Grief Quotes

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

~ C.s. Lewis

When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

~ C.s. Lewis

It was too perfect to last,' so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic - as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it ('None of that here!'). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean 'This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.' As if God said, 'Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.

~ C.s. Lewis

Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector.

~ C.s. Lewis

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.

~ C.s. Lewis

Anyone who has learned the Quran and holds it lovingly in his heart will 'value his nights when people are asleep, his days when people are given to excess, his grief when people are joyful, his weeping when people laugh, his silence when people chatter and his humility when people are arrogant'. In other words every moment of life will be precious to him, and he should therefore be 'gentle', never harsh nor quarrelsome, 'nor one who makes a clamour in the market nor one who is quick to anger'.

~ Ibn Mas'ud

Dreams hit the fan? Life unexpectedly take a turn for the worst? Here’s what you do:First thing I think is to realize God didn’t do this to you. It’s just life.Second, know that it sucks. It does.Third, it’s a tunnel not a cave.Fourth, it still sucks.Fifth, it’s not hopeless. Assign meaning to it. Choose for these horrible things to bring you closer to family and god and not farther apart.Praying for you

~ Richie Norton

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

~ Theodore Roethke

A shade of sorrow passed over Taliesin's face. 'There are those,' he said gently, 'who must first learn loss, despair, and grief. Of all paths to wisdom, this is the cruelest and longest. Are you one who must follow such a way? This even I cannot know. If you are, take heart nonetheless. Those who reach the end do more than gain wisdom. As rough wool becomes cloth, and crude clay a vessel, so do they change and fashion wisdom for others, and what they give back is greater than what they won.

~ Lloyd Alexander

Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.

~ Homer

Sometimes we have to soak ourselves in the tears and fears of the past to water our future gardens.

~ Suzy Kassem

… there is no permanence or guarantee in this life.

~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

Obsessive love wears down both its target and the obsessor.

~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

There are times in life when we need to allow a sad memory to run its course.

~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

You alwaysdrop by, to en-lighten my mind,when my wings arefeeling heavy &i've forgottenhow tofly.

~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

~ J.d. Salinger

She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they'd established during the intervening months. in that way, their life would return to its original shape, like a spring stretched in bad times but contracting eventually into happiness. That the world could come permanently unsprung had never occurred to him.

~ David Wroblewski

If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can't someone be healed by happiness?

~ Jodi Picoult

SUICIDE... Is to have the freedom to choose, when, where and how to die.

~ John Zea

We cannot experience free joy and happiness without experiencing the depths of pain.

~ Natalie Brenner

Stubbornness is the bearer of disaster…

~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

Here’s what I know: death abducts the dying, but grief steals from those left behind.

~ Katherine Owen

Your memory feels like home to me.So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.

~ Ranata Suzuki

Every broken heart has screamed at one time or another: Why can't you see who I truly am?

~ Shannon L. Alder

Grief was an ocean. We were sitting in the middle of it on makeshift life rafts, never knowing if we’d make it to shore.

~ Lilliana Anderson

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Saving YouThe darkness takes him over, the sickness pulls him in; his eyes—a blown out candle, I wish to go with him.Sometimes I see a flicker— a light that shone from them; I hold him to me tightly, before he's gone again.

~ Lang Leav

[A] person whose head is bowed and whose eyes are heavy cannot look at the light.

~ Christine De Pizan

This world’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back.

~ Aberjhani

I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.

~ Max Porter

We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.

~ Marcel Proust

But that's just it; I can either focus on what I have lost, or what I have gained, and I choose the latter.

~ Angie Smith

The idea of immortality, that like a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, with its countless waves of hope and fear, beating against the shores and rocks of time and fate, was not born of any book, nor of any creed, nor of any religion. It was born of human affection, and it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and darkness as long as love kisses the lips of death. It is the rainbow – Hope shining upon the tears of grief.

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open.

~ David Mitchell

She felt the depth of her losses before they were realized, and she wondered, Is there still hope? Did she even dare hold on to such a tenuous thing as hope?

~ Sage Steadman

Death seemed to lose its terrors and to borrow a grace and dignity in sublime keeping with the life that was ebbing away.

~ Charles Bracelen Flood

No point carrying useless ballast. It won't change a thing.

~ Joanne Harris

Acknowledgment--being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one's own life--is the only real medicine of grief.

~ Megan Devine

Something about Tilo’s new home reminded Musa of the story of Mumtaz Afzal Malik, the young taxi driver whom Amrik Singh had killed, whose body had been recovered from a field and delivered to his family with earth in his clenched fists and mustard flowers growing through his fingers. That story had always stayed with Musa – perhaps because of the way hope and grief were woven together in it, so tightly, so inextricably.

~ Arundhati Roy

Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried.Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn’t see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves,and for one another. We need each other to survive.I wish this for you: to find the people you belong with, the ones who will see your pain, companion you, hold you close,even as the heavy lifting of grief is yours alone. As hard as they may seem to find at times, your community is out there. Lookfor them. Collect them. Knit them into a vast flotilla of light that can hold you.

~ Megan Devine