How many times can a heart be shattered and still be pieced back together? How many times before the damage is irreparable?

Only fake tears last forever.

Nix still held Benny’s hand, and her grip tightened to an almost crushing force, grinding his hand bones together. It hurt, but Benny would rather have cut that hand off than take it back at...

Not only had my brother disappeared, but–and bear with me here–a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could...

I felt bad for trying to live a happy, full life, while my heart was buried in a dead man’s chest.

There’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.

Not every loss was confirmed by an officer at the door. Nor a telegram with the power to sink a fleet. Loss, often the worst kind, also arrived through the deafening quiet of an absence.

How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys....

According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it is...

But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love...

Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they’ve got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?””No, Matthew. What do they say?””The king is...

After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin…The heat in him...

The memory of the pain did not destroy the reality of the pleasure; grief did not obliterate joy.

It is poor solace to speak of the passing of time and grief,” the master said. His quiet voice had gone somehow bleak, though Araene could not decide where in his unchanging tone the difference...

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...

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.

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.

Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves...

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...

Sometimes the opposite of loss is loss.

Then, instead of telling her that where there was life there was hope, or to let a smile be her umbrella, or that it was always darkest just before the dawn, or anything else that...

I turned to face Audrey, and everything I loved was right there in her eyes, the memories tangible: the schooldays and sleepovers, the cheap bottles of wine and sappy chick flicks. She was there for...

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.

When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.

I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved – the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief...

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...

If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.

Some losses never heal you just learn to carry the burden and shed a tear every now and then

Death wins nothing here,gnawing wings that amputate––then spread, lift up, fly.

No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief.

God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real.

The day she was born,her grandfather made her a ring of silver and a polished stone, because he loved her already.

The tears I feel todayI’ll wait to shed tomorrow.Though I’ll not sleep this nightNor find surcease from sorrow.My eyes must keep their sight:I dare not be tear-blinded.I must be free to talkNot choked with grief,...

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

Thus heaven’s gift to us is this: That habit takes the place of bliss.

For in grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a...

But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could...

I think the worst kind of grief is unacknowledged grief.

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

Pattie saw grief. Her eyes focused on a version of her own young self, and so many other children in Vietnam who grew up without parents, some abandoned because of their ethnicity, others because of...

Each night the black sky and the bright stars were my stunning companions; occasionally I’d see their beauty and solemnity so plainly that I’d realize in a piercing way that my mother was right. That...

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

No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn’t stop for your grief.

Once you have walked down the grief path, what you have gained on your journey may turn into invaluable advice for someone else.

Hot heart-blood leaked from my face. From my eyes and my nose and my mouth. Not tears, because those would never stop. This was just liquid heartbreak seeping from my pores.

So much ice.She thumbed a drying tear away.How much water can the weight of ice carry?

I hid my grief well. (Hint: it’s in the basement)

There are silences and silences. No one of them is like another. There is the silence of grief in velvet-draped rooms of a plushly carpeted funeral parlor which is far different from the bleak and...

Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.the Tai Chi instructor

There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than “Cheer up!” The only way to get someone to cheer up was to help them forget, and saying “cheer up” had quite the opposite...