Grief Quotes - Page 9

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.

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

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

It feels like I’m stuck in one spot. It’s been this way for a long time. I know you understand, but now you’re moving on without me. And I—I’m not ready to be alone.

The only way out is through

Her marble tears run down her marble face.A stranger is someone who has no handkerchief.Who has no words to say.Whose shadow mind is burningas he sits watching her handsand thinks how rare!to see a Romantalkwith no gestures at all.

I was twenty-two, the same age she was when she'd been pregnant with me. She was going to leave my life at the same moment that I came into hers, I thought. For some reason that sentence came fully formed into my head just then, temporarily blotting out the Fuck them prayer. I almost howled in agony. I almost choked to death on what I knew before I knew. I was going to live the rest of my life without my mother.

All I have besides food is grief.

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling action after action had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an harrow to the string then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead through to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once now so many culs de sac.

(on grief) And 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.

I missed my one true friend, my mother. She and I were close in a way I don't think many other mothers and daughters were. I slept beside her every night of my childhood: so near to her back, I could probably sketch the constellation of moles and freckles on her skin there. When I was a very little girl, every morning I would wake before her and arrange myself so that when she woke, we were eye-to-eye. I miss her, with a never-ending ache that I did not think was possible, that crowds out any other feeling and certainly all reason, and any good sense.

Aurora, you're a child, live like one, don't act like one. Enjoy the innocence, dump the immaturity.

I hope I’m the ghost that belongs to her.

In days that follow, I discover that anger is easier to handle than grief.

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.

Though life has fated that we never cross paths again, don’t ever feel alone. For we are parallel …. and I will always be by your side.

Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray. When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move,my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that?Through the birches, I could see the pond.The sun was cutting small white holes in the water.I got up finally; I walked down to the pond. I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself,like a girl after her first loverturning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign.But nakedness in women is always a pose.I was not transfigured. I would never be free.

An emotionally abusive relationship, in very simplistic terms, is much like standing up in a too hot bath and sinking back in so as not to feel so dizzy.

Royal summoned mourners. They came from the village, from the neighboring hills and, wailing like dogs at midnight, laid siege to the house. Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men prostrated themselves: it was the art of sorrow, and those who best mimicked grief were much admired. After the funeral everyone went away, satisfied that they'd done a good job.

[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)

The universe acknowledges the value of your tears; for when it rains, it is shedding its own.

But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motionless, willing his eyes to see that she had stopped too. But she had not stopped. She was fading, going. "Wait," he said, talking as sweet as he had ever heard his voice speak to a woman: "Den lemme go wid you, honey." But she was going.

In the midst of the darkness of loss, I found light. Admittedly, in those first weeks, it might have been but a single small spark I sensed deep inside of me, but that spark guided me in the twisted, dark journey of grief. As I stumbled over the roots of hopelessness and despair, that light grew to illuminate my path, a path I sometimes felt very alone on. At some point in the journey I’d turned around, and there was God.That is grace.

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

It's like she has her heart in her hand and it's broken. She's holding it out and showing me all the little pieces. Or maybe it's my heart.

We all handle loss in our individual ways, grieve in all kinds of ways. We all go through feeling okay sometimes, but other times, we feel so bad we hurt ourselves or those around us.

Half-broke hearts just didn't have much pep.

Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June. There was a place where all the sun went glistening in your hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star. Where is the day that melted into one rich noise? Where the music of your flesh, the rhyme of your teeth, the dainty languor of your legs, your small firm arms, your slender fingers, to be bitten like an apple, and the little cherry-teats of your white breasts? And where are all the tiny wires of finespun maidenhair? Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this loveliness. You who were made for music, will hear music no more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost, ghost, come back from that marriage that we did not foresee, return not into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted wood, where we still life, strewn on the grass. Come up into the hills, O my young love: return. O lost, and by the wind grieved ghost, come back again.

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

Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love.

I stood staring to heaven and nothing came from there, no mercy or redemption. Whatever had come had come already and it was not sent by God. I stood, arms outstretched and empty, like a man praying but I was not praying, I was crying, because it had come to this and I had come to this place, and they were not with me... they were gone for ever.

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...

Well, the gold fish in the bowl lay upside down bloatingFull in the sky and the plains were bleached white with skeletonsVarious species grouped together accordingTo their past beliefsThe only way they ever all got together wasNot in love but shameful grief

If want to become a person with vision, get back and reconnect to your source.

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)

I look up, and Jackson's eyes find mine. For a second, it almost feels like we're about to race into the hole to join you. Being buried alive has got to be better than whatever comes next.

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.

Liv grabbed the cookie nearest her and broke it open.“It's up to you to make your happy ending.”Liv stared at it a moment, rereading the words. Did it mean life? Because if it did, then Liv disagreed. Sometimes life was downright unfair. Bad things happened to good people.

You don't understand," Alecto replied vacantly. "It isn't that I want to die... I just don't want to exist.

If you've been hurt and you've grieved and you've been through the mill, it takes a long time to get over it.

In the lowest of lows you can learn the highest of highs, and that often when you get to the point of wanting to die, it’s because you already have and are truly aching to live.

If you cannot hold me in your arms, then hold my memory in high regard.And if I cannot be in your life, then at least let me live in your heart.

I began to recognize that there was a part of me that was stronger than I ever could have imagined. I didn't know how I was still standing. I surprised myself. I was waking up to the fact that I was in charge of my own life and it was my choice whether to sink or float.

We have trauma, and we have grief. People die, and we find it baffling. Painful. Inexplicable. Grief is baffling. There are theories on how we react to loss and death, how we cope, how we handle loss. Some believe the range of emotions mourners experience is predictable, that grief can be monitored, as if mourners are following a checklist. But sorrow is less of a checklist, more like water. It's fluid, it has no set shape, never disappears, never ends. It doesn't go away. It just changes. It changes us.

When you try to take someone's pain away from them, you don't make it better. You just tell them it's not OK to talk about their pain.

It seemed as if the valley were not always girded by woods, growing on the surrounding hills and facing away from the horizon, but the trees had only taken up their places now, rising out of the ground to offer their condolences. He almost waved away the tangible beauty of the hour like a crowd of persistent friends, almost said to the lingering afterglow, 'thank you, thank you, I'll be all right.'

See, you’ve got to understand, son. There’s two types of guys in this world. There’s guys . . . who think they’re in control, and guys like us who live in the moment. Who accept life as it is.

Bereavement, despair, ache, yearning happen to all. We all bear the pain of grief. We all take them in our own ways. And we are all blessed with the grace to transcend. (Page xii)

I knew a girl, once, immortal like me-""And she was with someone mortal?" said Alec. "What happened?""He died," Magnus said. There was a finality to the way he said it that spoke of a deeper grief than words could paint.

Poor means when we lack things in our lives. There are two types of poverty. ...those that need food and shelter and those that need God in their lives. We are called to service to help both group of people as much as we can.

Sometimes I just needed to talk about it, even though it singed like touching the end of a match. I just needed to feel that pain for a moment, to know that it was real. It was my pain. I had earned it by living through it.

There is an ocean of silence between us… and I am drowning in it.

History dressed up in the glow of love’s kiss turned grief into beauty.

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

He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.

It may be difficult, but thru sorrow, it’s important to find happiness in our memories and be very thankful to have them!