“There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.”
― Christopher Moore
“Love is an engraved invitation to grief.”
― Sunshine O'Donnell, Open Me
“Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
“I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.”
― Victoria Hanley, The Seer and the Sword
“Who wants to know that the person you love and need the most can just vanish forever”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky is Everywhere
“You can't have real pain without real love. You can't feel grief and loss and hurt without real love. Love is the only way you can ever be really hurt deep down.”
― Katherine Applegate, Beach Blondes: June Dreams, July's Promise, August Magic
“...for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're only left with your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not.”
― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves the for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“We were talking the other evening about the phrases one uses when trying to comfort someone who is in distress. I told him that in English we sometimes say, 'I've been there.' This was unclear to him at first-I've been where? But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific loacation, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.
'So sadness is a place?' Giovanni asked.
'Sometimes people live there for years,' I said.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
“I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world--the company of those who have known suffering.”
― Helen Keller
“Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.”
― Mary Karr, Lit
“Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.
Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays
“The numbness of his loss had passed, and the pain would hit me out of nowhere, doubling me over, racking my body with sobs. Where are you? I would cry out in my mind. Where have you gone? Of course, there was never any answer.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
“Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life.”
― Caitlin Kittredge, Bone Gods
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