Grief Timeline Quotes

For those struggling with grief, there's no timetable. It can last months, years, or longer. There is no rush. Give yourself permission to take however long it may be to fully heal from your loss. ~ Dana Arcuri

He'd forgotten, in those long years in Bedlam, through fear and grief and pain, what it was like to simply be with a pretty woman. To tease and flirt and yes, perhaps steal a kiss. He didn't know how she felt about that kiss - or if she'd let him kiss her again, but he was certainly going to try. He had lost time to make up - much of life itself to live. He'd spent four years in limbo, simply existing, while others found lovers and friends, even started families. He wanted to live again. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

I had always wanted to have children, so it caused me a lot of grief when I was younger, and I had supposed that gay people could not be parents. ~ Andrew Solomon

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

There was something faintly comic about it all, DeeDee found herself thinking as she scrambled around the floor, her grandmother screaming nearby. The next instant, she marveled at life's paradoxes, the way human nature perceives humor even at the height of disaster... Wally Jr. had a similar insight: he woke up the next morning surprised to find he had slept through the night. He was unfamiliar with the way a breathless, suspended state of shock precedes grief. ~ Jill Leovy

To learn by heart is to learn
By hurt - grief inscribing
Its wisdom in the soft tissue.

Song you sing, poem you are -
Finger moving, precise
As a phonograph needle,
Along the groove of scar. ~ Gregory Orr

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways. ~ Peter Temple

The best way to hide your inner grief is to look good, act good, and pretend pain doesn't exist. ~ K.F. Breene

Since he couldn't give in to what he really wanted from Kady Dresco, he picked on her and snarked at her and generally gave her grief. And she gave it right back. Sometimes he thought they were engaged in one long round of mental foreplay. ~ Laura Kaye

The moral of the story is that grief, to the person of feeling, is a permanent wound, not a transient state. ~ Micheal Korda

Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon/ Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage./ Far off from these a slow and silent stream,/ Lethe the River of Oblivion rolls/ Her wat'ry Labyrinth whereof who drinks,/ Forthwith his former state and being forgets,/ Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain. ~ John Milton

The thing about dead people ... The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is ... complicated, I guess. ~ John Green

Sadly, atheists are becoming everything they aren't supposed to be: obnoxious, oppressive, loud, pushy, smug, condescending and annoying. Since when did the definition of atheism become "an anti-religious person"? It's one thing to say "I don't believe in God because I see no proof in God. We'll just agree to disagree". It's another thing to make it your sworn duty to put down and berate religious people, to view them as primitive morons, to turn every conversation into a debate and to make it your mission to put forth this vision of a faith-free society fueled only by science and technology. This kind of oppression is against everything atheists stand for. Atheists believe in the freedom of choice, the choice to not be religious if one does not want to be. This does not mean being pushy or rude towards anybody else who has made their own choices to be religious. For some people, religion gives them a purpose, helps them cope with trauma and grief, gives them hope, gives them something to hold onto. So, as long as they aren't pushing their faith on others, why should atheists do the same thing to them? ~ Rebecca McNutt

Going through the grief period of my dad and losing him - that was the worst thing because you know when you get that call. When you are seven, eight years old, you have that almost vision in your mind of what that's going to be like and what your going to feel like and it doesn't prepare you. ~ Richie Sambora

As Gary understands it, the greatest portion of grief is the one you dish out for yourself, and he and Sally have both served themselves from the same table tonight, the only difference being that he knows what he's missing, and she has no idea what is causing her to cry as she drives down the Turnpike. ~ Alice Hoffman

The main of life is composed of small incidents and petty occurrences; of wishes for objects not remote, and grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence ... ~ Samuel Johnson

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themsel ~ Aaron Freeman

Grief is an impossible meal, so we cut it up into little pieces, dress it in ritual, and take it like a pill. ~ S.J. Sindu

Grief is like cancer. It ebbs and flows within you. Then, it changes and transforms you. Forever. Grief. Cancer. Both force you to face your worst fear - death. Grief and cancer. Both undermine your optimism of life. You finally see the cup is really just half full, even if you believed otherwise your whole life. Both teach you to believe that bad things can happen to people, whether they're good or bad or rich or poor or young or old, alike. Grief and cancer corner the market for all. Grief and cancer take all comers. Both rule. Do they always win? I begin to wonder. ~ Katherine Owen

Grief is love not wanting to let go. ~ Earl A Grollman

Each of us will have our own Fridays - those days when the universe itself seems shattered and the shards of our world lie littered about us in pieces. We all will experience those broken times when it seems we can never be put together again. We will all have our Fridays. But I testify to you in the name of the One who conquered death - Sunday will come. In the darkness of our sorrow, Sunday will come. No matter our desperation, no matter our grief, Sunday will come. In this life or the next, Sunday will come. ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

Darling, no one would ever dream of performing an operation on a child without testing it first. And no one in a thousand years would take a child's daemon away altogether! All that happens is a little cut, and then everything's peaceful. Forever! You see, your daemon's a wonderful friend and com panion when you're young, but at the age we call puberty, the age you're coming to very soon, darling, daemons bring all sort of troublesome thoughts and feelings, and that's what lets Dust in. A quick little operation before that, and you're never troubled again. And your daemon stays with you, only...just not connected. Like a... like a wonderful pet, if you like. The best pet in the world!
Wouldn't you like that? (Marisa Coulter) ~ Philip Pullman

For many emotionally wounded addicts, the idea of grieving is a daunting prospect. To regularly grieve does require courage and a desire to heal - but rest assured; the resulting gains from these efforts are profound. ~ Christopher Dines

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

The highest stage of Man's ethical progress is reached when he becomes absolutely free from fear and grief. ~ Muhammad Iqbal

If you think poor people are entitled, try denying a rich person with an attitude some service they think they've earned. It's like grief - there are phases. Anger and denial are first. Then comes "do you understand how fucked you are if I don't get the thing I want?" Followed by "I demand to see your manager" and "I've never been treated so poorly in my life." The final stage is bargaining, where they try to give you extra money because all of life is like valet service to them, and an extra five bucks can change the world. If ~ Linda Tirado

The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon. ~ Jenny Offill

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

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

Suffering ignites the spark of contact with the sublime and offers proof of humanity ... ~ Lydia Millet

Our lives are before us, not behind."
"That depends on where you're standing on the timeline. ~ Heidi Heilig

To lose someone you love is the very worst thing in the world. It creates an invisible hole that you feel you are falling down and will never end. People you love make the world real and solid and when they suddenly go away forever, nothing feels solid any more. ~ Matt Haig

Grief leads you to believe that life will never be ordinary again, and it never really will be for it is made extraordinary as it is touched and transformed by our greatest loves and deepest losses. ~ Kate McGahan

When you try to take someone's pain away from them, you don't make it better. You just tell them it's not OK to talk about their pain. ~ Megan Devine

But to grieve means you have loved. To love opens up the possibility for grief. There cannot be one without the other. ~ Rin Chupeco

I learned something about grief. I had heard people say that when someone dies, it leaves a hole in the world. But it doesn't, I realized. Arturo was still everywhere. Something would happen and I would think, Wait until I tell Arturo. I kept turning around, expecting to see him. If he had disappeared completely, I thought, it might be easier. If I had no knowledge that he had ever existed, no evidence that he was ever part of our lives, it might have been bearable. And how wrong that sounded: part of our lives. As if he was something with boundaries, something that hadn't permeated us, flowed through us and in us and all around us. I learned something about grief. When someone dies, it doesn't leave a hole and that's the agony. ~ Cristina Henriquez

Tiffany found her mind filling up with an invisible gray mist, and in that thought there was nothing but grief. She could feel herself trying to push back time, but even the best witchcraft could not do that. ~ Terry Pratchett

At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain; the language of our sense and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain. ~ Dante Alighieri

Great joys, like griefs, are silent. ~ Shackerley Marmion

And yet I didn't think pain like that ever faded entirely. Grief had its own life, took its own sustenance. ~ Leigh Bardugo

And Complicated Grief is a text that announces, from the start, in its citation of influence, dense intertextuality and hybridity, a failure of some apparent or usual protections, and a need to re-examine "identity" in the light of an acknowledgement of our entanglements and interdependence. ~ Laura Mullen

It turns out that it's possible, if you are careful, to feel all the feelings that come with having and caring for a black hole, but to still not be consumed by it. I was, I realized, no longer afraid-- not of this darkness, or any other. ~ Michelle Cuevas