quotations about grief
Grief, a type of sadness that most often occurs when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing, because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket)
The Carnivorous Carnival
Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.
SARAH DESSEN
The Truth About Forever
The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
My grief was like a mountain that hid all of heaven from me.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR
The Song of the Seed
Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Adonais
Time ebbs, but Grief abides--
Grim flotsam of Life's tides.
NELLIE SEELYA EVANS
"On the Shore"
No grief has a right to immortality. That ground belongs to joy, to hope, to faith.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.
EURIPIDES
Alexander [fragment]
Grief has got no brother, sister or lover.
Grief finds friendship elsewhere. Grief, in the darkened
hours and hours before light flicks in one window
holds grief, a mirror.
MARILYN HACKER
"Grief", A Stranger's Mirror
There is not unmitigated ill in the sharpest of this world's sorrows;
I touch not the sore of thy guilt; but of human griefs I counsel thee,
Cast off the weakness of regret, and gird thee to redeem thy loss:
Thou has gained, in the furnace of affliction, self-knowledge, patience and humility,
And these be as precious ore, that waiteth the skill of the coiner:
Despise not the blessings of adversity, nor the gain thou hast earned so hardly,
And now thou hast drained the bitter, take heed that thou lose not the sweet.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Grief chants, or, if violent or sudden, its utterance is exactly like that of physical pain.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
But grief makes a monster out of us sometimes ... and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can't forgive yourself for.
MELINA MARCHETTA
On the Jellicoe Road
And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.
J. D. SALINGER
Franny and Zooey
Grief is not just a series of events, stages, or timelines. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through grief. But how long do you grieve for a husband of fifty years, a teenager killed in a car accident, a four-year-old child: a year? Five years? Forever? The loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, but its aftermath lasts a lifetime.
ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS
On Grief and Grieving
Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.
ARTHUR GOLDEN
Memoirs of a Geisha
grief is a house that disappears
each time someone knocks at the door
or rings the bell
a house that blows into the air
at the slightest gust
that buries itself deep in the ground
while everyone is sleeping
JANDY NELSON
The Sky is Everywhere
By every rudder that divides the seas,
Tall Grief shall stand, the helmsman of the ship.
By every wain that jolts along the roads,
Stout Grief shall walk, the driver of the team.
Midst every herd of cattle on the hills,
Dull Grief shall lie, the herdsman of the drove.
Oh Grief shall grind your bread and play your lutes
And marry you and bury you.
SIDNEY LANIER
"The Jacquerie: A Fragment"
What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one.
VOLTAIRE
A Philosophical Dictionary
Grief is just so scary.... If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That's what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn't get dinner.
ANNE LAMOTT
Salon, Nov. 3, Salon, Nov. 3, 2014
You cannot die of grief, though it feels as if you can. A heart does not actually break, though sometimes your chest aches as if it is breaking. Grief dims with time. It is the way of things. There comes a day when you smile again, and you feel like a traitor. How dare I feel happy. How dare I be glad in a world where my father is no more. And then you cry fresh tears, because you do not miss him as much as you once did, and giving up your grief is another kind of death.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
A Stroke of Midnight