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...

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...

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.

Allow yourself to be an anchor and anchored by others.

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

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

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

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.

Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.

When stupidity reaches its highest level, we act rubbish knowingly

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...

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...

It seemed everyone knew their place in it, but I was in the mood where I would rather be alone and look a houseplants.

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

She should have died on that day. Perhaps, in a way, she had.

Although it seems shocking to say so, grief is a funny thing. On the one hand, you’re numb, yet on the other, something inside is trying desperately to claw its way back to normal: to...

‘I think that’s why his asking me to pull the plug hurt so much. He kept saying if I really loved him, I should have been able to do it. And I thought, if he...

Now I know that grief is a whetstone that sharpens all your love, all your happiest memories, into blades that tear you apart from within.

Life however is teeming with vitality and is likewise terribly tenacious; holding on against impossible odds in impossible situations over impossible lengths of time.

What’s even more messed up than funerals, is the way people treat you after the funeral. Like you’re diseased or something.

Every hour that passed added to her grief, because it bore her further away from the living man, and because it was a tiny foretaste of the eternity she would have to spend without him....

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

The point is to turn your grief into love. The roses are helping you find grace.

Everybody dies, and everybody loses people they love-everybody-and that is not an excuse for you to fucking die. I love you, and I need you to be my mother, and I need you to have...

Sorry. Don’t need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.

Man only likes counting his grief, he doesn’t count his happiness. But if he were to count properly, he’d see that there’s enough of both lots for him.

It is true that the grief journey is very lonely, but it is also up to you to decide just how lonely you will make it.

The women cried with one another, and it didn’t seem to matter whether you were Jewish or Christian, you just mourned.

I don’t believe time heals. I don’t want it to. If I heal, doesn’t that mean I’ve accepted the world without her?

Adam’s lips are set in a grime line. I can’t tell if he’s about to cry or about to punch the guard. For his sake, I hope it’s the former. For you own, I hope...

It kind of scares me though, to keep wearing it every day like I do. What happens when I run out of it? Will I forget what she looked like? What it looked like when...

don’t tell me not to drink. not to smoke. not to grieve. if i speak of these things it’s because i have to— but i am not speaking to you.

Why are the photographs of him as a little boy so incredibly hard to look at? Something is over. Now instead of those shiny moments being things we can share together in delighted memories, I,...

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It’s hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you.

My mom told me once that Wyatt loved her the way a boy will love his mother, but I loved her the way an artist loves another. Jo taught me what that meant.

Had any poet adequately described the wretched ugliness of a loved one turned inside out with grief?

People were freaked out, but they showed it in weird ways. Back home, people would have been weeping and doing a lot of very public group hugs. At Wexford people just aggressively pretended nothing had...

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, asthe mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have...

Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning...

That evening I sat across from Jeremy Bulloch and Jacob at the dinner table. I watched as Jeremy, who seemed to speak Jacob’s silent language fluently, drummed his fingers up and down on the edge...

The aftermath of someone’s death is vertiginous, a murky, shimmering mass; to look at it head-on is to see only the fog of emotion. One must approach it sideways, entering it by way of an...

I’ve been moving a little to the music while I worked …and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I’ve been...

Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless...

…a passing face together with his grief turned you into a weeping Madonna…

There’s no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world...

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

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

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.