Grieving Quotes

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

He was a practical man: give him a sensitive technical instrument, and he could maintain it; something broken, and he could mend it, meditatively, efficiently. But confronted by his grieving wife, he felt useless.

It is not as if an 'I' exists independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is part of what composes who 'I' am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who 'am' I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost 'you' only to discover that 'I' have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost 'in' you, that for which I have no vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as *the tie* by which those terms are differentiated and related.

It’s funny how we say a person ‘made’ us when they actually broke us.Sort of like how I say ‘funny’... but I actually mean sad.

A kiss….….. is just a kiss….Until it’s all you reminisce.(Then the memory becomes your most treasured possession.)

How many times did we pass each other before we met? If only I’d known…. I would have searched for you endlessly.If only I’d found you before it was already too late.

The truth of it was he didn't want her. He wanted Mary Kate with every cell of his body. He missed everything about her. The feel of her sleeping at his side. Her gentle snores. Her soft brown curls tickling his nose enough to wake him from a sound sleep even on nights when he needed it most. Her smile. The smell of her. At odd moments he thought he had heard her laughter, or he'd catch a glimpse of her in the corner of an eye, but all of it was a lie, and every time it happened it was as if someone had ripped a deep wound in his chest. The pain was raw enough to make him want to take a razor to his wrist, but each time he considered acting upon the idea something stopped him, and so, he stumbled on barely alive and wishing for an end. At times he couldn't breathe, couldn't move without wanting to scream.

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?

It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.

You can miss places. You can miss people.Just know that what you’re really missing is the way things were. And even if you could go there again…. see them again…. you can’t go back.They’re not the same.You’re not the same.The loss of them changed you.

Verily, a man should not cling to those who have passed, for he will likely neglect service to the living.

It is the deepest of wrongs I am driven to write…. And losing you was one of them.

Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.

Ava turned to the side, staring out into the dark. In profile, her face was suddenly tired and sad, and Cole felt the urge to wrap himself around her. To protect her from whatever was dragging her down.

Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free. So often sleep brought dreams of him.

I don’t think you ever really understood….…. All the love I had in the world went to you.

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

Your smile and your laughter lit my whole world.

Fear manifested itself as a physical presence that seemed to dominate the public sphere. Time almost stopped. Even without confirmation I could sense that something had gone terribly wrong.

When my late father died — now I'm in mourning for my late mother — that sense of grief and bereavement suddenly taught me that so many things that I thought were important, externals, etc., all of that is irrelevant. You lose a parent, you suddenly realize what a slender thing life is, how easily you can lose those you love. Then out of that comes a new simplicity and that is why sometimes all the pain and the tears lift you to a much higher and deeper joy when you say to the bad times, "I will not let you go until you bless me.

Live your life in such a way that you'll be remembered for your kindness, compassion, fairness, character, benevolence, and a force for good who had much respect for life, in general.

It hurts that I was just one page in the book of your life…But what hurts more is knowing you’ll revise that chapter someday….….. and you’ll erase me completely.

You can stay here with your papa and die or you can go with me.... You'll be all right.

How do you love someone and just… walk away? Just like that. You just, go on as normal…. You get up, get dressed, go to work… How can you do that? How can you be okay with that?

For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.

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.

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.

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