Listen to me: die after me, all right? I don’t care what else you do, where you go, how you screw up your life, just… survive. Outlive me, please.

It reminds me that no embrace will ever feel the same again, because no one will ever be like her again, because she’s gone. She’s gone, and crying feels so useless, so stupid, but it’s all I can do.

He would roam about the world carrying his recollections with him, and perhaps some day he would come to forget them, for one can live only by forgetting; but when his grief should dissolve with the years he would be left an empty man, like a smiling automaton, incapable of any affections other than meterial...

To this day, she’s still sad. Because there’s not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I’m just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn’t hurt me at all.

The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins with love and ends with grief.

If we deny the grief its right in our lives, then we must question the love for which the grief is supposedly rooted. God’s grief is founded in His love for Himself and His love for us. Looking at God as our model is healthy. Facing the pain means honoring those with whom our love...

Did you really cease to love a person because you had been treated cruelly?

Sorry doesn’t make anything better. It’s just a word to fill the space of a loss of words.

When stupidity reaches its highest level, we act rubbish knowingly

I can’t help you, I can only guide you, and you are the one who can help yourself.

This is the real power of joy, to make us certain that, beneath all grief, the most fundamental of realities is joy itself.

Allow yourself to be an anchor and anchored by others.

Nothing is permanent in my mysterious world, even my moments of belief – Jenifer

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter – they...

Just days after Joseph died, we sat down to eat dinner at the dining room table. We each sat there, choking down our food, tears streaming down our faces, and no one speaking. There was no one in his chair; his side of the table had a gaping hole. A large part of the nightly...

I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.

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.

I wonder if I were to have an X-ray at the little hospital, would the machine see my grief? Is it like rust, arheum about the heart?

Grief was like a seizure that shook me like a storm.

…we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.

Wandering is better than place sometimes, than home, than destination. Sometimes she can eke out the idea that wandering is possibility, chance, serendipity–he might be there, that place she didn’t think to look, hadn’t worked hard enough to find….

Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth.

When other people are grieving, the newspaperman turns efficient.

I was helpless in trying to return people’s kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that’s for sure. Cruelty isn’t that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing...

I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old…drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before...

Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.

In the end I didn’t know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.

It’s a bad thing to even speculate about. I don’t want to cause any more grief for those people right now. It isn’t the right thing to do.

He’d lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.

For human nature is such that grief and pain – even simultaneously suffered – do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason...

Even in death, her mother was winning.

… being with people who don’t understand is worse than being alone with her grief.

How do you circumvent a mind bent upon lying to get away from the truth?

You strive all through your life, to get somewhere, to be something, Some One, to matter, to have this, to have that, fill up your life with possessions, bonds, connections and in the end, the greed is still there, one does not want to let go, not unless the great gods come down and say...

There is greater clarity in the still waters of sadness, something not found in the babbling brooks of more sought after emotions.

I transform “Work” in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real “Work” – of writing.) for: the “Work” by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love, grief) cannot be liquidated hastily: for me, it is accomplished only in and by writing.

She’d not known grief would come in waves, brought on by the smallest of things. Nor had she realized that ordinary acts of living would continue even after the loss of a love and that it would remain possible to get caught up in the moment of a simple pleasure before remembering.

When words can’t make it better, hold my hand and don’t let go.

My pain builds like storm clouds―massive, dark, and heavy with teardrops. Moisture falls torrential as if my world is a violent, eternal downpour; however, at long last the source runs dry and the bitter storm does cease. Blue skies dare to glow where the gloom has dissipated. I breathe it in, hoping to cleanse my...

What Karen wants to do – needs to do – is cry, but she can’t. Here, alone, when she could howl, beat the sofa cushions, scream; now, somehow, she is unable. It’s for fear that if she gives in to it, she’ll lose all sense of who she is. She is afraid that if she...

It takes a strong woman to lose everything, then stand naked in front of the mirror and face herself again. You need time, honey. And I don’t mean time for it to go away. I mean time to learn how to live with it. This is a pain you’ll always carry.

Sometimes all you can do is hug a friend tightly and wish that their pain could be transferred by touch to your own emotional hard drive.

Death. What a brief word for the extinguishing of life. To be no more. To have days cut off and at their end. To never again……….anything.

Grief denied will surface in borrowed clothes, the mad, sad clothes of paranoia, fear or loneliness

The kindness sent from one compassionate soul to another during the time of loss of one held so dear allows the sorrow-filled heart to open wide, filling the space of emptiness that grief may have created with a renewed sense of peace, compassion, and love.

Hearing him talk about his mother, about his intact family, makes my chest hurt for a second, like someone pierced it with a needle.

In grief, part of the pain comes from our feeling that we should not suffer so – that it is fundamentally alien to our being, this even though we all suffer, and frequently. Yet we reject suffering as a basic human truth, while greeting joy as integral to our very substance.

But when I do feel all the strength go out of me, and I fall to my knees beside the table and I think I cry, then, or at least I want to, and everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.

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...

Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.