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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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 all I can do.

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

There is never a reason good enough to be out of alignment with peace.

I know I could have saved your ashes to put into the ocean, but I wanted you to have the journey, all the way with the currents, to the open sea. And I know that when I finally get to see the waves washing on the shore, to hear them, I will feel you there.

Time heals old pain, while it creates new ones.

And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see...

With emotions ranging from fear, grief and anger to happiness and relief, the process of bringing home a child who needs in-home care can be complicated

Love is infinite. Grief can lead to love. Love can lead to grief. Grief is a love story told backward just as love is a grief story told backward.

From the dear comes grief; From the dear comes fear.If you’re freed from the dear You’ll have no grief, let alone fear.

What madness, to love a man as something more than human! I lived in a fever, convulsed with tears and sighs that allowed me neither rest nor peace of mind. My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it...

Sometime when I cry I’m not sure if it’s grief or relief.

I see what grief does, how it strips you bare, shows you all the things you don’t want to know. That loss doesn’t end, that there isn’t a moment where you are done, when you can neatly put it away and move on.

Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It’s true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she’ll know how to find me. She’ll look for the cardinal, drawn through the...

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

And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself—more birds than women flocking round his body!

Suffering invites us to place our hurts in larger hands. In Christ we see God suffering – for us. And calling us to share in God’s suffering love for a hurting world. The small and even overpowering pains of our lives are intimately connected with the greater pains of Christ. Our daily sorrows are anchored...

A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.

In days that follow, I discover that anger is easier to handle than grief.

The truth is, we never know what life will bring us and we don’t have as much control as we might think we have. But we CAN choose how we walk through life and how we spend our time.

I hope I’m the ghost that belongs to her.

This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping.

I think unconsciously I was afraid that if she asked me how I felt, my unleashed grief and rage would kill us all. In some unadmitted corner of myself I was already weeping and screaming and begging her not to leave me, not to go. If I started crying for real, only her comfort could...

I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it’s impossible to tell because I’m underwater. But he wasn’t crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she’d taken the part of him...

We live and we die, but we are made of sterner stuff. The carbon atoms in our fingernails, the calcium in our bones, the iron atoms in our blood — all the countless trillions of atoms of which we are made — are ancient objects. They existed before us, before the Earth itself, in fact....

Tears have always been easier to shed than explain.

To kill was to be doomed. To kill was to die, yourself.

I haven’t told you that today, Meg, because I don’t know.

…nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself.

I was sprawled out in my usual position on the couch, half asleep but entirely drunk, torturing myself by tearing memories out of my mind at random like matches from a book, striking them one at a time and drowsily setting myself on fire.

It’s odd, isn’t it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it’s a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you’re not alone.

In truth, nothing was the same. She forgot about the stars… and taking notice of the sea. She was no longer filled with all the curiosities of the world and didn’t take much notice of anything… other than how heavy… and awkward the bottle had become.

Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.

In happiness and suffering, in joy and grief, we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self.

Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?””Then what died? who are you mourning?””A point of view.

Grief shared was grief lessened.

The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.

Solitude and retirement cherish grief, employment and exertion are the only means of dissipating it.

We are born into a realm of constant change. Everything is decaying. We are continually losing all that we come in contact with. Our tendency to get attached to impermanent experiences causes sorrow, lamentation and grief, because eventually we are separated from everything and everyone we love. Our lack of acceptance and understanding of this...

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

The Poetic Assassin