Repressed Grief Quotes

My grandmother's unkindness, for instance, was the result of repressed grief over three deaths: her parents, before she was twelve, and her firstborn child. I don't recall ever seeing her smile. She was critical of everything and everyone. Table manners, posture, diction, wardrobe. My aunt, her mother's staunchest defender, often reminded us that my grandmother suffered from accumulated sorrow, bottled up since childhood and cloaked in intellect and intolerance as she grew older. She was never able to grieve fully or mourn the amassed losses, my aunt had said. If we repress our grief, over time, it's bound to harden the heart. ~ Nancy Cobb

Like Berlin, I was layered with guilt and destruction. I had caused grief as well as suffering it. I could never honestly point a finger without it turning around in mid-accusation. Olivia ~ Janet Fitch

With preference came point of view; with point of view, personality; with personality, uniqueness; with uniqueness, grief. ~ Jane Smiley

I feel very sorry for myself - that is what grief is. ~ William Boyd

Feeling must have rendered her numb. ~ Mary Lawson

There is too wide a gap, for most of us, between what we say and what we mean. Between our words and our thoughts. The first thing the Prophet Isaiah said when he saw the living and exalted God was, "Woe is me, I am ruined. For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips" (Isaiah 6:5). Isaiah was one of the most godly men who ever walked the earth. But seeing God, he sees also, abrupt and stark and grief-making, his own duplicity. Then God does what only God can do: he sears his lips clean (Isaiah 6:6-7). And herein lies our hope: truly seeing God, we truly see ourselves, in all our woe-begotten duplicity; but crying out to God, we are truly and greatly helped. ~ Mark Buchanan

It occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him
his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed. ~ Lauren Oliver

Give yourself mourning time and comprehend that expressing grief can modify your emotional and physical well being ~ Patricia Dsouza

It didn't help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn't see her. An unseen mother couldn't go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or help you with your homework, the familiar scent of her in your nostrils as she leaned in to correct a misspelling or puzzle over the meaning of an unfamiliar poem; or read with you on cold Sunday afternoons when the fire ~ David Nicholls

At certain moments of intense personal grief, capturing images was for me the only way to comprehend later what was happening. ~ Pedro Meyer

I wished for someone to hold me up. Suddenly someone was there. ~ Christie Watson

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

No point carrying useless ballast. It won't change a thing. ~ Joanne Harris

Grief grinds slowly; it devours all the time it needs. ~ Long Litt Woon

In the future, you'll live astride the line separating life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them. You'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgement falls away, and there remains the miracle of being. ~ Rana Dasgupta

For every tear you shed for someone else's grief, it takes one off of their suffering. ~ Katie Ashley

Excess of grief, like excess of joy is a violent thing which lasts but a short time. The heart of man cannot remain long in one extremity. ~ Victor Hugo

Even Tyler would be infected by this surprising outbreak of sadness, which he certainly would not have felt had he simply never happened to see Lily again. This taught him the vanity and egotism of grief, which so often compromises nothing except childish rebellion against the closing off of possibilities. ~ William T. Vollmann

Remember that a fresh breath of life follows every sigh of exasperation. Breathe in, breathe out, and ENJOY every moment. It is how everything begins and ends. - Charmainism ~ Charmaine Smith Ladd

Abruptly, they seemed alike to me and equally dear: my father, my son. I felt as though my father had been waiting for this moment to be born to me as the young man he'd been, so touchingly willing to bear witness to his conscience; and the surprise of this new sense of him, this birth, was a gift to me, a sudden balm in those days of my most intense grief. ~ Sue Miller

You can read all the books in the world on the Nazi concentration camps and the gas chambers, and yet reality will draw upon you only when you are put through that yourself. It is a law of God, or nature, if you prefer, that pain, suffering and grief cannot be transferred or known by proxy. Neither empathy nor sympathy but experience alone is a valid currency of affliction. It alone makes you a card-holding member all allows you to join the club of the wretched of the earth. All else is counterfeit. ~ Kiran Nagarkar

I knew that sunny citrus helped put things in focus, sharpened the memory, just like a squeeze of lemon juice could sharpen and clarify the taste of sweet fruit. I was also well aware that too much citrus could indicate a corrosive anger. My first wedding at Rainbow Cake had taught me that. But this was a gentle, subdued citrus, like the taste of a Meyer lemon.
Spice usually indicated grief, a loss that lingered for a long time, just like the pungent flavor of the spice itself, whether it was nutmeg or allspice or star anise. The more pronounced the flavor, the more recent the loss and the stronger the emotion. So there was some kind of loss or remembrance involved here. Yet there was also a comfort in the remembering, knowing that people had gone before you. That they waited for you on the other side. ~ Judith Fertig

Thus have the gods spun the thread for wretched mortals: that they live in grief while they themselves are without cares; for two jars stand on the floor of Zeus of the gifts which he gives, one of evils and another of blessings. ~ Homer

Photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself ... ~ Rebecca McNutt

Grief is like a physical pain which must be allowed to subside somewhat on its own before medical treatment is applied. ~ Plutarch

After grief for sin there should be joy for forgiveness. ~ Arthur W. Pink

In his youth, [he] had believed everything was possible. Then in grief, he believed everything was impossible. And now ... he felt that when you had lived enough of your life, there was no difference between the two. ~ Glen David Gold

We can endure much more than we think we can; all human experience testifies to that. All we need to do is learn not to be afraid of pain. Grit your teeth and let it hurt. Don't deny it, don't be overwhelmed by it. It will not last forever. One day, the pain will be gone and you will still be there. ~ Harold S. Kushner

Even the eternal skies weep, I thought; is there any shame then, that mortal man should spend himself in tears? ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

She closed her eyes, trying to remember the photos that had hung on the walls. She had passed these pictures every day, but now she only remembered them vaguely--her parents on their wedding day, her mother in a garden, her family at Knott's Berry Farm. How had she not memorized them? Or maybe she had once but she was beginning to forget. Did the house smell different because her mother's scent was gone? Or had she just forgotten how her mother smelled? ~ Brit Bennett

Get beyond love and grief: exist for the good of Man. ~ Miyamoto Musashi

Надобно смело признаться, Лира!
Мы тяготели к великим мира:
Мачтам, знаменам, церквам, царям,
Бардам, героям, орлам и старцам,
Так, присягнувши на верность - царствам,
Не доверяют Шатра - ветрам.

Знаешь царя - так псаря не жалуй!
Верность как якорем нас держала:
Верность величью - вине - беде,
Верность великой вине венчанной!
Так, присягнувши на верность - Хану,
Не присягают его орде.

Ветреный век мы застали, Лира!
Ветер в клоки изодрав мундиры,
Треплет последний лоскут Шатра…
Новые толпы - иные флаги!
Мы ж остаемся верны присяге,
Ибо дурные вожди - ветра.

14 августа 1918



Better, my Lyre, to confess it freely!
It was the great ever stirred our feelings:
masts, battle ensigns, churches, and kings,
bards, epic heroes, eagles, and elders.
Those that are pledged to the realm, like soldiers,
do not confide their Tent - to the winds.

You know the Tsar - do not toy with the hunter!
Loyalty has held us, firm as an anchor:
loyalty to greatness - to guilt - to grief,
to the great crowned guilt - loyalty unswerving!
Those that are pledged to the Khan will serve him
- their oath is not to the horde, but its chief.

We struck a fickle age, Lyre, that scatters
all to the winds! Uniforms ripped to tatters,
and the last shreds of the Tent worn thin...
New crowds ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

Grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it is that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds. Thou shakest us with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities. ~ Thomas De Quincey

Maybe the thing that we're losing is the very thing that has caused us to lose everything else in the first place. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I suffer from chronic nostalgia. Looking back makes me dizzy, queasy, and I yearn for it, ache for it. I want it back; maybe the homesickness will leave then.

But it's not the way I remember it. I long for a past that I didn't have, for the same experiences with different emotions, without the pain, without the ambivalence, without the fear. My heart remembers two different lives and I long for the one I can only see now, in retrospect. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

Cecilia never felt comfortable around Rachel. She felt trivial, because surely the whole world was trivial to a woman who had lost a child in such circumstances. She always wanted to somehow convey to Rachel that she knew she was trivial. Any time Cecilia imagined losing one of her daughters, a silent, primal scream would get trapped in her throat. If she couldn't stand imagining it, how could Rachel actually live it? "Time heals," Cecilia's mother-in-law intoned whenever the subject of Rachel's grief had come up, as if sharing a job with Rachel qualified her as an expert, and Cecilia had thought, I bet it doesn't. ~ Liane Moriarty

Oh I'll die I'll die I'll die
My skin is in blazing furore
I do not know what I'll do where I'll go oh I am sick
I'll kick all Arts in the butt and go away Shubha
Shubha let me go and live in your cloaked melon
In the unfastened shadow of dark destroyed saffron curtain
The last anchor is leaving me after I got the other anchors lifted
I can't resist anymore, a million glass panes are breaking in my cortex
I know, Shubha, spread out your matrix, give me peace
Each vein is carrying a stream of tears up to the heart
Brain's contagious flints are decomposing out of eternal sickness
other why didn't you give me birth in the form of a skeleton
I'd have gone two billion light years and kissed God's ass
But nothing pleases me nothing sounds well
I feel nauseated with more than a single kiss
I've forgotten women during copulation and returned to the Muse
In to the sun-coloured bladder
I do not know what these happenings are but they are occurring within me
I'll destroy and shatter everything
draw and elevate Shubha in to my hunger
Shubha will have to be given
Oh Malay
Kolkata seems to be a procession of wet and slippery organs today
But i do not know what I'll do now with my own self
My power of recollection is withering away
Let me ascend alone toward death
I haven't had to learn copulation and dying
I haven't had to learn the responsibility of sheddi ~ Malay Roychoudhury