Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have...

Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning...

That evening I sat across from Jeremy Bulloch and Jacob at the dinner table. I watched as Jeremy, who seemed to speak Jacob’s silent language fluently, drummed his fingers up and down on the edge...

The aftermath of someone’s death is vertiginous, a murky, shimmering mass; to look at it head-on is to see only the fog of emotion. One must approach it sideways, entering it by way of an...

I’ve been moving a little to the music while I worked …and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I’ve been...

Beyond aspects of pain that are physical, thought Oppenheimer, sickness or injury or privation, beyond the so-called obvious, suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless...

…a passing face together with his grief turned you into a weeping Madonna…

There’s no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world...

When words can’t make it better, hold my hand and don’t let go.

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

The human capacity for grief. It just isn’t capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn’t just level off—it just gives up, resets itself...

Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime, with a gift of tears;Grief, with a glass that ran;Pleasure, with pain for leaven;Summer, with flowers that fell;Remembrance, fallen from heaven,And madness risen from...

Des hommes qui ont vécu longtemps d’un grand amour, puis en furent privés, se lassent parfois de leur noblesse solitaire. Ils se rapprochent humblement de la vie, et, d’un amour médiocre, font leur bonheur. Ils...

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

I stood there feeling the lightness of my bones, knowing now this was not only lack of sleep that had transformed my bones into feathers, but my body’s recognition that soon I would be leaving...

It’s different when the person you love dies. There’s an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there’s the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help,...

Sam was your brother, and Trick was your friend, but what they did had nothing to do with you. You don’t have to choose. Just because me and your dad couldn’t live together, didn’t mean...

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have...

When someone you love…when they die, you want it undone. You’d do anything to have them back, and it’s easy to believe that if only this had happened or that had happened, everything would be...

The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you’re faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow,...

Grief is a hone to a hard mind.

…and they limp and halt, they’re all wrinkled, drawn, they squint to the side, can’t look you in the eyes, and always bent on duty, trudging after Ruin, maddening, blinding Ruin. But Ruin is strong...

That first shrink I saw when I got back to Clayton Falls told me no one is a lost cause, but I think that’s bullshit. I think people can be so crushed, so broken, that...

I didn’t cry. Real things don’t make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I’m like most civilised humans.

She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they’d established during the intervening months. in that way, their life...

The only way past the pain is through it. Pain, grief, anger, misery…they don’t go away–they just increase and compound and get worse. You have to live through them, acknowledge them. You have to give...

She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia,...

You don’t have to tell me you’re fine. I’m not fine. You’re not fine either. We can be honest with each other about that, can’t we?’ I say. The sides of her face tense as...

Somehow, grief had seemed easier to bear when the skies were dark and a cold wind kept cats and prey inside their nests.

Grief does not change you. It reveals you.

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...