quotes about Grief
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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. HousmanSource : A. E. Housman (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of A. E. Housman (Illustrated)”, p.8, Delphi Classics
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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 -
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 -
There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
-- Abraham Verghese -
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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 -
There is a graveyard in my poor heart - dark, heaped-up graves, from which no flowers spring.
-- Adah Isaacs MenkenSource : Adah Isaacs Menken (1868). “Infelicia [poems].”, p.72
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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 -
Death is a door life opens.
-- Adela Rogers St. JohnsSource : Adela Rogers St. Johns (1979). “Love, Laughter and Tears: My Hollywood Story”
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Do no cheat thy Heart and tell her, 'Grief will pass away.'
-- Adelaide Anne ProcterSource : Adelaide Anne Procter (1858). “Legends and lyrics: a book of verses”, p.26
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See how time makes all grief decay.
-- Adelaide Anne ProcterSource : Adelaide Anne Procter (1858). “Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses”, p.218
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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 -
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 -
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A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.
-- Agnes Repplier -
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 -
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 CesaireSource : "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land". Book by Aime Cesaire, 1939.
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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 -
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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 -
A brave action is often followed by grief. Do not let my resistance to grief stop the brave action.
-- Alanis Morissette -
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
-- Albert Camus -
Life becomes harder for us when we live for others, but it also becomes richer and happier.
-- Albert Schweitzer -
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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 -
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 -
It’s a strange grief…to die of nostalgia for something you never lived.
-- Alessandro Baricco -
"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 -
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Who ne'er knew joy but friendship might divide,Or gave his father grief but when he died.
-- Alexander Pope -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.
-- Alexandra Fuller -
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 -
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 -
He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.
-- Alexandre Dumas -
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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 -
Faded smiles oft linger in the face, While grief's first flakes fall silent on the heart!
-- Alfred Austin -
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 -
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 -
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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 -
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 -
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 -
Don't engage your heart in grief over the past or you wont be ready for what is coming.
-- Ali ibn Abi Talib -
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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 -
I have noticed that after a time of deep sorrow the greatest comfort may come from a person you do not know well.
-- Alice AdamsSource : Alice Adams (2011). “TO SEE YOU AGAIN: Stories”, p.146, Vintage
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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 CarySource : alice cary (1855). “poems”, p.283
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The hardest grief is often that which leaves no trace.
-- Alice Hegan Rice -
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Courage can be just as infectious as fear.
-- Alice MillerSource : Alice Miller (2002). “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”, p.19, Macmillan
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Only the mourning for what one has missed at the crucial time can lead to real healing.
-- Alice Miller -
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 -
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 -
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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 -
Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure
-- Alison BechdelSource : Alison Bechdel (2007). “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief
-- Alison BechdelSource : Alison Bechdel (2007). “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic”, p.223, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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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 BurtonSource : Alma P. Burton, Clea M. Burton (1966). “For They Shall Be Comforted”, p.30, Cedar Fort
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Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine -
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 -
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 NoelSource : Alyson Noel (2012). “Fated”, p.347, Pan Macmillan
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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 -
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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 -
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 -
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 HempelSource : Amy Hempel, Rick Moody (2007). “The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel”, p.40, Simon and Schuster
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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 -
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At one hundred, surely you learn to overcome loss and grief—or do they hound you till the bitter end?
-- André AcimanSource : André Aciman (2008). “Call Me by Your Name: A Novel”, p.74, Macmillan
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The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.
-- Andrea Gibson -
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 -
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 -
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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 -
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
-- Andrew Solomon -
I watched Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle. Good grief. What whining weenies.
-- Andrew Sullivan -
Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.
-- Anita Shreve -
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And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.
-- Anita ShreveSource : Anita Shreve (1998). “The Pilot's Wife”, Little, Brown
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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 -
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 HoodSource : Ann Hood (2009). “Comfort: A Journey Through Grief”, p.150, W. W. Norton & Company
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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 HoodSource : Ann Hood (2008). “The Knitting Circle”, p.18, HarperCollins UK
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Grief doesn't have a plot. It isn't smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.
-- Ann HoodSource : Ann Hood (2009). “Comfort: A Journey Through Grief”, p.53, W. W. Norton & Company
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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 -
Depression is anger slowed down; panic is grief speeded up.
-- Ann-Marie MacDonald -
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Call me a sinner, Mock me maliciously: I was your insomnia, I was your grief.
-- Anna Akhmatova -
Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.
-- Anne Carson -
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 -
Grief is a normal and natural response to loss. It is originally an unlearned feeling process. Keeping grief inside increases your pain.
-- Anne Grant -
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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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 -
But you can’t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in – then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.
-- Anne Lamott -
All I know is that after 10 years of being sober, with huge support to express my pain and anger and shadow, 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. They brought me home, to me, to the truth of me.
-- Anne Lamott -
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 -
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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 -
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 -
Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh -
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 -
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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 -
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 -
Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.
-- Anne RoipheSource : Anne Roiphe (2009). “Epilogue: A Memoir”, p.4, Harper Collins
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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 -
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Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature.
-- Anthony Rapp -
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 RappSource : "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.
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Cries of despair, misery, sobbing grief are a kind of wealth.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
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 -