Grieving Loss Quotes

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

Sometimes we grieve the living more than the dead. ~ Lawren Leo

Feel sorry for yourself.
Sure, your tiny steel-ribbed mother told you never to do that,
But who the hell is going to do it for you?
"Piangi, piangi," the old man in the opera tells Violetta.
"Cry, honey, cry." Do it right.
Do it yourself. ~ Lise Menn

Permission is the key that unlocks the door that's been holding us trapped, muzzled, and stifled in our grief. Permission is the opposite of rejection. Permission is the opposite of abandonment. Permission lifts the weight, eases the pressure, and loosens the reins. ~ Shelby Forsythia

I became very good at protecting all who would ask.
How are you?
I'm all right. I'm fine. I'm hanging in there. I'm feeling OK. Thanks for asking. I'm good. I'm doing well. I'm a little tired. I'm handling things. I'm fine, thanks to all of you. I'm getting better. I'm keeping busy. I'm making progress. Fine, better, well, good and thank you for asking. ~ Christine Silverstein

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

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild. ~ C.S. Lewis

She did not belong to the healthy group of widows and widowers who, after mourning, would nurture the seed of their grief into growing from loss - perhaps continuing the dreams of the lost, or learning to cherish alone the things they'd cherished together.

She belonged instead to the sad lot who clung to grief, who nurtured it by never moving beyond it. They'd shelter it deep inside where the years padded it in saudade layers like some malignant pearl. ~ Darrell Drake

Death will paint everything a different shade of remorse.

You'll feel guilty that you're still breathing.
But you can't stop.
You'll feel guilty for wanting to laugh again.
And it will be awful the first time that you do.
You'll feel guilty for just about everything at first.
And someday, at some point, you'll start to feel guilty . . .
for forgetting to feel guilty.

But of all Heaven's lessons, guilt isn't one of them. You don't need to hold on to it. It doesn't need to be a practice and it shouldn't be your life.

Heaven would never approve of your guilt.
Because Heaven has no regrets. ~ Tessa Shaffer

A word of consolation
may sweetly touch the ear.
Now and then a quiet song
will clear the mind of fear.
A simple act of kindness
can ease a load of care.
Stories told in memory
diminish all despair.
A whispered prayer of comfort
draws angel arms around.
Counting blessings, great and small,
helps gratitude abound.
These acts, all sympathetic,
will kindly play their part.
But seldom do they dry the tears
shed mutely in the heart. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Do you think that God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn't God understand that I just want to be with him? ~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Memories saturate my heart and
 the story of you spills from my eyes.

         ­­ - Grace Andren ~ Grace Andren

Wandering is better than place sometimes, than home, than destination. Sometimes she can eke out the idea that wandering is possibility, chance, serendipity
he might be there, that place she didn't think to look, hadn't worked hard enough to find ... ~ Michelle Latiolais

Grief could take the form of violence too, could give a false sense of permission, erase the world around, and that was what frightened Clare most about violence, how transferable it was. ~ Laura Van Den Berg

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you. ~ Kellie Elmore

When you become more spiritual, you can easily adjust to the loss of anyone significant in your life. ~ Linda Alfiori

Well," she said. "I was happy for fiffty-five years. That's more than
most people get. Now there's the clan to look after, like Raphael would've
wanted. The night we knew he was gone, and every night since, I watch
my vampires in the home he guarded. I watch the mundanes in the
streets he loved. Every one of them looks like a child I should help, a
possibility for a future I wasn't able to imagine. Every one of them seems
precious, worth defending, worth the world. Every one of them is
Raphael. ~ Cassandra Clare

My point here is that the grieving are very dangerous, Richard said. They are like injured animals with fearsome claws, bloodied and pushed into a corner.

Okay, said Clare.

They are deranged, he continued. They shouldn't be let out of the house. Immediately after the funeral some sort of waiting period should be instituted, a period of confinement. It is a matter of public safety. ~ Laura Van Den Berg

I think about the people I know with the absolutely largest hearts, people with a stunning capacity for endurance and grace and kindness against the most screaming terrors and pains. My Mom and Dad, for example, enduring the death of their first child at six months old, the boy the brother I never met, dying quietly in his stroller on the porch in the moment that my mother stepped back inside to get a pair of gloves because the crisp brilliant April wind was filled with a whistling cutting wind....

Fifty years later after five more children and two miscarriages she is standing in the kitchen with her usual eternal endless cup of tea and I ask her: How do you get over the death of your child?

And she says, in her blunt honest direct terse kind way,
You don't.
Her face harrowed like a hawk for a moment in the swirling steam of the tea.
p112-13 ~ Brian Doyle

He wasn't crying for the woman who had died. He was crying for the woman she had been. ~ Sharon Sala

It was brutal, the mortality contract. It came for everyone and no one was prepared. ~ Laura Van Den Berg

Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free. So often sleep brought dreams of him. ~ Bernard Taylor

After a major change in your life, either you get stuck in painful emotions or you take charge of your life and process your feelings to become emotionally stronger and resilient, the choice is yours. ~ Linda Alfiori

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 "Cutie" Cooper

I burned sixty calories. That should take care of a peanut I had in 1962. ~ Rita Rudner

Let what you give come through you rather than from you. There is no lack this way. Be truly unconditional in what you give so that there can be no fear or loss ... If you experience conflict, lack, or struggle today, let go of expectations, demands, and aiming to get something. Give yourself unconditionally . The Unconditioned Self is never diminished, and you cannot lose. ~ Robert Holden

There's 6.5 billion people curled up like fists protesting death, but every breath we take has to be given back; a nine year old boy taught me that. ~ Shane Koyczan

depression lowers attention span, tolerance for frustration, and memory. Behavior is affected by lowered motivation, loss of ability to experience pleasure, and fatigue. The body is affected by headaches, stomachaches, and muscle tension. Relationships are affected by a tendency to withdraw and become isolated with loneliness. ~ Archibald D. Hart

I would certainly say that films like Time Code and the Loss of Sexual Innocence were far more rewarding to me in terms of being able to move forward as a filmmaker. ~ Mike Figgis

Don't cry over what you lost; rejoice over what you'll gain. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

You want to know the story? I'd be happy to tell you. I think I have just enough caloric energy stored up to make it through the telling of the tale. It's short. I am monstrously fat. I am a glutton. My wife was disgusted and repulsed. She gave me six months to lose one hundred pounds. I joined Weight Watchers . . . see it there, right across the street, that gaunt storefront? This afternoon was the big six-month weigh-in. So to speak. I had gained almost seventy pounds in the six months. An errant Snickers bar fell out of the cuff of my pants and rolled against my wife's foot as I stepped on the scale. The scale over there across the street is truly an ingenious device. One preprograms the desired new weight into it, and if one has achieved or gone below that new low weight, the scale bursts into recorded whistles and cheers and some lively marching-band tune. Apparently, tiny flags protrude from the top and wave mechanically back and forth. A failure--see for instance mine--results in a flatulent dirge of disappointed and contemptuous tuba. To the strains of the latter my wife left, the establishment, me, on the arm of a svelte yogurt distributor whom I am even now planning to crush, financially speaking, first thing tomorrow morning. Ms. Beadsman, you will find an eclair on the floor to the left of your chair. Could you perhaps manipulate it onto this plate with minimal chocolate loss and pass it to me. ~ David Foster Wallace

Between 10 and 20 years to complete the course, from the first small alterations of character, tremors in the hands and face, emotional disturbance, including – most notably – sudden, uncontrollable alterations of mood, the helpless jerky dance-like movements, intellectual dilapidation, memory failure, agnosia, apraxia, dementia, total loss of muscular control rigidity sometimes, nightmarish hallucinations and a meaningless end. This is how the brilliant machinery of being is undone by the tiniest of faulty cogs, the insidious whisper of ruin, a single bad idea lodged in every cell, on every chromosome four. ~ Ian McEwan

As she grew older, she was aware of her changing position on mortality. In her youth, the topic of death was philosophical; in her thirties it was unbearable and in her forties unavoidable. In her fifties, she had dealt with it in more rational terms, arranging her last testament, itemizing assets and heirlooms, spelling out the organ donation, detailing the exact words for her living will. Now, in her sixties, she was back to being philosophical. Death was not a loss of life, but the culmination of a series of releases. It was devolving into less and less. You had to release yourself from vanity, desire, ambition, suffering, and frustration - all the accoutrements of the I, the ego. And if you die, you would disappear, leave no trace, evaporate into nothingness ... ~ Amy Tan

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

He was out to get back everything he'd lost; there was no end to his loss; this thing would drag on forever. ~ Jack Kerouac

The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia. ~ Walker Percy

The loss of connection between churches and neighborhoods creates a corresponding loss of localized imagination and creates an addictive-like dependence on acontextual experts who scan the physical and spiritual horizon for 'success. ~ Tim Keel

If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss. ~ Cassandra Clare

How do I describe him now? Where do I start? How do I distill the first impression created in those few distance seconds? How do I extract his finished portrait, composed of layer upon layer of color, back into the pale, hasty pencil sketch that my eyes drew the first time they landed on him? How can I use a mere few lines to paint the whole picture with all its breadth and depth? Is it even possible to attain that sort of scrutiny, that measure of lucidity, when the hands of loss keep touching the memory, staining it with their fingerprints? ~ Dorit Rabinyan

By experiencing your emotions somatically, there is no boogie man to scare you. ~ Gary Zukav

Beauty is a willing loss of mental control, surrendered to organic process that is momentarily under the direction of an exterior object. The object is not thought and felt about, exactly. It seems to use my capacities to think and feel itself. ~ Peter Schjeldahl

There is no right or wrong way to grief. There is only one way - your way! ~ Mark Alexander

unscathed. As a victim, you might be taken to the point of not wanting to live anymore due to the loss of the soul mate illusion. Just know this, if you were to die, the Narcissist may have a slight feeling sorrow for a brief moment (although highly doubtful), but the Narcissist simply ~ Steve Craig

I think people can get a little weirded out by pain, suffering, and death. They don't know what to do so they end up saying things that are hurtful to people who have experienced loss. ~ Matt Chandler

The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary. ~ Chris Hedges

The light bearers know deep pains,
Their gift is transcending a loss to a gain. ~ Nikki Rowe

Love built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever. ~ Louise Doughty

Eating crappy food isn't a reward -- it's a punishment. ~ Drew Carey

Loss of someone we love cannot be adequately expressed with words. Grappling with loss, struggling with disconnection and despair, fills us with a sense of anguish and actual pain. Indeed, the parts of our brain that process physical pain overlap with the neural centers that record social ruptures and rejection. Loss rips us apart. ~ Daniel J. Siegel

It was really tough as a kid going to a Braves game. It was a guaranteed loss. You're looking at 100 losses a year. I was a huge baseball fan, played it for quite a while. But when '91 happened, with Smoltz and Glavine, it turned around, and I will say it made it pretty sweet. ~ Brian Baumgartner

I think it's doubly important, now that we see so many people failing. When the norm is an anti-hero, there's a serious loss when you cannot portray a decent person on screen without it becoming slightly sentimental or feeling like it's unrealistic. ~ Brendan Gleeson

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good society' which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.' ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Hello, Ethan." "What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?" He seemed at a loss, for Macon, which just meant he didn't have an immediate and charming explanation on the tip of his tongue. "It's complicated." "Well, uncomplicate it. Because you climbed in my window in the middle of the night, so either you're some kind of vampire or some kind of perv, or both. Which is it? ~ Kami Garcia

When a family is broken by death, there is no clear way forward out of despair. It is easy to mistake grief for proof of love, and so refuse to relinquish it. For the first year or longer, there is a constant, grinding question that hands over you: Stay or go? You fixate on the fantasy of willing time to roll backward. You find the precise moment before they were taken, and plant your flag there. Death becomes the territory where our love lives, a dangerous place for the living to stay for very long. ~ Galadrielle Allman

There comes a time when a man must rise above shock, the loss of lung, and grape-tossing women to come up with a life-saving plan. Now is that time. ~ Jes Drew

I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the "Lady Vain." ~ H.G.Wells

There is no life without regrets. Every important choice has its benefits and its deficits, whether or not people admit it or even recognize the fact: no mother has the radical, lifelong freedom that is essential for my happiness. I will never know the intimacy with, or have the impact on, a child that a mother has. Losses, including the loss of future possibilities, are inevitable in life; nobody has it all. ~ Jeanne Safer

I was beginning to taste it. Something bitter, but warm.
A flavor that woke me up and let me see things clearly. A flavor that made me feel safe, so I could let those things go. A flavor that held my hand and walked me across to the other side of loss, and assured me that one day, I would be just fine. A flavor for a change of heart- part grief, part hope.
Suddenly, I knew what that flavor would be. I padded down to the kitchen and cut a slice of sour cream coffee cake with a spicy underground river coursing through its center, left over from an order that had not been picked up today.
One bite and I was sure. A familiar flavor that now seemed utterly fresh and custom-made for me.
Cinnamon.
The comfort of sweet cinnamon. It always worked. I felt better. Lighter. Not quite "everything is going to be all right," but getting there. One step at a time. ~ Judith Fertig

In this time of globalization, with all its advantages, the poor are the most vulnerable to having their traditions, relationships and knowledge and skills ignored and denigrated, and experiencing development with a great sense of trauma, loss and social disconnectedness. ~ James Wolfensohn

When it was proposed to me to go abroad, rub oft some rust, and better my condition in a worldly sense, I fear lest my life will lose some of its homeliness. If these fields and streams and woods, the phenomena of nature here, and the simple occupations of the inhabitants should cease to interest and inspire me, no culture or wealth would atone for the loss. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The demons were scary, but girls - Well, girls are really terrifying ~ Darren Shan

At a time in history when scientists are recording unprecedented extinction rates and many people feel that the loss of biological diversity and deteriorating natural systems is the defining issue of our time, the west Amazon is ground zero. Nowhere are the stakes higher. ~ Paul Rosolie

One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say. ~ C.S. Lewis

Mr. Oamaru has taught me that loss isn't just limited to the present; it can happen in any direction. Even what's done and vanished can be taken from you. Other, earlier memories that we made of my father sink and revert to water ~ Karen Russell

Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun. ~ Hilaire Belloc

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears ... as easily as we open and shut our eyes. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

On her new LP, Shatter, Jude Johnstone examines heartbreak and loss with such tender resignation that I wept in acknowledgement of its artful simplicity. A lesson in melodic grace delivered by as fine a singer-songwriter as any I know. ~ Rodney Crowell

Losers must have leave to speak. ~ Colley Cibber

It is not the loss that makes you a loser, but it is how you respond to it. ~ Debasish Mridha

On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside of existing society. On one hand we have the day-to-day struggle; on the other, the socialist revolution ... It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers ... One is the loss of its mass character, the other the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other, the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform. ~ Rosa Luxemburg

Please remind them that none of us have all the time we think we have in this troubled but still beautiful world. ~ Edwidge Danticat

Or the quaking misgivings that infected every step forward, after a loss. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Let the dry eyes perceive
Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses
By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve. ~ Dylan Thomas