Grief Quotes

...she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk's bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs, flooding across the rough wooden floor, down the narrow wooden stairs and out into the old soil of the garden. No roses, no, she does not even ask to make roses, just dissolution; most any night she asks just for that.

~ Michelle Latiolais

For all her culture's attention to the physical, it seemingly has little to salve the creatural anguish of losing someone else's body, their touch, their heat, their oceanic heart...she doesn't want another body, she wants the body she loved, the forceps scar across his cheek that she traced with her hand, his penis, its elegant sweep to the side, the preternaturally soft skin. One wants what one has loved, not the idea of love.

~ Michelle Latiolais

It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people's too - yours, Leo's, Dad's. We have to expand at the moment we feel the most shrunk.

~ Rosamund Lupton

The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces— those, I think, are the sensations of grief.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

I see you in the grass,Running through the snow,But where you have gone,I cannot go.

~ Helen Pearson

I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.

~ Robin Mckinley

A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.

~ Jay Neugeboren

My heart broke when he died, split in half and fell down into my stomach or somewhere deep and muddy, and I'm still not sure where it is now. I hear it beating sometimes in my ears, or feel its fast pulse in my neck, like I do now; but in my chest, where it should be, it mostly just feels empty.

~ Jen Violi

I wish I could take my brain and put it inside your head,” Winslow said. “Just for a moment. Then you’d know what all I can’t find how to say.

~ Alan Heathcock

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The moonlight rained down on the beach as if to shine a spotlight on my solitude, and I wanted to cry out at it, ‘Why did you take her? You, surrounded by all of your twinkling stars and infinite wonders and darkness. There’s already enough beauty where you are.

~ Rachael Wade

Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength.

~ Oivd

He felt like his own heart might stop beating just from acknowledging the concept. The sadness, the sorrow, and the loss, they were living things, funnily enough.

~ Adam P. Knave

How we respond to grief can shape our present

~ K.c. Rhoads

I've seen too much sacrifice to believe that God is behind all of it, and I've seen sacrifice that has no indicia of the hand of God at all. Loss is not always part of some greater plan explainable by reference to the actions of a divine being with a divine purpose.

~ Neil Abramson

The gastliness of nothing. Because I was nobody's sister now.

~ Rosamund Lupton

It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...

~ Emma Donoghue

And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.

~ Emma Donoghue

She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I will not say: do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life

~ Nicholas Sparks

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of parties with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

~ Sylvia Plath

Grief can destroy you --or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see that it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.

~ Dean Koontz

Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.

~ Veronica Roth

To weep is to make less the depth of grief.

~ William Shakespeare

Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.

~ Sarah Dessen

And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you...

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Often I wish this would all be over, Liesel, but then somehow you do something like walk down the basement steps with a snowman in your hands.

~ Markus Zusak

The tears I feel todayI'll wait to shed tomorrow.Though I'll not sleep this nightNor find surcease from sorrow.My eyes must keep their sight:I dare not be tear-blinded.I must be free to talkNot choked with grief, clear-minded.My mouth cannot betrayThe anguish that I know.Yes, I'll keep my tears til later:But my grief will never go.

~ Anne Mccaffrey

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.

~ Arthur Golden

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one, you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.

~ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.

~ Sarah Waters

Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.

~ William Shakespeare

Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.

~ Charles Bukowski

But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

~ Donna Tartt

The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.

~ Andrea Gibson

Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.

~ Lauren Oliver

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

~ C.s. Lewis

There is much asked and only so much I think I can or should answer, and so, in this post I would like to give a few thoughts on what seemed to be the overwhelming question: “WHY?”And here is the best answer I can give: Because.Because sometimes, life is damned unfair.Because sometimes, we lose people we love and it hurts deeply.Because sometimes, as the writer, you have to put your characters in harm’s way and be willing to go there if it is the right thing for your book, even if it grieves you to do it.Because sometimes there aren’t really answers to our questions except for what we discover, the meaning we assign them over time.Because acceptance is yet another of life’s “here’s a side of hurt” lessons and it is never truly acceptance unless it has cost us something to arrive there.Why, you ask? Because, I answer.Inadequate yet true.

~ Libba Bray