Grief Quotes:

Give me a land of boughs in leaf A land of trees that stand; Where trees are fallen there is grief; I love no leafless land.

- A. E. Housman

source: A. E. Housman (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of A. E. Housman (Illustrated)”, p.8, Delphi Classics

topic: Grief, Land, Giving

Where but in the very ***** of comedown is redemption: as where but brought low, where but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we discern the savage afflictions that turn us around: where but in the arrangements love crawls us through

- A. R. Ammons

topic: Grief, Loss, Errors

One is not allowed a grief for a life never lived. Yet one has buried the fruit of love, and a great deal of hope and many dreams.

- Abigail McCarthy

topic: Dream, Regret, Grief

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

- Abraham Verghese

topic: Grief, Results, Capacity, Emote, Human Capacity

Neither happiness nor grief are everlasting in this life-but one of the two is everlasting in the next. Which one do you want?

- Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi

topic: Grief, Islamic, Two

There is a graveyard in my poor heart - dark, heaped-up graves, from which no flowers spring.

- Adah Isaacs Menken

source: Adah Isaacs Menken (1868). “Infelicia [poems].”, p.72

topic: Spring, Grief, Flower

Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.

- Adam Rapp

topic: Grief, Rain, Heart, Humidity, Arteries

Death is a door life opens.

- Adela Rogers St. Johns

source: Adela Rogers St. Johns (1979). “Love, Laughter and Tears: My Hollywood Story”

topic: Grief, Doors

Do no cheat thy Heart and tell her, 'Grief will pass away.'

- Adelaide Anne Procter

source: Adelaide Anne Procter (1858). “Legends and lyrics: a book of verses”, p.26

topic: Grief, Heart, Passing Away

See how time makes all grief decay.

- Adelaide Anne Procter

source: Adelaide Anne Procter (1858). “Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses”, p.218

topic: Time, Grief, Decay

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

- Adrienne Rich

topic: Art, Grief, Love Life, Desire Love

Chorus: Zeus, who guided men to think who laid it down that wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart grief of memory; against our pleasure we are temperate.

- Aeschylus

topic: Memories, Grief, Heart, Zeus

A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.

- Agnes Repplier

topic: Grief, Bears, Trouble

A man by his sin may waste himself, which is to waste that which on earth is most like God. This is man's greatest tragedy and God's heaviest grief.

- Aiden Wilson Tozer

topic: Grief, Men, Tragedy

Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.

- Aime Cesaire

source: "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land". Book by Aime Cesaire, 1939.

topic: Attitude, Grief, Men

I am going to St. Petersburg, Florida, tomorrow. Let the worthy citizens of Chicago get their liquor the best they can. I'm sick of the job-it's a thankless one and full of grief. I've been spending the best years of my life as a public benefactor.

- Al Capone

topic: Jobs, Grief, Years, Benefactors, Thankless

I like pubs too, but it's hard for me to go and get proper bladdered in the way I used to. I don't want to moan about being recognised but I do get a bit of grief sometimes.

- Alan Davies

topic: Grief, Want, Way

A brave action is often followed by grief. Do not let my resistance to grief stop the brave action.

- Alanis Morissette

topic: Grief, Brave, Resistance

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

- Albert Camus

topic: Grief, Men, Justice

Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.

- Albert Schweitzer

topic: Life, Grief, Bad Ass, Live For Others, Reverence For Life

To be bowed by grief is folly; Naught is gained by melancholy; Better than the pain of thinking, Is to steep the sense in drinking.

- Alcaeus

topic: Pain, Drinking, Grief, Steep

Who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are powerless. But happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

topic: Art, Grief, Our World

"Oh, when we are journeying through the murky night and the dark woods of affliction and sorrow, it is something to find here and there a spray broken, or a leafy stem bent down with the tread of His foot and the brush of His hand as He passed; and to remember that the path He trod He has hallowed, and thus to find lingering fragrance and hidden strength in the remembrance of Him as "in all points tempted like as we are," bearing grief for us, bearing grief with us, bearing grief like us."

- Alexander MacLaren

topic: Grief, Dark, Night, Dark Woods, Hidden Strength

Who ne'er knew joy but friendship might divide,Or gave his father grief but when he died.

- Alexander Pope

topic: Father, Grief, Joy

Music the fiercest grief can charm, And fate's severest rage disarm. Music can soften pain to ease, And make despair and madness please; Our joys below it can improve, And antedate the bliss above.

- Alexander Pope

topic: Music, Pain, Grief

Don't be sad, don't be angry, if life deceives you! Submit to your grief - your time for joy will come, believe me.

- Alexander Pushkin

topic: Inspirational, Grief, Believe, Don't Be Sad

I have outlasted all desire, My dreams and I have grown apart; My grief alone is left entire, The gleamings of an empty heart. The storms of ruthless dispensation Have struck my flowery garland numb, I live in lonely desolation And wonder when my end will come. Thus on a naked tree-limb, blasted By tardy winter's whistling chill, A single leaf which has outlasted Its season will be trembling still.

- Alexander Pushkin

topic: Dream, Lonely, Grief, Desolation, Empty Heart

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.

- Alexandre Dumas

topic: Grief, Able, World, Monte Cristo, Deepest Feelings

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must of felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. " Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.

- Alexandre Dumas

topic: Hope, Children, Grief

He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.

- Alexandre Dumas

topic: Happiness, Grief, Sadness

Does the open wound in another's breast soften the pain of the gaping wound in our own? Or does the blood which is welling from another man's side staunch that which is pouring from our own? Does the general anguish of our fellow creatures lessen our own private and particular anguish? No, no, each suffers on his own account, each struggles with his own grief, each sheds his own tears.

- Alexandre Dumas

topic: Pain, Grief, Struggle

Faded smiles oft linger in the face, While grief's first flakes fall silent on the heart!

- Alfred Austin

topic: Grief, Fall, Heart, Faded

The heart bow'd down by weight of woe, To weakest hope will cling, To thought and impulse while they flow, That can no comfort bring, That can, that can no comfort bring, With those exciting scenes will blend, O'er pleasure's pathway thrown; But mem'ry is the only friend That grief can call its own.

- Alfred Bunn

topic: Grief, Heart, Woe

I sometimes find it half a sin, To put to words the grief i feel, For words like nature,half reveal, and half conceal the soul within,

- Alfred Lord Tennyson

topic: Life, Grief, Soul

Forgive my grief for one removed Thy creature whom I found so fair I trust he lives in Thee and there I find him worthier to be loved.

- Alfred Lord Tennyson

topic: Grief, Forgiving, Found

Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran .

- Algernon Charles Swinburne

topic: Time, Grief, Men, Shadow Of Death

Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time 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 hell, Strength without hands to smite, Love that endures for a breath; Night, the shadow of light, And Life, the shadow of death.

- Algernon Charles Swinburne

topic: Summer, Pain, Grief

Don't engage your heart in grief over the past or you wont be ready for what is coming.

- Ali ibn Abi Talib

topic: Grief, Heart, Past

Greed takes a person to the watering place but gets him back without letting him drink. It undertakes responsibility but does not fulfill it. Often the drinker gets choked before quenching his thirst. The greater the worth of a thing yearned for, the greater is the grief for its loss. Desires blind the eyes of understanding. The destined share would reach him who does not approach it.

- Ali ibn Abi Talib

topic: Wisdom, Islamic, Grief, Get Him Back, Islamic Wisdom

I have noticed that after a time of deep sorrow the greatest comfort may come from a person you do not know well.

- Alice Adams

source: Alice Adams (2011). “TO SEE YOU AGAIN: Stories”, p.146, Vintage

topic: Grief, Sorrow, Comfort, Deep Sorrow

Even for the dead I will not bind my soul to grief, death cannot long divide; for is it not as if the rose that climbed my garden wall had bloomed the other side?

- Alice Cary

source: alice cary (1855). “poems”, p.283

topic: Wall, Grief, Garden

The hardest grief is often that which leaves no trace.

- Alice Hegan Rice

topic: Grief, Hardest

Courage can be just as infectious as fear.

- Alice Miller

source: Alice Miller (2002). “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”, p.19, Macmillan

topic: Grief

Only the mourning for what one has missed at the crucial time can lead to real healing.

- Alice Miller

topic: Real, Grief, Healing

Because if she let go of her grief even for a minute it would only hit her harder when she bumped into it again.

- Alice Munro

topic: Letting Go, Grief, Minutes

In each of us, there is a little voice that knows exactly which way to go. And I learned very early to listen to it, even though it has caused so much grief and havoc, and I think that is the only answer.

- Alice Walker

topic: Grief, Thinking, Voice, Which Way To Go

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same, there's a real lightheartednes s about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.

- Alice Walker

topic: Real, Grief, Things Change

Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure

- Alison Bechdel

source: Alison Bechdel (2007). “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Grief, Sea, Design, Daedalus, Icarus

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

- Alison Bechdel

source: Alison Bechdel (2007). “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic”, p.223, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Grief, Absence, Form

Even the Savior of the world, the Only Begotten Son of God, was obliged to come to earth and to take upon himself an earthly tabernacle. He experienced joy and sorrow, happiness and grief, lasting satisfaction and frequent disappointments. As Paul has written, "Though he were a Son yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him."

- Alma P Burton

source: Alma P. Burton, Clea M. Burton (1966). “For They Shall Be Comforted”, p.30, Cedar Fort

topic: Disappointment, Grief, Son

Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.

- Alphonse de Lamartine

topic: Death, Pain, Grief, Joy And Grief, Inspirational Bereavement

I only really fake it anymore with sommeliers who are being really snotty to me and I don't want to take their grief and so I try to do something to kind of throw them off or put them on the defensive, even if I don't know what I'm talking about

- Alton Brown

topic: Grief, Talking, Fake, Sommelier

And I know you've spent a lifetime trying to protect me from the staggering pain of grief that comes from losing the things and the people and the places you allowed yourself to care about--but guess what, Jennika--that's no way to live. As much as it hurts to lose something you love, there's much greater joy in getting to experience it for as long as it lasts.

- Alyson Noel

source: Alyson Noel (2012). “Fated”, p.347, Pan Macmillan

topic: Hurt, Pain, Grief

Funeral: a pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that deepens our groans and doubles our tears.

- Ambrose Bierce

topic: Death, Suicide, Grief, Undertaker

And sometimes we cling because the memory is so painful that we can't stop visiting it and hoping to make it come out differently. The risk of letting go is that we have to confront our own selves and our own possibilities.

- Amy Bloom

topic: Letting Go, Memories, Grief

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.

- Amy Bloom

topic: Lying, Grief, Mean, Spirited, Diabolical

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

- Amy Hempel

source: Amy Hempel, Rick Moody (2007). “The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel”, p.40, Simon and Schuster

topic: Mother, Baby, Grief, Drink Milk, Newborn Baby

Who is it that loves and who that suffers? He alone stages a play with Himself; who exists save Him? The individual suffers because he perceives duality. It is duality which causes all sorrow and grief. Find the One everywhere and in everything and there will be an end to pain and suffering.

- Anandamayi Ma

topic: Pain, Grief, Play

At one hundred, surely you learn to overcome loss and grief—or do they hound you till the bitter end?

- André Aciman

source: André Aciman (2008). “Call Me by Your Name: A Novel”, p.74, Macmillan

topic: Grief, Loss, Overcoming

There are no solutions to life, but there is an experience of wholeness, of bliss, of being, of the deathlessness of the Divine Self, of Silence in all its multifacted, diamond splendor that heals all grief, all wounds, all questions.

- Andrew Harvey

topic: Grief, Self, Silence

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory

- Andrew Solomon

topic: Depression, Grief, Air, Allegory, Postpartum Depression

Sometimes, people end up thankful for what they mourned. You cannot achieve this state by seeking tragedy, but you can keep yourself open more to sorrow's richness than to unmediated despair. Tragedies with happy endings may be sentimental tripe, or they may be the true meaning of love.

- Andrew Solomon

topic: Grief, People, Suffering, Tripe, True Meaning Of Love

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

- Andrew Solomon

topic: Depression, Grief, Proportion

I watched Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle. Good grief. What whining weenies.

- Andrew Sullivan

topic: Grief, Politics, Whining

Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.

- Anita Shreve

topic: Grief

And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.

- Anita Shreve

source: Anita Shreve (1998). “The Pilot's Wife”, Little, Brown

topic: Grief, Might, Way

Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.

- Ann Brashares

topic: Grief, Three, Rooms, Three Months

Time passes and I am still not through it. Grief isn't something you get over. You live with it. You go on on with it lodged in you. Sometimes I feel like I have swallowed a pile of stones. Grief makes me heavy. It makes me slow. Even on days when I laugh a lot, or dance, or finish a project, or meet a deadline, or celebrate, or make love, it is there. Lodged deep inside of me.

- Ann Hood

source: Ann Hood (2009). “Comfort: A Journey Through Grief”, p.150, W. W. Norton & Company

topic: Grief, Laughing, Making Love, Deep Inside

The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that? Instead, she said, "I love you." She did. She loved him. But even that didn't feel like anything anymore.

- Ann Hood

source: Ann Hood (2008). “The Knitting Circle”, p.18, HarperCollins UK

topic: Grief, Love You, Language

Grief doesn't have a plot. It isn't smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.

- Ann Hood

source: Ann Hood (2009). “Comfort: A Journey Through Grief”, p.53, W. W. Norton & Company

topic: Grief, Plot, Smooth

I think you have to deal with grief in the sense that you have to recognize that you have it, and say that it's OK to have all the sadness.

- Ann Richards

topic: Grief, Sadness, Thinking

When grief is deepest, words are fewest.

- Ann Voskamp

topic: Grief

Depression is anger slowed down; panic is grief speeded up.

- Ann-Marie MacDonald

topic: Depression, Grief, Panic

Call me a sinner, Mock me maliciously: I was your insomnia, I was your grief.

- Anna Akhmatova

topic: Grief, Insomnia, Call Me

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

- Anne Carson

topic: Grief, Tragedy, Doe

I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.

- Anne Enright

topic: Sex, Grief, Feelings, Diarrhoea, Looseness

Grief is a normal and natural response to loss. It is originally an unlearned feeling process. Keeping grief inside increases your pain.

- Anne Grant

topic: Love, Pain, Grief, Stages Of Grief, Sympathy Condolences

Grief is perhaps an unknown territory for you. You might feel both helpless and hopeless without a sense of a 'map' for the journey. Confusion is the hallmark of a transition. To rebuild both your inner and outer world is a major project.

- Anne Grant

topic: Grief, Journey, Confusion, Outer Worlds

Grief is a process, not a state.

- Anne Grant

topic: Grief, Grieving, States

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But, what I've discovered is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place, and that only grieving can heal grief. The passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

- Anne Lamott

topic: Lying, Grief, Grieving, Isolated Places

Help" is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn't matter how you pray--with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, "Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.

- Anne Lamott

topic: Prayer, Grief, Believe, Dance Floor, Garage

Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.

- Anne Lamott

topic: Grief, Numbness, Silence

only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

- Anne Lamott

topic: Grief, Grieving, Alone Time, Passage Of Time

The grief and tears didn't wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet.

- Anne Lamott

topic: Grief, Feet, Tears, Being Sober

There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

- Anne Michaels

topic: Children, Grief, Believe, Fugitive, Sleeping Child

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

topic: Grief, Grieving, Losing Someone, Deep Grief, Grief Comfort

Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before.

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

topic: Death, Grief, Grieving, Amputation, Parting

To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost." So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions." An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.

- Anne Rice

topic: Grief, Mean, Eye, Lestat, Vampire Lestat

And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world.

- Anne Rice

topic: Pain, Grief, Fate

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

- Anne Roiphe

source: Anne Roiphe (2009). “Epilogue: A Memoir”, p.4, Harper Collins

topic: Life, Grief, Moving

Family members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own grief, tends to degrade the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person who was once their own.

- Anthony Kennedy

topic: Grief, Mourning, Stakes, Degrade, Deceased

Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature.

- Anthony Rapp

topic: Grief, Doe, Temperature, Humidity

In our culture I think most people think of grief as sadness, and that's certainly part of it, a large part of it, but there's also this thorniness, these edges that come out.

- Anthony Rapp

source: "From musical to memoir, actor Anthony Rapp comes up with dramatic making-of 'Rent' story and moving personal one" by David Wiegand, www.sfgate.com. February 21, 2006.

topic: Grief, Sadness, Thinking

Cries of despair, misery, sobbing grief are a kind of wealth.

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

topic: Grief, Despair, Misery, Weeping, Sobbing

And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you...

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

topic: Stars, Crazy, Grief

The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.

- Anton Chekhov

topic: Powerful, Philosophy, Grief, Upper Hand

When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.

- Anton Chekhov

topic: Grief, Heart, Giving

For years, I had used these fractured men to justify my cynicism and workaholism, and the grief, insomnia and casual anorexia were no longer of any interest to me.

- Antonella Gambotto-Burke

topic: Grief, Insomnia, Men

But what was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief. Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

- Arundhati Roy

topic: Grief, Night, Law, Quietness

Too many people I've loved dearly have left this earth. And some I've lost are still here breathing the same air. That grief can be comparable if not worse in its consumption.

- Aunjanue Ellis

source: "Exclusive: Actress Aunjanue Ellis and Director Russell Costanzo Discuss 'The Tested'". IndieWire Interview, www.indiewire.com. April 29, 2011.

topic: Grief, Air, Breathing

From the onset, I saw victims on both ends of the gun. I will mourn my son's death for the rest of my life. Now, however, my grief has been transformed into a powerful commitment to change. Change is urgently needed in a society where children kill children.

- Azim Khamisa

topic: Children, Powerful, Grief

There is no end to grief. Nor no end to poetry.

- Babette Deutsch

source: Babette Deutsch (1969). “The collected poems”

topic: Grief, Poetry, Ends

Everyone who lives long enough to love deeply will experience great losses. Don't let fear of loss, or the losses themselves, take away your ability to enjoy the wonderful life that is yours.

- Barbara Cooper

source: "Got a problem? Just ask Grandma" by Huma Qureshi, www.theguardian.com. September 28, 2012.

topic: Grief, Loss, Deep Love, Wonderful Life, Great Loss

Great unhappiness is incompatible with the belief that it will ever end.

- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

topic: Grief, Belief, Unhappiness

Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration.

- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

topic: Pain, Grief, Heart, Black Pearl

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

- Barbara Kingsolver

topic: Grief, Writing, Character

You don't think you'll live past it and you don't really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that's still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.

- Barbara Kingsolver

topic: Grief, Past, Thinking

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.

- Barbara Kingsolver

source: Source: www.wherestherage.com

topic: Grief, Believe, Track

The upside to grief is it takes away your appetite. When people say you look good they really mean it. Nature's thoughtful that way.

- Barbara Park

topic: Grief, Mean, Thoughtful

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, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain.

- Barbara Taylor Bradford

source: Barbara Taylor Bradford, Sue Monk Kidd (2001). “Of love and life: three novels selected and condensed by Reader's Digest”

topic: Pain, Grief, Believe, Finality, Family Gathering

Sorrow is not sickness-unless it becomes a permanent state of mental ill-health. The point is there are indeed stages of grief, as all the therapists tell us, but they do not obey some great unseen timetable.

- Bel Mooney

topic: Grief, Suffering, Sorrow, Stages Of Grief, Timetables

Separate from the other unnamed billions who walk the earth, each of these little groups of three or five or twelve, brought together by the shuffle of chance, then welded by blood, sees in itself the whole of earth, or all that matters of it. What happens to one of the three or five or twelve will happen to them all. Whatever grief or triumph may touch any one will touch every one, as they are carried forward into the unknowable under the brilliant, terrifying sun which nourishes all.

- Belva Plain

source: Belva Plain (2009). “Evergreen”, p.441, Dell

topic: Family, Grief, Blood, Groups Of Three

When a virtuous man is raised, it brings gladness to his friends, grief to his enemies, and glory to his posterity.

- Ben Jonson

topic: Grief, Men, Enemy, Gladness

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

- Ben Marcus

topic: Grief, Bigs

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

- Ben Marcus

source: Ben Marcus (2012). “The Flame Alphabet”, p.225, Granta Books

topic: Grief, Sound, Looks

That is the inescapable math of tragedy and the multiplication of grief. Too many good people die a little when they lose someone they love. One death begets two or twenty or one hundred. It's the same all over the world.

- Ben Sherwood

source: Ben Sherwood (2010). “Charlie St. Cloud: A Novel”, p.267, Bantam

topic: Grief, Math, Two

If a man be gloomy let him keep to himself. No one has the right to go croaking about society, or what is worse, looking as if he stifled grief.

- Benjamin Disraeli

topic: Attitude, Grief, Men

Grief is the agony of an instant. The indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

- Benjamin Disraeli

topic: Happiness, Grief, Agony

The indulgence in grief is a blunder.

- Benjamin Disraeli

topic: Grief, Blunders, Indulgence

Those things that hurt, instruct.

- Benjamin Franklin

topic: Hurt, Grief, Teaching, Help With Grief

One cannot get through life without pain...What we can do is choose how to use the pain life presents to us.

- Bernie Siegel

topic: Pain, Grief, Use, Without Pain

We hear the rain fall, but not the snow. Bitter grief is loud, calm grief is silent.

- Berthold Auerbach

source: Berthold Auerbach (1896*). “On the Heights”

topic: Rain, Fall, Grief

The greatest antidote in the world for grief is work, and the necessity of work.

- Bess Streeter Aldrich

source: Bess Streeter Aldrich (1994). “A Lantern in Her Hand”, p.178, U of Nebraska Press

topic: Grief, World, Antidote

It was like that. Sometimes I'd go for a period—days or weeks—without feeling the full sweep of my loss, and then as unexpected as a thunderclap, the realization would rip the protective coating from my senses. Maybe that's the way it is with trick knees and aging griefs. Totally pain free one moment and absorbingly painful the next.

- Bette Greene

source: Bette Greene (1988). “Morning is a long time coming”, Starfire

topic: Pain, Rip, Grief

It's come at last," she thought, "the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn't enough food in the house you pretended that you weren't hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter's night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn't be cold. You'd kill anyone who tried to harm them - I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them from.

- Betty Smith

topic: Children, Grief, Winter

The humiliation that Jane had felt turned to something else--grief perhaps, or regret. Regret that she had not known how to act with a boy, regret that she had not been wiser.

- Beverly Cleary

topic: Regret, Grief, Boys

Grief and constant anxiety kill nearly as many women as men die on the battlefield.

- Bill Vaughan

topic: Grief, Men, Anxiety

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

- Blaise Pascal

topic: Life, Grief, Time Heals, Offended You, Offenders

About twenty pages into Luke B. Goebel's Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, I realized I was reading with one hand holding my forehead and one balled at my waist, kind of clenched, and gazing down into the paper like a man soon to be converged upon. Goebel's testimony comes on like that: engrossing, fanatical, full of private grief, and yet, at the same time, charismatic, tender, and intrepid, aglow with more spirit than most Americans have the right to wield.

- Blake Butler

topic: Reading, Grief, Men, Luke, Hand Holding

What if all possible pain was only the grief of truth?

- Brenda Shaughnessy

source: Brenda Shaughnessy (2012). “Our Andromeda”, p.8, Copper Canyon Press

topic: Pain, Grief, What If

If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.

- Brené Brown

topic: Inspirational, Real, Grief, Depression And Anxiety, Anxiety Depression

Don't be ashamed to weep; 'tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.

- Brian Jacques

source: Brian Jacques, Peter Standley (2002). “Taggerung”

topic: Nature, Memories, Grief, Memories And Love, Wounded Heart

The Language of Sand has something for everyone: myths, mystery, community, humor, grief, and ultimately healing. I found myself not only rooting for Abigail but for the whole community of Chapel Isle. Block manages to hold sass and heartfelt emotion in perfect equilibrium.

- Brunonia Barry

topic: Block, Grief, Healing, Abigail, Sass

Pity speaks to grief more sweetly than a band of instruments.

- Bryan Procter

source: Bryan Waller Procter (1857). “Dramatic Scenes ; with Other Poems Now First Printed”, p.218

topic: Grief, Band, Speak

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Wisdom, Grief, Talking, Grief Observed

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Fear, Grief, Yawning, Inspirational Grief, Inspirational Grieving

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Grief, Grieving, Sky, Stillbirth, Empty Houses

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

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Grief, Long, Valleys, Grief Observed

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Wisdom, Grief, Yawning

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process. It needs not a map, but a history, and if I don't stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there's no reason why I should ever stop.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Grief, Writing, Suffering, Grief Observed

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling action after action had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an harrow to the string then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead through to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once now so many culs de sac.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Grief, Frustration, Thinking

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 spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Grief, Cutting, Loss, Stillbirth, Grief Observed

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 spiral?

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Grief, Circles, Phases, Stillbirth, Grief Observed

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Life, Grief, Sadness, Live Each Day, Keeping A Journal

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Grief, Grieving, Ideas, Stillbirth, Grief Observed

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

- C. S. Lewis

topic: Grief, Healing, Grieving

I am unable, mentally incapable, of relating the dead thing, the broken body refusing to divulge why or where the occupant has gone, to the thing that was alive.

- Caitlin Thomas

topic: Grief, Broken, Gone, Divulge

there is no gaiety as gay as the gaiety of grief.

- Caitlin Thomas

topic: Grief, Gay, Gaiety

More lightly do his sorrows press upon a man, when to a friend or fellow traveller he tells his griefs.

- Callimachus

topic: Grief, Men, Sorrow

It took two," I said. "Two different people to make the Heartwood what it is. Two different experiences, grief and joy, combined. True love never has just one face, does it? It must always have two, or it isn't true love at all.

- Cameron Dokey

topic: Grief, Two, People

And then came a time when I could no longer say 'We,' and I found myself in a lonesome land where no one remembered that I had ever been young, or called me by my given name.

- Candace Wheeler

source: Candace Wheeler (1918). “Yesterdays in a Busy Life”

topic: Grief, Loss, Land, Lonesome, Given Names

Talking about your feeling with someone who is willing to listen can be enormously consoling, especially if that person has experienced a death similar to the one you are grieving.

- Candy Lightner

topic: Grief, Grieving, Talking, Consoling

The road through grief is a rocky one. Traveling along it requires courage, patience, wisdom, and hope.

- Candy Lightner

topic: Grief

Embrace your grief. For there, your soul will grow.

- Carl Jung

topic: Grief, Loss, Soul

I have to ask myself how I can possibly expect to know Jesus as he would want to be known if my life remains unscathed by trouble and grief. How can I hope to grasp anything of God's heart for this broken planet if I never weep because its brokenness touches me and breaks my heart? How can I reflect his image if I never share in his sufferings? And how will any of us ever learn to treasure his hesed and grace if we never experience phases where these blessings seem absent?

- Carolyn Custis James

topic: Jesus, Grief, Heart, Brokenness

I wake up in that state of grief when you can tell you've been mourning even in your sleep.

- Carolyn Parkhurst

source: Carolyn Parkhurst (2010). “The Nobodies Album”, p.52, Anchor

topic: Grief, Sleep, Mourning

What I have learned lately is that people deal with death in all sorts of ways. Some of us fight against it, doing everything we can to make it not true. Some of us lose our selves to grief. Some of us lose ourselves to anger.

- Carrie Jones

topic: Grief, Fighting, Self, Dealing With Death

They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite

- Cassandra Clare

topic: Sad, Get Well, Grief, Magnus Bane, Time Heals All

The heart that loves must one day grieve. Love and grief are the Goddess's twined gifts. Let the pain in, let it open your heart to compassion. Let me help you bear your grief and then may your heart ease and open to greater love. May the love that flows eternally through the universe embrace and comfort you. p.85

- Cate Tiernan

source: Cate Tiernan (2008). “The Calling: Book Seven”, p.86, Penguin

topic: Pain, Grief, Heart, Greater Love

Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.

- Catherynne M. Valente

topic: Grief, Might, Causes

These are the folk who may pass into the kingdom of heaven: the grief-stricken, lovers, scholars of a certain obsessive disposition. Brute beasts. Women who have become as men and men who have become as women. Writers of books with long titles. Only those knights who have failed to touch the Grail. Industrious women. You, and I, and a boy named Oleg, and a girl with blue hair.

- Catherynne M. Valente

topic: Girl, Book, Grief, Blue Hair

But grief is a walk alone. Others can be there, and listen. But you will walk alone down your own path, at your own pace, with your sheared-off pain, your raw wounds, you denial, anger, and bitter loss. You'll come to your own peace, hopefully, but it will be on your own, in your own time.

- Cathy Lamb

source: Cathy Lamb (2011). “The First Day of the Rest of My Life”, p.355, Kensington Publishing Corp.

topic: Pain, Grief, Loss

When in these fresh mornings I go into my garden before anyone is awake, I go for the time being into perfect happiness. In this hour divinely fresh and still, the fair face of every flower salutes me with a silent joy. . . . All the cares, perplexities, and griefs of existence, all the burdens of life slip from my shoulders and leave me with the heart of a little child that asks nothing beyond the present moment of innocent bliss.

- Celia Thaxter

topic: Morning, Children, Grief, Burdens Of Life, Perfect Happiness

A still-born son os superior to a foolish son endowed with a long life. The first causes grief for but a moment while the latter like a blazing fire consumes his parents in grief for life.

- Chanakya

topic: Grief, Son, Fire

Even a pandit comes to grief by giving instruction to a foolish disciple, by maintaining a wicked wife, and by excessive familiarity with the miserable.

- Chanakya

topic: Grief, Giving, Wife, Pandit

He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.

- Chanakya

topic: Family, Education, Grief, Family Members

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment's grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one's life.

- Chanakya

topic: Grief, Loss, Causes, Incurring

Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.

- Charles Bukowski

topic: Grief, Sorrow, Cry

Your tale is of the longest," observed Monks, moving restlessly in his chair. It is a true tale of grief and trial, and sorrow, young man," returned Mr. Brownlow, "and such tales usually are; if it were one of unmixed joy and happiness, it would be very brief.

- Charles Dickens

topic: Grief, Moving, Men

A blight had fallen on the trees and shrubs; and the wind, at length beginning to break the unnatural stillness that had prevailed all day, sighed heavily from time to time, as though foretelling in grief the ravages of the coming storm. The bat skimmed in fantastic flights through the heavy air, and the ground was alive with crawling things, whose instinct brought them forth to swell and fatten in the rain.

- Charles Dickens

topic: Grief, Rain, Air, Spooky, Blight

No one's ever completely broken. It's just a matter of how much has to fall apart before the ember of life is exposed to air.

- Charles Eisenstein

topic: Grief, Fall, Loss, Embers

We are not strong enough to stand up against endless grief, And yet pain is the constant drone of life. So if we are to have any happiness at all, it is only in the passing instant.

- Charles Frazier

source: Charles Frazier (2006). “Thirteen Moons: A Novel”, p.393, Random House

topic: Strong, Pain, Grief, Not Strong Enough

But, as old Swedish legends say, Of all the birds upon that day, The swallow felt the deepest grief, And longed to give her Lord relief, And chirped when any near would come. Hugswala swala swal honom! Meaning, as they who tell it deem, Oh, cool, oh, cool and comfort Him!

- Charles Godfrey Leland

source: Charles Godfrey Leland (1872). “The Music-lesson of Confucius, and Other Poems”, p.66

topic: Grief, Giving, Bird, Swedish

Depend upon it, a man never experiences such pleasure or grief after fourteen years as he does before, unless in some cases, in his first lovemaking, when the sensation is new to him

- Charles Kingsley

topic: Grief, First Love, Men, Fourteen

I don't know the meaning of life. I don't know why we are here. I think life is full of anxieties and fears and tears. It has a lot of grief in it, and it can be very grim. And I do not want to be the one who tries to tell somebody else what life is all about. To me it's a complete mystery.

- Charles M. Schulz

topic: Grief, Thinking, Anxiety, Why We Are Here, Anxiety And Fear

Snoopy (musing on his rooftop): Good Grief! Is it November already? My life is going by too fast. I think someone pushed the "Fast Forward" button.

- Charles M. Schulz

topic: Grief, Thinking, Buttons, Rooftops, Snoopy

The benefits [of the resurrection] are innumerable. To list a few: Our illnesses don't seem nearly so final; Our fears fade and lose their grip; Our grief over those who have gone on is diminished; Our desires to press on in spite of the obstacles is rejuvenated... Our identity as Christians is strengthened as we stand in the lengthening shadows of saints down through the centuries, who have always answered back in antiphonal voice: 'He is risen, indeed!'

- Charles R. Swindoll

topic: Christian, Easter, Grief, Christian Easter, He Is Risen

I know nothing which can so comfort the soul; so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and grief; so speak peace to the winds of trial, as a devout musing upon the subject of the Godhead.

- Charles Spurgeon

topic: Grief, Wind, Soul

This day, my God, I hate sin not because it damns me, but because it has done Thee wrong. To have grieved my God is the worst grief to me.

- Charles Spurgeon

topic: Hate, Grief, Bereavement, Sins Not

The heart which grief hath cankered, Hath one unfailing remedy - the Tankard.

- Charles Stuart Calverley

source: Charles Stuart Calverley (1862). “Verses and Translations”, p.57

topic: Grief, Heart, Alcohol

Sometimes -- she knows this from her own life -- to get to the other side, you must travel through grief. No detours are possible.

- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

source: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (2014). “Oleander Girl: A Novel”, p.276, Simon and Schuster

topic: Grief, Detours, Sides

There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.

- Chris Cleave

source: Chris Cleave (2012). “Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set: Little Bee, Incendiary, Gold”, p.115, Simon and Schuster

topic: Grief, Heart, Mind

This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.

- Chris Cleave

source: Chris Cleave (2012). “Chris Cleave Ebook Boxed Set: Little Bee, Incendiary, Gold”, p.255, Simon and Schuster

topic: Grief, Moving, Ears

The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.

- Chris Hedges

topic: War, Grief, Honor, Jingoism

A mourner is, perforce, a person with a story. The pity is, how very rarely it gets told.

- Christian McEwen

topic: Grief, Stories, Pity

To mourn is to be extraordinarily vulnerable. It is to be at the mercy of inside feelings and outside events in a way most of us have not been since early childhood.

- Christian McEwen

topic: Grief, Childhood, Feelings

Mourning has a pace and rhythm of its own. It cannot be rushed.

- Christian McEwen

topic: Grief, Mourning, Pace

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.

- Christian Nestell Bovee

topic: Grief, Losing A Loved One, Cry

The griefs of private men are soon allayed, But not of kings.

- Christopher Marlowe

topic: Kings, Grief, Men

There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

- Christopher Moore

topic: Real, Grief, Sorrow

Let'sss just kill him," said the shorter Ra'zac. "He has caused us much grief." The taller one ran his finger down his sword. "A good plan. But remember, the king's instructions were to keep them alive." -from Eragon, Chapter Title: The Ra'zac's Revenge.

- Christopher Paolini

topic: Kings, Revenge, Grief

There is no time for grief; there never is.

- Christopher Pike

topic: Grief

Han spotted a child‟s homespun dolly in the ditch, pressed into the mud. He reined in, meaning to climb down and fetch it so he could clean it up for his little sister. Then he remembered that Mari was dead and had no need of dollies anymore. Grief was like that. It gradually faded into a dull ache, until some simple sight or sound or scent hit him like a hammer blow.

- Cinda Williams Chima

topic: Children, Grief, Blow

Why do the right wing media so assiduously scrutinize the words of a grief filled mother and ignore the words of a lying president?

- Cindy Sheehan

topic: Mother, Lying, Grief, Scrutinize

Time heals many wounds but this loss becomes the defining sadness of your life.

- Claire Cook

topic: Grief, Sadness, Loss, His Loss

And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it's not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother's death, I'd catch myself thinking about her as alive; and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone.

- Claire Messud

topic: Mother, Dream, Grief, Thinking About Her

A compassionate willingess is required - as is the courage to live before the fact, before the understanding, before any rational support or certainty, to live the moment to its natural peak and conclusion, and to accept with dignity whatever joy, grief, misfortune, or unexpectedness occurs.

- Clark Moustakas

topic: Grief, Support, Joy, Unexpectedness

If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.

- Clifford Odets

topic: Sad, Suicide, Grief, Sleeping Pills

The failure to cultivate virtue, the failure to examine and analyze what I have learned, the inability to move toward righteousness after being shown the way, the inability to correct my faults-these are the causes of my grief.

- Confucius

topic: Grief, Moving, Inability

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

- Cormac McCarthy

source: Cormac McCarthy (2007). “The Road”, p.46, Vintage

topic: Pain, Grief, Heart