Time Grief Quotes

Grief was beginning to be overlaid by the first layer of skin and time. Jordan supposed that layer would get thicker and thicker and in a way she was sorry. Grief cut, but it also made you remember. (78%) ~ Kate Quinn

Life has a way of filling up one's time with many different things to do. So much so that you turn a blind eye to the things that really matter. ~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Grief is like any other kind of pain. No matter how intense or how constant it is, time takes the edge from it. It may not fade, but it loses its sharpness. It becomes the new normal, and eventually steps aside and makes room in the mind for other things. ~ Joseph R. Lallo

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

But time soon passes. Even the deepest pain eventually loses its edge in the more vivid reality of the present; then, what once was unbearable becomes strangely familiar. And after much familiarity, it assumes the insignificance of just another milestone, ever marking the journey to higher ground. ~ N. Maria Kwami

The house is eerily quiet. All this time I thought silence would be a welcome reprieve, but it's less comforting than I imagined. The house feels so much bigger and colder than it ever has. ~ Hannah Harrington

There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness, of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails. ~ Olivia Laing

I do kabbalistic meditation. It's not unlike time travel; it can change the past and not just the future. You can look at what was lost and go beyond the grief of what was lost. ~ Roseanne Barr

Time heals many wounds but this loss becomes the defining sadness of your life. ~ Claire Cook

Let the sky celebrate!
Let it pour some rain
to wash away the past years' grief.

Let the fireworks speak
announcing a New Year to break,
displaying seasons of different flavours.

Oh New Year, can you restore our hopes and spill our fears?

I wonder.. What will you bring?
Happiness, confusion, or sadness?
Let the other years witness..
your joy, your pity, your cruelty, and your niceness.

So New Year, I have too many hopes in you.
My wishes are infinite, what are you going to do?
Don't disappoint me, I suppose you already know.
The hope fountain knows no chains,
Don't tell me it's all in vain..
Tell me how I can refrain myself from dreaming in my dale.
If only there was a chance or even an opportunity in disguise,
I wouldn't cease proving and proving my worth all the time,
I would use my ship to sail,
And you will witness my success..
This is what I promise,
And here comes the test..
Let me declare it in that feast..

So New Year, I have too many hopes in you.. ~ Noha Alaa El-Din

I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

I feel time beginning to slow, until the last of him is grey powder on the sea and time stops altogether. ~ Sophie Hardcastle

Sometimes my grief feels as though I've been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I'm colliding into a wall that won't give. There's no escape, just a hard wall that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again. ~ Michelle Zauner

Whatever you believe, and however, each of us deals with these events in our lives, one thing is for certain the truism, time is a great healer, is of no consolation at that moment of intense, all-consuming grief.

From GLASS HALF FULL ~ Sarah Jane Butfield

Time sped. And the poet through sorrow Became like his suffering kind. Again he toiled over his poems To lighten the grief of his mind ... ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Youth holds no society with grief. ~ Euripides

…in the twentieth century
grief lasts at most a year.'

I have used this quote from the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet as a prelude to a small tale before I go on to the War in iraq. The reason I chose to use this quote is because I wonder how long grief lasts in the twenty-first century. Is it now a month? Two weeks? Or just enough time for the television cameras to record it and then it's over? I don't know. ~ Saeed Akhtar Mirza

Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth. ~ Brent Green

Harry's extremities seemed to have gone numb. He stood quite still, holding the miraculous paper in his nerveless fingers while inside him a kind of quiet eruption sent joy and grief thundering in equal measure through his veins. Lurching to the bed, he sat down.

He read the letter again, but could not take in any more meaning than he had done the first time, and was reduced to staring at the handwriting itself. She had made her "g's" the same way he did: he searched the letter for every one of them, and each felt like a friendly little wave glimpsed from behind a veil. The letter was an incredible treasure, proof that Lily Potter had lived, really lived, that her warm hand had once moved across this parchment, tracing into these letters, words about him, Harry, her son. ~ J.K. Rowling

Her mother had come a week after the baby died, the only time Annie had seen her since she'd left Kansas. Her hair gone white, her dress starched stiff, her small hands as dry as paper. Annie had wanted her mother to make it better. What she got was "God decides what's right for us" and a butter cake she'd packed from home, made by someone in the congregation. Maybe something truthful, some real emotion from her mother, might have been a small bridge Annie could have crossed. But hers had been a family of hidden feelings, held tongues. "Life is so hard out here," her mother had said, unable to wipe the sigh from her voice, the disapproval, as if the Panhandle - Annie's choice - was somehow to blame for the baby's death. Annie had been too grief-tired to get angry, but she had had the thought, when she looked at her mother's stolid face, that she would probably never see her ~ Rae Meadows

With his iPod all the way up, nothing in this
world can touch him. Just over his pulse
is a fresh tattoo- a dotted line and the words
Cut Here
Grief is a street he skates down. "Hey,
donkey's ass!" He bides his time, sanding
away his fingerprints, wondering how he
could get his assailants in one room. ~ Ron Koertge

In Louisiana, one of the first stages of grief is eating your weight in Popeyes fried chicken. The second stage is doing the same with boudin. People have been known to swap the order. Or to do both at the same time. ~ Ken Wheaton

The creation itself is full of griefs. How can one understand joy if there is no sorrow? And how can everyone be happy at the same time? ~ Sarada Devi

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

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us: they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys, as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth––: could we exist without them? Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus, the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness; and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god had suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Would it help," he asked gently, "to have a shoulder to cry on?"
She fought to conceal how much the question unnerved her. "Thank you, but no." Carefully she dropped the herbs into the kettle. "Crying is a waste of time."
"' To weep is to make less the depth of grief.'"
"Is that a Romany saying?"
"Shakespeare. ~ Lisa Kleypas

I started crying. "When will it stop hurting?"
"I don't know. I wish I could tell you. I wish I could take the pain away. But it will get better and easier for you over time. ~ Olga Trujillo

She could see that to lose a sibling was hard: it could only seem unnatural:out of time, out of order, a vicious re-run of your own departure into nothingness. ~ Fay Weldon

Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours if it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static pain often is ... is it not yet enough? ~ C.S. Lewis

It's all rehearsed, in a weird way. People spend so much time dramatizing trivial bullshit that when an actual tragedy happens, I wonder how anyone could possibly act out their grief in a natural way. The tragedies we steel ourselves for never come for years and years, and our negative fantasies wear us down inch by inch, so that when the blow actually comes, there's little of us left to care. ~ Halle Butler

Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here's what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it's still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it's been too long since you missed them last. ~ Kristin O'Donnell Tubb

If people took some simple pleasure in reality (which is entirely independent of time), they would never have needed to come up with the idea that they could ever again lose anything with which they had truly bonded. No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between human beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

For the first time in the interminable twenty-seven years that he had been waiting, Florentino Ariza could not endure the pangs of grief at the thought that this admirable man would have to die in order for him to be happy. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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

Will you not weep?"
"I do not have the time for tears. ~ George R.R. Martin

That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died, I know that, and you've been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we've explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we're having now that a few months have gone by--- but now it's time for you to come back. You have been away long enough. ~ Lydia Davis

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it ... I would discover that it hadn't washed me away. ~ Anne Lamott

Yes, an awful lot of sorrow has sort of quietened down up here. People just wild with grief have brought their relatives up to this hill. We all know how it is... and then time... and sunny days... and rainy days... n' snow... We're all glad they're in a beautiful place and we're coming up here ourselves when our fit's over. Now there are some things we all know but we don't takem' out and look at'm very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and ain't even the stars... everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. ~ Thornton Wilder

As I lay in my bed unable to sleep I challenged Him: Pull out another miracle. Send him back. You can do that. You're God. At that point in my grief, I envisioned how utterly fantastic it would be for others to see what a mighty and awesome God we serve. They could witness a modern-day miracle! I was convinced the only way for this to happen was for God to send Joseph back. It would be a win/win situation! Dozens would come to know Jesus - and - I'd have Joseph home in time for supper. ~ Shelley Ramsey

It's easy to hate women and hate women's bodies when we don't do very much to fight back. We have to step into the skin we're in. Your body isn't perfect? Well, neither is mine. Neither is anyone's. It's time to redefine "perfect" or drop the expectation. It's time to feed ourselves with compassion instead of grief. Compassion instead of starvation. Compassion instead of food. ~ Wendy Shanker

I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it. ~ Rachel Joyce

In the months that followed my mother's death, I managed to look like a normal person. I walked the street; I answered my phone; I brushed my teeth; most of the time. But I was not OK. I was in grief. Nothing seemed important. Daily tasks were exhausting. Dishes piled in the sink, knives crusted with strawberry jam. At one point I did not wash my hair for ten days. I felt that I had abruptly arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of everyday. ~ Meghan O'Rourke

When we put his kippah into the museum, everyone was talking about how much money it was worth and the embroidery by some famous artist and how it was a national relic, and all this -- but I was just thinking of Shabbat, and seders, and -- and it didn't mean any of those things to me. It meant lighting candles. It meant he'd hid the afikomen in the palace for me and joking with his advisors as he waited around for me to find it so he could give me a new book. National treasure? I--' She blinked away new tears, but this time the look on her face was one of indignation. ~ Shira Glassman

The difference between me and Mr. and Mrs. Feltner, as I had to see and feel even in my own grief, was that they were old and I was young. I was filled with life, with my life and Virgil's life, with the life of our baby, and with other lives that might, in time, come to me. But the Feltners had begun to be old. Life had quit coming to them, and was going away. ~ Wendell Berry

Death had two meanings - the loss of resources to society and the personal grief of the few who cared. Fersonne's value was less than that of one cargo, and this time, I was one of the few who cared, and I wanted there to be some meaning ~ L.E. Modesitt Jr.

I was walking along one day and smacked into this wall called hope deferred and depression and...grief.
And it wouldn't budge.
After some time, I realized this darkness I'd found myself in was called grief.
I'd been through so much trauma, everything about me- including my body, emotions and soul, was shutting down and going into preservation mode.
I entered a season where the battle caught up with me and I realized just how badly I'd been beaten and torn up, inside and out. ~ Ashley Nikole

For winter's rains and ruins are over, And all the season of snows and sins; The days dividing lover and lover, The light that loses, the night that wins; And time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and cover Blossom by blossom the spring begins. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Emulation is grief arising from seeing one's self, exceeded or excelled by his concurrent, together with hope to equal or exceed him in time to come, by his own ability. But envy is the same grief joined with pleasure conceived in the imagination of some ill-fortune that may befall him. ~ Thomas Hobbes

I was sprawled out in my usual position on the couch, half asleep but entirely drunk, torturing myself by tearing memories out of my mind at random like matches from a book, striking them one at a time and drowsily setting myself on fire. ~ Jonathan Tropper

We are capable of suffering with our world, and that is the true meaning of compassion. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don't ever apologize for crying for the trees burning in the Amazon or over the waters polluted from mines in the Rockies. Don't apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal. That is what is happening as we see people honestly confronting the sorrows of our time. ~ Joanna Macy

Grief never goes away. It just changes. At first it's like molten-hot lava dripping from your heart and hollowing you from the inside. Over time, it settles into your bones, your skin, so that you live with it, walk with it every day. Grief isn't the footprints in the snow. It's the empty spaces between. ~ Tyrell Johnson

At last, Lady Evenstar, fairest in this world, and most beloved, my world is fading. Lo! we have gathered, and we have spent, and now the time of payment draws near."
'Arwen knew well what he intended, and long had foreseen it; nonetheless she was overborne by her grief. "Would you then, lord, before your time leave your people that live by your word?" she said. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean
But be. ~ Archibald MacLeish

Rather than anchoring our hope beyond the struggle, always projecting ahead, perhaps locating joy within the struggle through our full presence can be our essential gesture at this moment in time. To feel the pain of now and not look away. To act not with the hope of moving forward, always forward, but to see the wisdom of stepping sideways as we create a different space, a more conscious space in the direction of pause, where we can breathe and gather ourselves so we can gather others around us and create a community of care, even within our own families, especially within our own families. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

It's like you don't get that she's not gone yet, like you think her time left isn't meaningful anymore. You're acting like a selfish child. ~ Lisa Genova

My brother buried his resentment that day. But resentment buried is not gone. It is like burying a seed: for a season it may stay hidden in the dark, but in the end, it will always grow. I did not see it, though we were still close, even at that age. I think now that to be close to someone can be to underestimate them. Grow too close, and you do not see what they are capable of; or you do not see it in time. ~ Beth Underdown

Goodbye forever" is the perfect joke, because forever is impossible. Every night I say it, and every morning I see my father again. Forever is meaningless. Tough talk, an empty threat. Forever is our secret handshake. Our code word. Our decoder ring. Not a measurement of time at all. I know this because "Goodbye Forever" comes easily. The passage of actual time is much more difficult. ~ Joey Comeau

For a long time I spent my weary days in a fog of what might be and what has been and I guess you could say im still learning how to accept what is. ~ Nikki Rowe

You'd think I'd be used to this agony by now , but it always catches me off guard. Anyone who says grief fades over time is a fucking liar. It never goes away. It just gets better at hiding. You never know when it's going to spring out of the shadows and sucker punch you in the gut.
Grief is a real asshole. ~ Chelsea Sedoti

Ought we not, from time to time, open ourselves up to cosmic sadness? ... Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears his grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate. But if you do not clear a decent shelter for your sorrow, and instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge-from which new sorrows will be born for others-then sorrow will never cease in this world and will multiply. ~ Etty Hillesum

When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar.
The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living. ~ John Connolly

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it. It's like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it. ~ Arthur Golden

People always say it's changelings who most crave touch, but that's not the truth. A long time ago, long before Silence, Psy craved it more than any other.
He let her words was over him like affectionate rain. His mate, his mate, was trying to temper his grief, trying to tell him they weren't so very different after all. ~ Nalini Singh

He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: Only God knows how much I loved you ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Though a few older men cut fingers in time of grief, it is usually the smallest girls who are selected for this ceremony, and a woman in the valley whose left hand is not a stump is very rare. ~ Peter Matthiessen

Absolute silence greeted the mystery of death, and for a time impossible to measure they waited, motionless, while Lynn's spirit rose from her body. Severo felt a long howl surging from the center of the earth and passing through his body to his lips, but it did not escape. The scream invaded him, filled him, and burst inside his head in a silent explosion.
Portrait in Sepia, Isabel Allende. ~ Isabel Allende

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

She wasn't broken.
She was made up of a thousand tiny little cracks.
She was always trying to keep herself glued together.
But it was hard, she felt too much.
No matter what she did, her emotions seeped through,
sometimes in drips, other times in floods,
She felt everything,
the heaviness of the clouds right before rain,
the rush of the subway cars as they left the station,
the feeling of goodbye as she watched someone walk away,
wondering if it was the last time she would see them,
the feeling of a kiss lingering on her cheek for hours.
She felt the loneliness of the sun as it hung in the sky,
shedding light on the day,
without companion.

And she longed to give as much as the sun.
If she could brighten someone's day,
bestow warmth were there was cold,
make someone smile, give someone hope,
then for a minute, an hour, maybe even a day,
the cracks would fill with love
and the pain would become only a voice,
reminding her that her pain was important.
She knew how fragile life was, how hard,
and how precious.

She wanted to feel it all. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

What if you wake up one fine morning only to realize that the life you have been living since the last few days was nothing but a dream of yours?

Would you go back to sleep then?

I wake up each morning only to realize you're not by my side. And if this emptiness is nothing but a nightmare, let me wake up and go back to the time we were together... ~ Sanhita Baruah

When your father died, I remember standing at his grave and thinking, This is the place where I can leave my grief. It wasn't immediately, of course, but I had somewhere to go, and every time I visited the cemetery, I felt like when I got back into my car, a tiny little bit of grief was gone. ~ Karin Slaughter

I knew that he was filled with grief when he finally kissed me one last time in one of the bathroom stalls at Fiumicino Airport and that, even if on the plane the drinks and the movie had distracted him, once alone in his room in New York, he too would be sad again, and I hated thinking of him sad, just as I knew he'd hate to see me sad in our bedroom, which had all too soon become my bedroom. ~ Andre Aciman

I have noticed that after a time of deep sorrow the greatest comfort may come from a person you do not know well. ~ Alice Adams

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

Eternity, so understood, is not an extension of time, not even an indefinite time. It is, rather, a vertical dimension cutting through time at each of its moments. It is the confrontation with the full moon through the trees dark with the day's rain. It is the goodness of an act or the truth of a witness which avail nothing in the order of time, yet are still irreducibly good. It is the awareness of the intensity of the blue sky on a summer day.
…
The pain of the grief suffered by a loved one has a similar quality. It once was, and it is no more. There were events which led up to it, and events which followed it, and, for practical purposes, it makes every kind of sense to think of it in those terms, in the order of time. Yet there is another perspective that will not be denied: recognizing that grief in its purity, in its eternal validity before God. So, too, the beauty of the trillium or the goodness of a moral act which changed nothing and yet, for all eternity, stands out in its nobility. Humans are beings capable of perceiving all that. They are capable of perceiving the creation not only in the order of time but in the order of eternity, lifting up its moments out of time's passage into eternity in the eternal validity of truth, goodness, and beauty of their joy and sorrow. ~ Erazim V. Kohák

Once upon a time there were two boys who purposefully misremembered things about their father. It made them feel better if ever they forgot things about their mother. ~ Max Porter

No, he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king's voice ... whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give. ~ Peter S. Beagle

It was an oddly satisfying idea to feel bereft as I left my mother this time. We only feel bereft when we're deprived of something meaningful. ~ Laura Anderson Kurk

No grief is so acute but time ameliorates it. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

So, you're dead asleep, and you get a call. Something terrible's happened, and I'm dead. What do you do?"
It took him a moment to quell the terror, to ignore the small, dark place inside him that feared getting that call every day. "Before or after I fall prostrate with grief?"
"Before, during, and after. Do you peruse your wardrobe and select a coordinating outfit - down to the footwear? Do you deal with your hair so it's perfectly groomed?"
"With my considerable skills and innate instincts that would take no time at all."
"Keep it up and I'll dump red sauce all over your fashionable smarty-pants."
"That statement is one of the countless reasons why, under the circumstances you described, I'd be lucky to remember to dress at all. ~ J.D. Robb

At first I thought I would never recover from Cicero's death. But time wipes out everything, even grief. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that grief is almost entirely a question of perspective. For the first few years I used to sigh and think, 'Well, he would still be in his sixties now,' and then a decade later, with surprise, 'My goodness, he would be seventy-five,' but nowadays I think, 'Well, he would be long since dead in any case, so what does it matter how he died in comparison with how he lived? ~ Robert Harris

The new captain looked up. Oh, good grief, Vimes thought. It's bloody Rust this time round!
And it was indeed the Hon. Ronald Rust, the god's gift to the enemy, any enemy, and a walking encouragement to desertion.
The Rust family had produced great soldiers, by the undemanding standards of 'Deduct your own casualties from those of the enemy, and if the answer is a positive number, it was a glorious victory' school of applied warfare. But Rust's lack of any kind of military grasp was matched only by his high opinion of the talent he in fact possessed only in negative amounts. ~ Terry Pratchett

Going with the flow of life is like catching a train at the station. You need to be at the right station at the right time and board the right train to get you where you need to be. If you go earlier than you're supposed to, you can catch the wrong train. You don't want to do that because it will just take you further away from me than you feel you already are. You need to go through the growing pains of grief so that you and I can fulfill our destiny and be in the right place at the right time to be reunited again. ~ Kate McGahan

I don't want to. Believe me. But I can't help it. Rose said in time, I'll learn the control to keep his feelings out, but I can't do it now. And he has so much, Sydney. So much feeling. He feels everything so strongly - love, grief, anger. His emotions are up and down, all over the place. What happened between him and Rose ... it tears him apart. ~ Richelle Mead

Time does not heal,
It makes a half-stitched scar
That can be broken and again you feel
Grief as total as in its first hour.
-Elizabeth Jennings ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Larkin gets it, got it, the lies we live just to tread through time. ~ Amy McNamara

Every relation between forms in a painting is to some degree adaptable to the painter's purpose. This is not the case with photography. Composition in the profound, formative sense of the word cannot enter into photography. The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time. One might argue that photography is as close to music as to painting. I have said that a photograph bears witness to a human choice being exercised. The choice is not between photographing X and Y: but between photographing at X moment or at Y moment. The objects recorded in any photograph (from the most effective to the most commonplace) carry approximately the same weight, the same conviction. What varies is the intensity with which we are made aware of the poles of absence and presence. A photograph, while recording what has been seen, always and by its nature refers to what is not seen. It isolates, preserves, and presents a moment taken from a continuum. The only decision (the still photographer) can take is as regards the moment he chooses to isolate. Yet this apparent limitation gives the photograph its unique power. The immediate relation between what is present and what is absent is particular to each photograph: it may be that of ice to sun, of grief to tragedy, of a smile to a pleasure, of a body to love, of a winning race-horse to the race it has run. ~ John Berger

Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

He came up and kissed me on my forehead, and before he stepped away, I closed my eyes and tried hard to memorize this moment. I wanted to remember him exactly as he was right then, how his arms looked brown against his white shirt, the way his hair was cut a little too short in the front. Even the bruise, there because of me.

Then he was gone.

Just for that moment, the thought that I might never see him again… it felt worse than death. I wanted to
run after him. Tell him anything, everything. Just don't go. Please just never go. Please just always be near me, so I can at least see you.

Because it felt final. I always believed that we would find our way back to each other every time. That no matter what, we would be connected - by our history, by this house. But this time, this last time, it felt final. Like I would never see him again, or that when I did, it would be different, there would be a mountain between us.

I knew it in my bones. That this time was it. I had finally made my choice, and so had he. He let me go. I was relieved, which I expected. What I didn't expect was to feel so much grief.

Bye bye, Birdie. ~ Jenny Han

She's thinking about grief and trauma, how they can hide out inside a woman, how they can come back.
The playwright follows her eyes, until he sees what she sees.
The photographer's framed image, the orphan girl lit up by the explosion, a girl blowing forward, a girl coming out of fire, a girl who looks as if she might blast right through image and time into the world
"I know what's happened," the poet says. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Great joy doesn't obliterate grief. Both can be encompassed at the same time. ~ Helen Brown

You weren't supposed to choose me," he said.
Behind them, Ira approached, stunned and speechless for what must have been the first time in his life. He helped lift Samuel, whose cheeks had blanched as well. Camille prodded Oscar's arms and stomach and face. It was truly him. The unbearable grief over losing him flipped inside out. Her joy ran so deep and strong she thought she might burst from it.
"The night the Christina went down, you rowed to me," she answered, her throat knotted as she thought of her father. She forced it down. "This time, I must have needed to row to you."
Oscar kissed her, his lips still cold but filled with life. She leaned into him and hung on as though he might disappear. Ira let out a playful high-pitched whistle. Samuel coughed. Oscar and Camille reluctantly pulled apart and blushed.
"Holy gallnipper," Ira said. Camille grinned, not minding in the least that he was using that annoying turn of phrase again. "I can't believe that little rock…I mean you were dead, mate. Dead as this bloke right here." Ira kicked McGreenery in the leg. Oscar nodded, rubbing his hand over the fading red mark, as if to feel for himself that the deadly wound was gone.
"I was in the dory," he whispered. Ira cocked his head.
"Say again?"
Camille lifted her ear from his chest, where she'd wanted to listen to the smooth rhythm of his heart. She looked up at him before hearing its strong beat.
"The dory?"
Oscar nodded again, eyebrow ~ Angie Frazier

How to explain Time and Separateness back to God, Who had never thought of them, Who could let the whole world come to grief in a scattering moment? ~ Eudora Welty

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

All the stories and descriptions of that time without exception peak only of the patriotism, self-sacrifice, despair, grief, and heroism of the Russians. But in reality it was not like that ... The majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Her tears fell abundantly
but her grief was so truly artless, that no dignity could have made it more respectable in Emma's eyes
and she listened to her and tried to console her with all her heart and understanding
really for the time convinced that Harriet was the superior creature of the two
and that to resemble her would be more for her own welfare and happiness than all that genius or intelligence could do.
It was rather too late in the day to set about being simple-minded and ignorant; but she left her with every previous resolution confirmed of being humble and discreet, and repressing imagination all the rest of her life. ~ Jane Austen

[She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the original - one emotion that time could never fade, and that would drag you back any number of years into the pure, undiluted feeling, as if you were living it anew. It wasn't love ... and it wasn't hate, or anger, or happiness, or even grief. Memories of those were but echoes of the true feeling.
It was shame. Shame never faded. ~ Laini Taylor

I have waited for this day, and grief faded with time.
Or did it? Perhaps grief never leaves us but is merely drowned out by a flood of life overwhelming it. Perhaps the wound that bled once is bleeding still, and I did not notice it until now. ~ Claire North

This time when she picked up her paints, she didn't think, she just painted. It was like opening the door onto a storm. The canvas was her doorway and the paint all the thunder and lightning, the wild pain-filled sky caught inside her. ~ Michelle Frost

Trauma never goes away completely, it changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away. ~ Mark Epstein