GRIEF QUOTES
quotations about grief
Slowly, grief tires and sleeps, but never dies. In time it grows used to its prison, and a relationship of respect develops between prisoner and jailer.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
You do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.
ADAM RAPP
Nocturne
Compare your griefs with other men's, and they will seem less.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
JOAN DIDION
The Year of Magical Thinking
It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.
SUE MONK KIDD
The Secret Life of Bees
It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as if grief could be lessened by baldness.
CICERO
Tusculan Disputations
Ye, O ye
Shall grieve, and ye shall grieve, and ye shall grieve.
Your Life shall bend and o'er his shuttle toil,
A weaver weaving at the loom of grief.
SIDNEY LANIER
"The Jacquerie: A Fragment"
We postpone the finality of heartbreak by clinging to hope. Though this might be acceptable during early or transitional stages of grief, ultimately it is no way to live. We need both hands free to embrace life and accept love, and that's impossible if one hand has a death grip on the past.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.
JODI PICOULT
My Sister's Keeper
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
Everything Is Illuminated
Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,
being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Burlap Sack"
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
The Little Stranger
Oh, what grief not to have
grief, and to spend your life
on the colorless grass
of the undecided path!
FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA
"Crossroads"
Joy and grief are things of great hazard and danger in the life of man: The one breaks the heart; the other intoxicates the head.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Brothers Karamazov
It's funny, how one can look back on a sorrow one thought one might well die of at the time, and know that one had not yet reckoned the tenth part of true grief.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
It's better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won't get it.
HILARY THAYER HAMANN
Anthropology of an American Girl
It is better to drink of deep griefs than to taste shallow pleasures.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Grief--unlike sex, music, and cheating at cards--was not a skill that could be honed by practice.
TIM PRATT
Cup and Table