for my grief’s so greatThat no supporter but the huge firm earthCan hold it up: here I and sorrows sit;Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.(Constance, from King John, Act III, scene...

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...

She heard him mutter, ‘Can you take away this grief?”I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears...

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...

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.In both states, the imagination’s entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the...

He may even find it as amusant as I do, and we will be sharing a belly laugh tomorrow.

I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It’s like discovering a great hole in the...

The deeper the grief, the more radiant the love.

She’d not known grief would come in waves, brought on by the smallest of things. Nor had she realized that ordinary acts of living would continue even after the loss of a love and that...

EnragedI throw myself to the ground and I scream,my best friend is gone, this world is so mean.I cry as I pound my fists on his grass,I’m very upset that our time went so fast.My...

There are places I cannot visit. Places of unbearable sadness, grief, mourning. They say places are made by people. I say places are defined by the memories they conjure—the lunge of a curse, a shared...

My experience is that God will meet us anywhere. Grieving badly and under the covers? He’s there. Sitting at the cemetery, wishing it were you? You’re not alone. Sitting on your child’s bedroom floor still...

The difference between shallow happiness and a deep, sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can’t stand pain. Joy, on the other hand, rises from sorrow...