Pressing my head to his heart, I listened hard, straining to hear any gurgle or murmur of life. Hearing nothing, I felt the shock settle into my mind, slowing it down and then turning it...

Like young fern shootsmy child’s fingers curled.I did not expect,in the fifth month, frost.

There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There’s no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman’s excuse was that no...

…you must never partly love or stop half way – because then, you become superficial and cannot be deeply hurt or loved…

If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again...

For the human memory is short, and even when we write it in stone we quickly forget and the stones crumble and even those stones then forget.

She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible...

And in a way, this was how he had come to see his death, as a series of small ones taking place over the course of his life and leading finally to the main event,...

Regardless of what you’ve been through we all process energy differently.

I knew I was being an idiot. But I figured if I kept being an idiot, if I didn’t actually accept the truth, then the truth would become false.

I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to my grief. It felt better, somehow, to be helpless. I didn’t feel ashamed.

Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut…

And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your souls means that you are still alive, still human, and still...

A lot of people who read my novel ‘Smog City’ ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it’s because I’ve given them life. Not literally of...

Everyone else felt the need to assure me that Mother’s death was part of God’s plan. Exactly, I wanted to shout after reading this sentiment half a dozen times— his plan is to kill us...

As I am an honest man, I thought you had received some bodily wound. There is more sense in that than in reputation. Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit...

When a small group of people come together to relive the Salem witch hunts, God cries. For if anything is sorrowful to God, it is evil done in his name. When you find out you...

It happened. It was awful. You aren’t perfect. That’s all there is. Don’t confuse your grief with guilt.”We stay in the silence and the loneliness of the otherwise empty dormitory for a few more minutes,...

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.

I believe there is no heaven or hell. There are no devils or angels. No afterlife or salvation. My soul won’t be incarnated or lost in the oblivion. One day, I will just stop existing…...

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

I am not alive if I am only a wispy memory in someone’s fickle brain . . .

He felt like his own heart might stop beating just from acknowledging the concept. The sadness, the sorrow, and the loss, they were living things, funnily enough.

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

I loved everything about her, and I didn’t care how dark she got. If anything it was what I loved the most, the veil of pain that fell across her face most of the day,...

And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn’t have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.

There she comes” – and that is dying.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.Comforter, where, where is your comforting?Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a...

The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had...

The pains in my heart don’t go away these days. The heartaches are chronic; they layer on top of each other from one day to the next, thickening like a callus.

A rule without exceptions is an instrument capable of doing mischief to the innocent and bringing grief — as well as injustice — to those who should gain exemptions from the rule’s functioning.

(The death of his child) “was the first experience of his life, so far as we know, which drove him to look outside of his own mind and heart for help to endure a personal...

Grief is like a journey one must take on a winding mountainside, often seeing the same scenery many times, a road which eventually leads to somewhere we’ve never been before.

Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.

I used to feel afraid of the future, always assuming the worst. But now I’ve realized that my worst fears have already happened, and I’ve survived them! I’ve walked into the fire and made it...

My hands are dying.

There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.

May you hear my feeble voice! It will tell you that here below there is a heart full of the memory of you.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done...

Though I knew in my mind that others had felt such loss, this loss was mine, and I felt that no one would ever understand it, and to try to explain the lonliness and pain...

Ever since the Christmas of ’53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of...

He felt that he could not turn aside from himself the hatred of men, because that hatred did not come from his being bad (in that case he could have tried to be better), but...

With a damp palm, I turned the knob and cracked open the door. She was asleep in her freshly made bed. I can’t explain how relieved I felt for this simple mercy. She was here...

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.

Grief was dagger-shaped and sharp and pointed inward. It was made of fresh loss and old sorrow. Rendered and forged and sometimes polished. Irene Finney had taken her daughter’s death and to that sorrow she’d...

I climbed aboard a Greyhound bus and rode it to New York without telling anyone, without so much as a goodbye. What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I was young and stupid and broken. I...

An English teacher at school once said to her, ‘Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically.’ Nothing she has ever experienced has prepared her for the...

It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I...

Grief is a stern teacher, but I am confident I could not have learned some lessons in any other way. For that, I am grateful. Grateful to God for loving me enough to stretch me...

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and...