Grief Quotes

When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.

~ Rosamund Lupton

When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds, Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me. (III,ii, 371-380)

~ William Shakespeare

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

~ John Banville

There are degrees of obsession, of awareness, of grief, of insanity.

~ Nina Lacour

I do hope that when the day comes, whether in 1, 10, or 100 years, I don’t want you to think of me and feel sad.

~ Esther Earl

Which would you choose if you could:pleasure for yourself despite your friendsor a share in their grief?

~ Sophocles

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.

~ William Maxwell

[F]or grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have never known, as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed.

~ Pericles

I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it - assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks you from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But on that day, ... almost a year after Khader's death, I couldn't understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I'd too long denied. I couldn't understand it, so i tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can't bite down on assassin grief and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss.

~ Gregory David Roberts

I see what grief does, how it strips you bare, shows you all the things you don't want to know. That loss doesn't end, that there isn't a moment where you are done, when you can neatly put it away and move on.

~ Elizabeth Scott

It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me...was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn't have gone through and couldn't get back to the place I hadn't meant to leave. Actually, it was other way round: I hadn't gone anywhere and nothing was changed, so far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery.

~ William Maxwell

Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she thinks about him now, it is more as a lost possibility than as a man. She has forgotten his breath, his musculature.

~ Anita Shreve

I stood there feeling the lightness of my bones, knowing now this was not only lack of sleep that had transformed my bones into feathers, but my body's recognition that soon I would be leaving this place I had inhabited for one year, this place made entirely of grief.

~ Anne Spollen

She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness.

~ Fay Weldon

Try to be thoughtful, don't make the poor man say it;see how human he is,he has children of his own,it is your job t

~ Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief - but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.

~ Edward Abbey

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.

~ David Mitchell

It's funny how sometimes you don't see the obvious things coming. You think you know what life has in store for you. You think you're prepared. You think you can handle it. And then-boom, like a thunderclap-something comes at you out of nowhere and catches you off guard.

~ Cynthia Hand

What this country needs... what this great land of ours needs is something to happen to it. Something ferocious and tragic, like what happened to Jericho or the cities of the plain - something terrible I mean, son, so that when the people have been through hellfire and the crucible, and have suffered agony enough and grief, they’ll be people again, human beings, not a bunch of smug contented cows rooting at the trough.

~ William Styron

Loving someone means that you will inevitable grieve for them, love is an engraved invitation for grief.

~ Sunshine O'donnell

That was the thing about being bereaved. People were overcome with sympathy. They did things for you without even considering whether or not it was the right thing to do.

~ Brenna Yovanoff

Sorrow can be a bully.

~ Amy Waldman

The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that? Instead, she said, I love you. She did. She loved him. But even that didn't feel like anything anymore.

~ Ann Hood

Synthesis is the gateway to Transcendence, because once you accept that you are forever changed and that life is forever different, you have to ask, What are you going to do about that fact? Will the change be for the better or for worse? It's the loss itself that becomes the catalyst for meaning. (pg 273)

~ Ashley Davis Bush

Mrs. Sussex said Byron’s loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub: he didn’t want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she’d never been there.

~ Rachel Joyce

My hands are dying.

~ Courtney Summers

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

~ Abraham Verghese

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

~ Alexandra Fuller

What people resist is not change per se, but loss.

~ Ronald A. Heifetz

[I]t wasn't history that was too fragile, but me.

~ Jessi Kirby

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

~ Donna Tartt

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

~ Kate Morton

Every hour that passed added to her grief, because it bore her further away from the living man, and because it was a tiny foretaste of the eternity she would have to spend without him. Again and again she found herself forgetting, for the space of a heartbeat, that he was gone forever and that she could not turn to him for comfort.

~ J.k. Rowling

Have I thought long to see this morning’s face,And doth it give me such a sight as this?

~ William Shakespeare

After breakage/there is always sleep.

~ David Rivard

But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...

~ Rosamund Lupton

…nothing remained but loneliness and grief…

~ Louisa May Alcott

She has never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James. He thought of pushing open the half-closed door and kneeling before his wife, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and helping her upstairs. He raised his hand, stroking the wood of the door, planning to say something to calm her. But what wisdom could he offer Gus, when he could not even heed it himself? James walked upstairs again, got into bed, covered his head with a pillow. And hours later, when Gus crept beneath the sheets, he tried to pretend that he did not feel the weight of her grief, lying between them like a fitful child, so solid that he could not reach past it to touch her.

~ Jodi Picoult

…determined to enjoy her luxury of grief uncomforted.

~ L.m. Montgomery

There is a feeling of disbelief that comes over you, that takes over, and you kind of go through the motions. You do what you're supposed to do, but in fact you're not there at all.

~ Frederick Barthelme