Grief Observed Quotes

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

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

Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. ~ C.S. Lewis

Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac? ~ C.S. Lewis

I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache an about lying awake.' That's true to life. 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

I gave in, and admitted that God was God. ~ C.S. Lewis

Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness. ~ C.S. Lewis

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. ~ C.S. Lewis

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 will always wear this scar. It's called love. ~ Wylie R. Weeks

She is not with me,this grief is not bigger then this happiness that she is with her choice ~ Mohammed Zaki Ansari

Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.

It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor--from breast to knees--
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

If only he loved himself as much as he loved the rest of the world. ~ Irvine Welsh

Theory of mind postulates that, even though these cannot be directly observed, we readily impute mental states to others (and also to ourselves, since the bedrock proposal is that we understand our own mental states well enough to generalize from them). And so we constantly infer someone else's intentions, thoughts, knowledge, lack of knowledge, doubts, desires, beliefs, guesses, promises, preferences, purposes, and many, many more things in order to behave as social creatures in the world. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

Should I rejoice in the inferiority of my fate?" - John Lockwood ~ Noorilhuda

So this is the "smug idiot thinks he's funny" face, Kami observed. Not to be confused with other "smug idiot" variants. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

I remember watching rioters in Panama, for example, smashing shop windows, allegedly in the name of freedom and democracy, but laughing as they did so, searching for new fields of glass to conquer. Many of the rioters were obviously bourgeois, the scions of privileged families, as have been the leaders of so many destructive movements in modern history. That same evening, I dined in an expensive restaurant and saw there a fellow diner whom I had observed a few hours before joyfully heaving a brick through a window. How much destruction did he think his country could bear before his own life might be affected, his own existence compromised? ~ Theodore Dalrymple

She knew what such grief was like and she had built her own defenses high over the years. But if you raised them too much, they became a prison and in the end you drowned with no one to hear you scream. ~ Elizabeth Chadwick

It also explains why the gospel of the kingdom has such transforming power in human life. For that gospel opens the kingdom to everyone, no matter their classification, and it enables us really to become a different kind of person, beyond all condemnation, blame, and shame, and to know it. Those who mourn, when they step into the kingdom of the heavens, are "given beauty in place of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of grief, and garments of praise in place of a spirit of despair" (Isa. 61:3). ~ Dallas Willard

A city lay out there, that I had barely observed or cared about. I wanted it - life, people. I wanted to see it, feel its rush through my blood. No boundaries, no limits to what I might encounter or do. ~ Sarah J. Maas

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man. ~ John Quincy Adams

Hired mourners at a funeral say and do - A little more than they whose grief is true ~ Horace

Which is why Slothrop now observes his coalition with hopes for success and hopes for disaster about equally high (and no, that doesn't cancel out to apathy - it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as knives). It does annoy him that he can be so divided, so perfectly unable to come down on one side or another. Those whom the old Puritan sermons denounced as "the glozing neuters of the world" have no easy road to haul down, Wear-the-Pantsers, just cause you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there! Energy inside is just as real, just as binding and inescapable, as energy that shows. When's the last time you felt intensely lukewarm? eh? Glozing neuters are just as human as heroes and villains. In many ways they have the most grief to put up with, don't they? ~ Thomas Pynchon

Needed mothering. Grief and distance bound the wound, perfecting the bond ~ M.L. Stedman

But grief, he'd discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then 'moved on' (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves - waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living. ~ John Verdon

apophthegmata) on a variety of topics.72 It's easy to tell the difference between a proper joke and a vulgar one. The first is appropriate for the most serious kind of person in a light mood on the right occasion. The other, if it involves a disgraceful subject or obscene language, doesn't suit even an easy-going fellow. There are limits to be observed in play and recreation as well. We don't want to abandon all precaution and, carried away by our sense of enjoyment, end up disgracing ourselves. Examples of appropriate kinds of recreation include exercising on the Campus Martius,73 also hunting. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Queen of my tub, I merrily sing,
While the white foam rises high,
And sturdily wash, and rinse, and wring,
And fasten the clothes to dry;
Then out in the free fresh air they swing,
Under the sunny sky.

I wish we could wash from our hearts and our souls
The stains of the week away,
And let water and air by their magic make
Ourselves as pure as they;
Then on the earth there would be indeed
A glorious washing-day!

Along the path of a useful life
Will heart's-ease ever bloom;
The busy mind has no time to think
Of sorrow, or care, or gloom;
And anxious thoughts may be swept away
As we busily wield a broom.

I am glad a task to me is given
To labor at day by day;
For it brings me health, and strength, and hope,
And I cheerfully learn to say-
"Head, you may think; Heart, you may feel;
But Hand, you shall work always! ~ Louisa May Alcott

As Dwight Eisenhower observed, Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. ~ Gretchen Rubin

He had ... regarded travel as a hygienic necessity, which had to be observed against will and inclination. ~ Thomas Mann

She wasn't too big, heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any one human female package to contain, and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I don't know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instance with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew there would never be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do. ~ William Faulkner

John Finnis observed that, since there is no doctrine of subjective rights in Aquinas and there is such a doctrine in Suarez, a "watershed" must be situated somewhere between the thirteenth century and the seventeenth. But this view rests on the fallacy, widespread among modern jurists and philosophers who are not medieval specialists, that if an idea is not to be found in Aquinas it is not really a medieval idea at all. ~ Brian Tierney

If a man can devote himself undisturbed to the work which is on his mind, he can, as far I have observed, completely ignore his surroundings--they disappear for him; he can sit in filth and disorder, draught and cold, and be completely happy. For most women it is insufferable to sit in a room if the color scheme displeases them. ~ Isak Dinesen

One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed God knows which was right. ~ Carl Sandburg

In 1856 the Know-Nothings even ran a former president, Millard Fillmore, as their presidential candidate. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid", observed Abraham Lincoln. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal'. We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes'. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics'". ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species. ~ Jose Saramago

I didn't think it was possible - but this situation has managed to get worse." "But you're so calm," she observed.
"That's usually when you can tell everything has gone to shit. ~ G.A. Aiken

Sadly, some Christians think that they should not grieve. "My loved one is in a better place, so why should I grieve?" Yes, your loved one may well be in a better place, but you have lost an important part of your life, and that causes mourning and grief. We miss that person and the love we shared. Being a Christian does not remove your human feelings from you. You will grieve that loss, just like every other human being. So ~ James R. White

I cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing! ~ John Gardner