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Grief Quotes

Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you a...

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Picture of Don DeLillo
Don DeLilloThe Body Artist

I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a...

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It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to pu...

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When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the th...

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Picture of Donna Tartt
Donna TarttThe Goldfinch

When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change.

But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves...

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Picture of Donna Tartt
Donna TarttThe Goldfinch

I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mo...

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

Picture of Donna Tartt
Donna TarttThe Secret History

He did touch people's lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they w...

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Picture of Donna Tartt
Donna TarttThe Secret History

My soul hath thirsted after the strong living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of G...

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Picture of Dorothy Day
Dorothy DayThe Reckless Way of Love: Notes on Following Jesus

The eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of sorrow.

She was brave from excess of grief

The first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing ...

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There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolu...

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Picture of Edward Abbey
Edward AbbeyPostcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

And thus we all are nighingThe truth we fear to know:Death will end our cryingFor friends that come ...

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Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of let...

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The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framewor...

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I tell you hopeless grief is passionless,That only men incredulous of despair,Half-taught in anguish...

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And wilt thou have me fashion into speechThe love I bear thee, finding words enough,And hold the tor...

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Picture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett BrowningSonnets from the Portuguese

Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.

Picture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett BrowningSonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Plus Sonnets from the Porte-Cochere by S. H. Bass

This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe r...

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Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are...

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My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn't that crazy? To still have a broken...

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Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll ...

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But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map ...

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Come in! come in !’ he sobbed.‘Cathy, do come. Oh do -once more! Oh! my heart’s darling! hear me thi...

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No parson in the world ever pictured heaven so beautifully as they did, in their innocent talk

I wonder if it hurts to live,And if they have to try,And whether, could they choose between,They wou...

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When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but ...

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To lose what we never owned might seem an eccentric Bereavement but Presumption has its Affliction a...

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Picture of Emily Dickinson
Emily DickinsonOpen Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson

If you've got to my age, you've probably had your heart broken many times. So it's not that difficul...

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I loathe a friend whose gratitude grows old, a friend who takes his friend's prosperity but will not...

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Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.

A whole Gothic world had come to grief...there was now no armour glittering through the forest glade...

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She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of orde...

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Fay WeldonWorst Fears

My head is full of fireand grief and my tongueruns wild, piercedwith shards of glass.

Picture of Federico García Lorca
Federico García LorcaThree Tragedies: Blood Wedding

The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then n...

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I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be norm...

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The fairest things have fleetest end,Their scent survives their close:But the rose's scent is bitter...

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Francis ThompsonComplete Poetical Works of Francis Thompson

Despite the fact that every sport this side of badminton worries about concussions that result in br...

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Every night when I go to bed, I hope that I may never wake again, and every morning renews my grief.

For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, ...

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Picture of Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García MárquezOne Hundred Years of Solitude

She was no longer wresting with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and mak...

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If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it wa...

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In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak...

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The clouds were gathering over Mary, too--deep and dark, but of altogether another kind from those t...

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I have become a sour woman. I take no joy in meat nor mead, and song and laughter have become suspic...

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...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder ...

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Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.

You can't love your mother or father if you don't also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and,...

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Picture of Glenn Beck
Glenn BeckThe 7: Seven Wonders That Will Change Your Life

Still waters run deepest, they used to tell me.

For darkness terrifies. It swallows you, warps you, nullifies you. Who alive can possibly profess co...

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It's very shocking, I think, for people caring for the dying to realise how unsaintly they feel, how...

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But undying memories stood like sentinels in her breast. When the notes of doves, calling to each ot...

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What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

If there were no life beyond this earth-life, some people I have known would gain immortality by the...

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What is so sweet as to awake from a troubled dream and behold a beloved face smiling upon you? I lov...

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We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world--the company of those w...

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The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an...

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Most people are ennobled by the actual presence of death. But how long do you suppose this nobility ...

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We will talk of this again, when the grass has first withered on her grave. Then you'll hear him spo...

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There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.

At Night on the High SeasAt night, when the sea cradles meAnd the pale star gleamLies down on its br...

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Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive...

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And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red w...

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…and they limp and halt, they’re all wrinkled, drawn, they squint to the side, can’t look you in the...

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When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs ...

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There are words and accents by which this grief can be assuaged, and the disease in a great measure ...

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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those...

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I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the an...

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My death..I mean..will it be quick,and with dignity? How will i know when the end is coming?""When y...

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And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out...though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was lo...

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Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a strick...

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J. K. RowlingHarry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.

Picture of J. K. Rowling
J. K. RowlingHarry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there — the walls and the chairs and the ch...

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J. K. RowlingThe Casual Vacancy

Every hour that passed added to her grief, because it bore her further away from the living man, and...

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Picture of J. K. Rowling
J. K. RowlingThe Casual Vacancy

Grief is a hone to a hard mind.

I've never seen grief like it. Grief like that, it's like an animal. She's not eating. She's not sle...

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Picture of Jackie Kay
Jackie KayWish I Was Here

Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies? 'Sister Sonja often asked me, as though to unde...

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If you want to connect with people who are in distress and great grief and scared, you need to do it...

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If I'm feeling outraged, grief, disbelief, frustration, sympathy, that gets channeled through me and...

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Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.

In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into ...

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Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground – I screamed and instantly ran mad. We remained thus mutua...

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Dear Eloisa (said I) there’s no occasion for your crying so much about such a trifle. (for I was wil...

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My grandmother whispering to herself, over and over, "David is in heaven now, David is in heaven now...

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Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to st...

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...love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic yo...

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Hospital waits are bad ones. The fact that they happen to pretty much all of us, sooner or later, do...

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Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it...We might expect that we will be pr...

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Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, th...

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I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world.

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull t...

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My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would sti...

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We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's ...

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...nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite ...

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Picture of Joan Didion
Joan DidionThe Year of Magical Thinking