Orlean Puckett: The Life of a Mountain Midwife
Apart from my father, this house if filled with women. Women stop their lives; they're programmed that way. A child comes into the world and suddenly the choices grow fewer. The women seem to understand the payoff. You sacrifice, yes. You don't get to the gym, to the shrink, to the office, but you get this fragment of a moment with a person who is momentary, who will not be like this again." - 74
— Robin Romm, The Mercy Papers
She could almost feel him prodding her; urging her to go on. As the wails of pain and torment assulted her ears, she knew that's exactly what she would do until the war was over and she could crawl into a quiet, dark corner and mourn for the part of her that had died with him.
— Jaclyn A. Wilson, Unjust Cause
In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on.
— George Eliot, Adam Bede
What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind.
— Roger Angell
What is love for, if not to intensify our affections—both in life and death? But, O, do not be bitter. It is tragically self-destructiveto be bitter.
— John Piper, Good News of Great Joy: Daily Readings for Advent
At that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes.
— Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays
I'd much rather be hold up with a ball of yarn, tucked inside the safety of the house with my mother. Out there, you must come to grips with the rot and bone, bloom and disintegration. It's part of the world, this ruthlessness, this severed leg, this sun-bleached skull. I can't really stand it. All the signs point toward change, and all that means is death. - 140-141
— Robin Romm, The Mercy Papers
It's not that I am not moved by these things, that I don't them in my life. But lately, their power has diminished." - 140
— Robin Romm
It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Memories begin to creep forward from hidden corners of your mind. Passing disappointments. Lost chances and lost causes. Heartbreaks and pain and desolate, horrible loneliness. Sorrows you thought long forgotten mingle with still-fresh wounds.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the children’s pictures on the walls — meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable.
— J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy
Your whole world ceases to exist and you're nothing but a shell of a person you once were. Your mom has dealt with it her way, me in mine, and you in yours," he said, lifting his hand off of John's gravestone and rising. "Your mom hates the world, I avoid it, and you try to save it.
— Nicole  Williams, Crash
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
— Iris Murdoch
If suddenly you do not exist,if suddenly you no longer live,I shall live on.I do not dare,I do not dare to write it,if you die.I shall live on.For where a man has no voice,there, my voice.Where blacks are beaten,I cannot be dead.When my brothers go to prisonI shall go with them.When victory,not my victory,but the great victory comes,even though I am mute I must speak;I shall see it come even though I am blind.No, forgive me.If you no longer live,if you, beloved, my love,if you have died,all the leaves will fall in my breast,it will rain on my soul night and day,the snow will burn my heart,I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, butI shall stay alive,because above all things you wanted me indomitable,and, my love, because you know that I am not only a manbut all mankind.
— Pablo Neruda
When other people are grieving, the newspaperman turns efficient.
— Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire
I thought about how the past can become so small. An entire day, 24 separate, heavy hours, becomes the size of a tiny brown leaf falling from a tree. Before you know it, a whole year is just a pile of dead leaves on the ground. The year or so I’d spent in love with Chad was starting to feel so long ago, swept away by the wind. I knew that this year would soon feel far away too.
— Kimberly Novosel, Loved
...nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
All the tears in the world can't bring back the dead or wash away your fears and grief. I want you to put up your chin and tell yourself you are strong. And if you begin to weaken, hold on to me. That's what I am here for.
— Cynthia  Wright, Silver Storm
You think when someone you love passes away, everything becomes clearer, that your priorities and perspectives align in a way they’ve never aligned before because of the sobriety of it all. But it doesn’t. Those revelations just become skewed and distorted until you’re forced to rewrite them entirely. You can’t walk straight on a new path when you have too much luggage on your back. You just keep swerving, trying to find a way to accommodate the weight, but it’s all dead and you know it’s going to take you down. The only answer is to reroute.-Emma
— Rachael Wade, Love and Relativity
These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath.
— David Nicholls, One Day
It is the heart that has been pierced that feels the most.
— Jocelyn  Murray
He was beneath the waves, a creature crawling the ocean bottom.
— Doppo Kunikida, Five Stories
It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain.
— Barbara Taylor Bradford, Three Weeks in Paris
I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)
— Barbara Blatner
oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)
— Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death
If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you’d think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour.
— George Eliot, Adam Bede
...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)
— Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death
...a passing face together with his grief turned you into a weeping Madonna...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
blue-gold sky, fresh cloud, emerald-black mountain, trees on rocky ledges, on the summit, the tiny pin of a telephone tower-all brilliantly clear, in shadow and out. and on and through everything everywhere the sun shines without reservation (p. 97)
— Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death
He took the box but did not avail himself of a tissue. She understood. Sometimes it was comforting to feel the wetness of grief's tears on your face.
— Julius Lester, The Autobiography of God
Is there no pity sitting in the clouds that sees into the bottom of my grief?
— William Shakespeare
Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.
— Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn't that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends? 
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Sometimes the hardest goodbyes are the ones never said, the ones that always just hang there in the back of the mind like a dark cloud. There's so much to say but no one to say it to because the person you want most to hear it is already gone. That's how he felt. Sorrow, regret, a wound so deep it didn't even bleed. Like a puncture wound, an ache that didn't heal but just hurt. He didn't know if he wanted it to heal. That'd be too much like a final goodbye.
— Virginia Brown, Dark River Road
Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly -the thought of the world's concern at her situation- was found on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
It was like someone had died- like I had died. Because it had been more than just losing the truest of true loves, as if that were not enough to kill anyone. It was also losing a whole future, a whole family- the whole life that I'd chosen... 
— Stephenie Meyer, New Moon
The grief that does not speak whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
You don't even realize you're living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after.
— Robin Wasserman, The Book of Blood and Shadow
As I walk through the redwood trees, my sneakers sopping up days of rain, I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes, when grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn't anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.
— Rosamunde Pilcher, The Shell Seekers