Death And Grief Quotes

Animals will be seen on the earth who will always be fighting against each other with the greatest loss and frequent deaths on each side. And there will be no end to their malignity; by their strong limbs we shall see a great portion of the trees of the vast forests laid low throughout the universe; and, when they are filled with food the satisfaction of their desires will be to deal death and grief and labour and wars and fury to every living thing; and from their immoderate pride they will desire to rise towards heaven, but the too great weight of their limbs will keep them down. Nothing will remain on earth, or under the earth or in the waters which will not be persecuted, disturbed and spoiled, and those of one country removed into another. And their bodies will become the sepulture and means of transit of all they have killed.

O Earth! why dost thou not open and engulf them in the fissures of thy vast abyss and caverns, and no longer display in the sight of heaven such a cruel and horrible monster? ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

I feel a strong immortal hope, which bears my mournful spirit up beneath its mountain load; redeemed from death, and grief, and pain, I soon shall find my [child] again within the arms of God. ~ Charles Wesley

The ultimate self is free from sin, free from old age, free from death and grief, free from hunger and thirst, which desires nothing and imagines nothing. ~ Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

Loving God, in life and in death, we belong to you. So in the midst of life, we entrust ourselves to your care. We are bold to ask for help when we are confused, lost, or afraid. We are eager to ask for healing for our bodies and minds, whether wounded, ill, or recovering. And we are unceasing in our prayers for those we love who are far from us physically, emotionally, or spiritually. In the midst of death and grief, even though we are weary, we return again and again, praying for comfort, for an easing of the pain that comes from loss, and for the light of your presence to pierce the present darkness. ~ Kimberly Bracken Long

Life is hard, no? And full of sorrow. The Pilani dance in defiance of death and grief and hardship. They choose to burn before the darkness, rather than to gutter out like a dim flame. ~ Alison Croggon

Death doesn't happen instantly. For a little while, you hover around your body, confused. What you want more than anything is to go home, to be safe, to know you're okay. But my life was over. ~ Caroline Flohr

The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either. ~ Wendell Berry

I wait for him to do what everyone else did after my parents died. Spout of some conventional words of sympathy like, I'm so sorry. How awful. You poor thing. Terribly sad...and then run. People always do. Nobody knows what to say after the initial words of supposed comfort. Death and grief make everyone around you vanish because death and grief are intolerable. ~ Jessica Park

The evil we see today was not part of God's original design. It was not God's intent for human life. That means that ultimately, even a peaceful death at the age of 90 yrs old is not the way things were meant to be...The rage at the dying of the light is our intuition that we were not meant for mortality, for the loss of love, or for the triumph of darkness. In order to help people face death and grief we often tell people that death is a perfectly natural part of life. But that asks them to repress a very right and profound human intuition - that we were not meant to simply go to dust, and that love was meant to last. ~ Timothy J. Keller

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first ... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. ~ Ron Rash

How can one hate oneself so much that one is willing to murder that self?'
The ship shook his head and rain flew from his locks. 'That is your mistake. No one wants the self to die. I only wanted to make all the rest of it to stop. The only way to achieve that was to put death between the world and myself. ~ Robin Hobb

Love is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the pathway of discipleship. It comforts, counsels, cures, and consoles. It leads us through valleys of darkness and through the veil of death. In the end love leads us to the glory and grandeur of eternal life. ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the Capital, that is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness. [pause]But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death.. ~ Virginia Woolf

Nine months ago, my mother died. This was the saddest, most painful time of my life, but somehow unexpected laughter managed to eke its way into the days and moments following her death...after determining she was, in fact, dead, my father, a very practical man, took the opportunity to finish up some laundry he has been working on ~ Meredith Spidel

Life is so sweet even though it is full of lies and half truths... ~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

The pain of losing a loved one by the horrible act of murder is not lessened by the horrible murder of another, not even when it is cloaked as 'justice' and state-sanctioned. It is only a delusion to believe that one's pain is ended by making someone else feel pain. ~ Antoinette Bosco

So long as you have a society with a lot of guns- and America has more guns per capita than any other county in the world- children will be at risk of being shot. The questions are how much risk, and what, if anything, is being done to minimize it? If one thinks of various ways in which commonplace items, from car seats to medicine bottle tops, have been childproofed, it's clear that society's general desire has been to eliminate as many potential dangers from children as possible, even when the number of those who might be harmed is relatively small. If one child's death is preventable, then the proper question isn't "Why should we do this" but rather "Why shouldn't we?" It would be strange for that principle to apple to everything but guns. ~ Gary Younge

I've thought a lot about how if something horrible happened, and if it were like 'The Road' situation, I've decided I don't want to survive past the death of society as we know it. ~ Gillian Jacobs

Life may suck but death is worse. ~ Alane Wilson

You said how Michelangelo was a manic-depressive who portrayed himself as a flayed martyr in his painting. Henri Matisse gave up being a lawyer because of appendicitis. Robert Schumann only began composing after his right hand became paralyzed and ended his career as a concert pianist. (...) You talked about Nietzsche and his tertiary syphilis. Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his clubfoot. The Bronte sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O'Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

"According to Thomas Mann," Peter said, "'Great artists are great invalids. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Death is like the setting of the sun. The sun never sets; life never ceases ... we think the sun sets, and it never ceases shining; we think our friends die, and they never cease living. ~ Amelia Barr

THE WOOKIEE SIGHED, a low rumble, and gazed at the medal in his palm. On the humans it looked substantial and solid, fit to be worn around the neck. In his hand the scale was altered, and if he brought his fingers together he could conceal it entirely. A pretty thing, hastily engraved in a stylized flower meant perhaps to recall the emblem of the Republic. At its heart a rising sun, halfway above the horizon, both symbolized the dawn of a new hope in the wake of this victory over the Galactic Empire and recalled the Death Star's destruction. ~ Greg Rucka

Each stage of your life
is like petals of a flower...
unfolding and opening until it comes to full bloom...You will blossom and then you die...But know that this is not your ending. ~ Summerlyn Guthrie

We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. (10) ~ Pema Chodron

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let's face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself. ~ Ann Patchett

You cannot conceive of the depths of my sorrow, Campbell Maria Cooper." Alicia brought her fist to her mouth and her other hand to the rail of the bed and took a deep breath before she continued. "I will never be the same when you are gone. Things for me will be dim and gray and flat. But there is one thing that will keep me going, Campbell, and that is the belief in my connection to you. This thing. This crazy enmeshed love feeling that I have is real. Like this cup is real. Or this phone is real. And it will not just go away when you do. Okay? Wherever you are going, you will be connected to me by this thing, and you will never, ever be alone, okay? I want you to know that. ~ Wendy Wunder

I might have said you'll pay for the wild & reckless hour,
pay in the currency of sweat and shiver,
the future squandered, the course
of years reconfigured, relinquishment so
complete it's more utter than any falling in love. Falling

instead in flames, burning tiles spiraling to litter
the courtyards of countless places that will
never be yours, the fingerprints,
tossed gloves & glittering costumes, flared
cornices & parapets, shattering panes, smoked out

or streaked with embers, the tinder of spools, such
a savage conflagration, stupid edge-game,
the way junkies tempt death,
over & over again, toy with it. I might have
told you that. Everything you ever meant to be, pfft,

out the window in sulphured matchlight, slow tinder
& strike, possession purely ardent as worship
& the scream working its way out
of your bones, demolition of wall & strut
within until you're stark animal need. That is

love, isn't it? Everything you meant to be falls
away so you dwell within a perfect
singularity, a kind of saint. ~ Lynda Hull

Trustan's eldest son, Crispin, had been the one who'd chased him across the schoolyard that fateful day. While Maris hadn't really understood the insults they'd yelled, he knew the misery of being punched and slapped while being unable to strike back. Tired of it all, he'd been praying for death when out of nowhere a boy half his size had slammed into Crispin and knocked him away from Maris. Like some mythical hero, Darling had beat the bastard down and told him that he better never touch Maris again. Then he'd turned around, bleeding and bruised, and extended his hand to Maris. "Hi, I'm Darling Cruel. We should be friends." In that heartbeat, Maris had fallen head over heels in love with him. And he'd been that way ever since. He'd never met anyone who came close to Darling's loyalty, kindness, or generous spirit. Until Ture. For ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Then I heard your voice as clear as day,
And you told me I should concentrate,
It was all so strange,
And so surreal,
That a ghost should be so practical.
Only if for a night
And the only solution was to stand and fight,
And my body was bruised and
I was set alight,
But you came over me like some holy rite,
And although I was burning,
You're the only light
Only if for a night ~ Florence Welch

I sleep - I sleep long.
I do not know it - it is without name - it is a word unsaid,

It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on,

To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.
Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.
Do you see O my brothers and sisters?

It is not chaos or death - it is form, union, plan - it is eternal

life - it is Happiness.

from "Song of Myself," Strophe 50. ~ Walt Whitman

There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist. ~ Christian Wiman

I am absolutely enraptured by the atmosphere of a wreck. A dead ship is the house of a tremendous amount of life-fish and plants. The mixture of life and death is mysterious, even religious. There is the same sense of peace and mood that you feel on entering a cathedral. ~ Jacques-Yves Cousteau

For a moment, I believe, there was a stillness. A shocking realization by all things - beetles, dormice, the spiders spinning their webs in the moonlight, even the hot metal of the tracks and the wind in the trees - that Death had just shrieked past like a stinking black eagle and made off with a remarkable man. ~ Alexander Masters

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. ~ A.W. Tozer

I have killed and hurt. I have conquered and pillaged. I have done all of this in the name of my own desires, have done everything in life because of my own selfishness. I have always taken what I wanted, and it has never given me happiness. If I return to the surface, alone, I will forever remember this moment, the moment I decided to choose my own life over my sister's. It will haunt me, even with Magiano at my side, until my death. What I saw for myself in my future is a future I cannot have, not with the past that I have already created. It is an illusion. Nothing more.

Perhaps, after all the lives I have taken, my atonement is to restore life to one. ~ Marie Lu

To be alive means to live in a world that proceeded one's own arrival and will survive one's own departure. On this level of sheer being alive, appearance and disappearance, as they follow upon each other, are the primordial events, which as such mark out time, the time span between birth and death. ~ Hannah

As their song crescendoed I had the sudden conviction that the world, which I had considered the province of meaningless chances, a mad dance of atoms, was as orderly as the hexagons in the honeycombs I had just crushed into wax and that behind everything, from Helen's weaving to Circe's mountain to Scylla's death, was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack. ~ Zachary Mason

A girl my age had been murdered in these woods and I'd seen her last terrified moments, watched her bleed to death in this forest. A life like mine had ended here, and it didn't matter how many times I'd seen deaths in movies, it wasn't the same, and I wasn't ever going to forget it. ~ Kelley Armstrong

For those who believe in the resurrection, death is inconsequential. In the resurrection, those that were dead live, and those who live believe they shall never die. ~ Emily Thorne

If Paulus's army had capitulated before the end, the Russians would have had the advantage of withdrawing forces against Paulus and against the southern front, where I had only two Romanian armies. Therefore, the resistance of the Sixth German Army, even to the death of the last man, was necessary. ~ Erich Von Manstein

Another thing we can learn to do is to be more grateful for every day we have with our children. None of us ever knows how long we have on Earth, so it is imperative that we live and love each moment we have. For some of us, our children's days do become numbered and we learn how to make the best of every moment we have left with them. ~ Laura Lane

It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like--how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you--how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another--and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was. ~ Margo Rabb

I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now
Run with you in the evenings along the shore,
Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,
You see me there. ~ Robinson Jeffers

But there isn't a single word in the universe that you can think of that would describe the way you feel right now. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

The friend who knows a lot more than you do will bring difficulties, and grief, and sickness, as medicine, as happiness, as the essence of the moment when you're beaten when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say, I trust you to kill me. ~ Rumi

We stood up on two legs
And raised our heads above golden grass
He was there

We sharpened stone and steel
Used tools to harvest grass, beast and brother
He was there

We clustered together
In brick and mud swarming with rats and plague
He was there

We built nations and mistrust
Our fingers hovered over the red button
He smiled

Still we build
To rise above the golden grass
Away from the reach of his scythe

When he will harvest no more ~ Tim Seeley

While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked. ~ Herman Melville

Moving to America felt as splitting and eternal as death. ~ Marina Nemat

What pleasure in this life remains unmarked by sorrow? What glory can endure upon this earth unchanged? All is feebler than a shadow, more deceptive than a dream; for death in a single moment takes all things away. But in the light of Thy countenance, O Christ, and in the joy of Thy beauty, give rest to those whom Thou hast chosen, for Thou lovest mankind... ~ St John Damascus

I don't know whether to cry or scream or do both. It feels like I've done more than enough of both. And it feels like I haven't done enough.

And at some point, I know I'm going to have to crawl out of this bed and pick up the pieces but right now, it can be just me. Just me, these four walls, and this bed.

The universe doesn't have to exist outside this bedroom, and that's perfectly okay. ~ Mason Deaver