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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still. I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars… I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there, but I did. I felt their completeness as whatever they had been in the world.I...

I’m happy for Tyson. I’m sure a good amount of grief he’s gone through has been self-imposed. He’s kind of tortured himself for some of the games he hasn’t played well in. He’s really broke out the last three games and he was obviously excellent again tonight.

His face looked almost as gray as his suit, and the pouches beneath his eyes looked like little bags for holding all the sadness that his head couldn’t hold.

The heart aches in brokenness as daylight awakens the pain of knowing.

The people in the hospital had been struck by her calm and the number of questions she had asked. They hadn’t appreciated her inability to understand something quite obvious – that Tolya was no longer among the living. Her love was so strong that Tolya’s death was unable to affect it: to her, he was...

The grief that does not speak whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.

Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows, which shows like grief itself, but is not so; or sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, divides one thing entire to many objects: like perspectives which, rightly gaz’d upon, show nothing but confusion:

My mother always pouted that it was actually her paintings and not her charm, her beauty or her sass that made him fall in love with her. He’d always insisted that it was definitely her sass. I knew the truth. He fell for all those things, and when she died, it was like someone had...

when life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it’s not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end.

Eby knew all too well that there was a fine line when it came to grief. If you ignore it, it goes away, but then it always comes back when you least expect it. If you let it stay, if you make a place for it in your life, it gets too comfortable and it...

O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?And shall I couple Hell?

An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

A selfish person can still love someone else, can’t they? Even when they’ve hurt them and let them down.

For a moment we sit in silence. Eventually, I turn to him and say, “Do you believe in God?” His eyes narrow for a moment and he stares at me at me for a while. Stares in a rather intense way, like a doctor looking at a troubling X-ray. Then he looks out the and...

You haven’t lost Iraki, you know. I don’t know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.’He’ll find his way inside you, and you’ll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you’ll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking...

We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed.” The 1960’s and 1970’s were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad...

I’m sure that they’ll be able to realize how wrong it all is… even though the idiots outnumber most people these days, there are still enough intelligent people to fight against it.

There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it… this place, she decided, was called Smog City.

The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled.

He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds—that loneliness which...

There are some who would vow that life isn’t fair. They believe the worst is yet to come, that evil will always conquer good, and that we have no control over our fate. It’s true, there are storms that shake our foundations and monsters that threaten to tear us limb from limb. We will make...

I didn’t create them, humans created the Pollution. Cheryl Nobel, Alecto Steele, Albert Sanders, Olivia Campbell, all my pretty little Representations, there aren’t many of them left these days but they’re still very dangerous! They’re here to tell society all about its mistakes! You don’t understand the world of Representations.

I’ll remember you… I remember everyone I’ve lost.

Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.

Alvin didn’t cry, didn’t curse, didn’t holler…. He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only I did…. Only I cracked, alone, later in the one place in our house where I knew I could go to be apart from the living and all that they cannot not do.

There is nothing to fear. Nothing to worry about. Grieve nothing in this transitory world,” he says softly.

Laine taped the last box shut. That was it, then: All of Gavin’s belongings put away; some for charity, some for the dump, some to be saved for a happier ‘one day’ that Laine felt, right now, was as distant as the stars.

What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other.

Strange, what the heart can bear. It can carry grief beyond measure. It can bear a weight that is too great to speak of. But a heart can’t bear the world. It has its limits…

He thinks he can see all her grief in her face, all her love and empty days.

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...

Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it. (74)

Slowly, painfully, I let go. It was like prying my own fingers off the edge of the cliff. And that hurt too-particularly the falling part, and not being sure what was at the bottom.But I did know. Now was what was at the bottom. I was already there.