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5711dcb Royal summoned mourners. They came from the village, from the neighboring hills and, wailing like dogs at midnight, laid siege to the house. Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men prostrated themselves: it was the art of sorrow, and those who best mimicked grief were much admired. After the funeral everyone went away, satisfied that they'd done a good job. grief satisfaction funeral phonies house Truman Capote
7dc3dcc Grief and rage--you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours. rage grief Anne Carson
783c934 Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like theses -- simple, humane, conscientious, forgiving -- held life together. Only a few days earlier he would have been able to perform them. But now he took the retainer and dropped it in the toiler. He pressed the handle. The retainer, jostled int he surge, disappeared down the porcelain throat, and, when waters abated, floated triumphantly, mockingly, out, Mr. Lisbon waited for the tank to refill and flushed again, but the same thing happened. The replica of the boy's mouth clung to the white slope. grief society parents Jeffrey Eugenides
6648b70 "At Night on the High Seas At night, when the sea cradles me And the pale star gleam Lies down on its broad waves, Then I free myself wholly From all activity and all the love And stand silent and breathe purely, Alone, alone cradled by the sea That lies there, cold and silent, with a thousand lights. Then I have to think of my friends And my gaze sinks into their eyes, And I ask each one, silent and alone: "Are you still mine? Is my sorrow a sorrow to you, my death a death? Do you feel from my love, my grief, Just a breath, just an echo?" And the sea peacefully gazes back, silent, grief poetry love hermann-hesse Hermann Hesse
99c5c19 "I've seen how cigarettes went from being advertised in every type of media to being something found to be deadly... they can't kill me no matter how many of them I smoke but I've seen humans die from smoking them... if I were you I would stop smoking them." "Why should I? You smoke 'em all the time, you chain-smoke cigarettes," Mandy pointed out. "Yeah, I started doing that back in the Sixties... for reasons you likely saw on those VHS tapes... but I'm not a person, I'm Pollution, things like that aren't dangerous to me but they are to you," Alecto told her. "It's not a good idea." grief loss depression past education cigar blast-from-the-past chain-smoke no-smoking vhs-tape retro depress deadly times disturbing smog haunting gray cancer spooky video creepy smoke cigarette tobacco pollution attack health eerie scary sick knowledge trapped self-help horror Rebecca McNutt
6759640 I've been alive a long time, long enough to know that the more baggage you carry in life, the more unstable you'll be, until eventually you get sick of carrying it, and then you just fall down. mourning grief life baggage unstable mourn fall mental-illness Rebecca McNutt
1c9d77f "Why'd you want to kill yourself? Didn't you feel anything, or didn't it hurt you?" Mandy questioned, looking puzzled. "Yes, I suppose it did, ... it was strange, it was sharp, that's all I can think of to describe it... and cold, but not cold like ice, more like... I don't know, like something much worse, something horrible... and it seemed like the ground was falling upwards, becoming the sky... for a moment it made me consider that it was just a dream, that I was on some sort of drug, and then I remember being overjoyed to see the sky was still above me, then just really sad, really tired... and then I don't remember much else about it," Alecto told her, glaring straight ahead at the sky with narrowed eyes. "I don't mind, I'm not supposed to mind, anyway. Mearth already told me that eventually I would want to be dead, that it was inevitable... still, I sometimes wish that I could have done something good for other people in my life, it might have made up for all the bad stuff I've done." suicide grief loss dark friends death sadness friendship dysfunctional swing-set confusion morbid spooky creepy canada help friend self-harm self-mutilation halloween drugs dying nostalgia Rebecca McNutt
9943267 In those moments of unnaming when we have lost ourselves, we must remember to return to our past redemptions to find God's mark of glory on our abandonment, betrayal, and shame. We wrongly believe that we will be happy if we can escape the past. But without our past we are hollow and plastic beings who have only common names and conventional stories. When we enter into our story at the point we lost our name, we are most likely to hear the whisper of our new name. grief lament healing true-self Dan B. Allender
e3242a7 I hear the word in the hall over and over again. Suicide. Suicide. Suicide. Did he or didn't he? Everyone's got a guess. Still no one knows for sure, except Gabe, but he's not talking. Why does it even matter? He's gone. His, ours, theirs-- blame needs a place. His, ours, theirs-- pain all over the place. His, ours, theirs-- forgiveness missing from this place. suicide grief forgiveness Lisa Schroeder
2ddf6e0 "According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it is the ego's survivability that is finally at issue. Why the ego? After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a "you" or a set of "yous" without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the boundaries of who I am. If I have a boundary at all, or if a boundary can be said to belong to me, it is only because I have become separated from others, and it is only on condition of this separation that I can relate to them at all. So the boundary is a function of the relation, a brokering of difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness. If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who "I" am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others. I may lose this "you" and any number of particular others, and I may well survive those losses. But that can happen only if I do not lose the possibility of any "you" at all. If I survive, it is only because my life is nothing without the life that exceeds me, that refers to some indexical you, without whom I cannot be." grief loss klein morality life otherness butler seperation boundaries self-preservation dissociation survival Judith Butler
d7bdd7d It is always winter now. winter grief sorrow winter-is-coming jaehaerys-targaryen fire-and-blood George R.R. Martin
bcfce31 "Will you not weep?" "I do not have the time for tears." mourning grief loss sorrow strength weep tears George R.R. Martin
5a0e1ef Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing and you were in the best possible place in the world for it - in a beautiful place of worship, surrounded by grace. Take this time, every minute of it. Let things work themselves out here in India. grief spirituality life Elizabeth Gilbert
5900aae "I've seen a lot of stuff... maybe I've seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I've seen what they can do, how evil they can be... I've seen the Holocaust and I've seen Jonestown, I've seen the Vietnam War and I've seen Hiroshima... I've seen the Chernobyl disaster... I've seen the World Trade Center attack... I've been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive," Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding." earth grief nature human death chernobyl hazardous hippie alive smog nuclear jonestown personification kami disaster steel pollution holocaust vietnam-war lonely sad dying evil Rebecca McNutt
a50f21c "Her gaze wavered towards one of the books on the sales counter beside the register, a hardcover copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet with many of the pages dog-eared and stained with coffee and tea. The store owner caught her looking at it and slid it across the counter towards her. "You ever read Hamlet?" he questioned. "I tried to when I was in high school," said Mandy, picking up the book and flipping it over to read the back. "I mean, it's expected that everyone should like Shakespeare's books and plays, but I just...." her words faltered when she noticed him laughing to himself. "What's so funny, Sir?" she added, slightly offended. "...Oh, I'm not laughing at you, just with you," said the store owner. "Most people who say they love Shakespeare only pretend to love his work. You're honest Ma'am, that's all. You see, the reason you and so many others are put-off by reading Shakespeare is because reading his words on paper, and seeing his words in action, in a play as they were meant to be seen, are two separate things... and if you can find a way to relate his plays to yourself, you'll enjoy them so much more because you'll feel connected to them. Take Hamlet for example - Hamlet himself is grieving over a loss in his life, and everyone is telling him to move on but no matter how hard he tries to, in the end all he can do is to get even with the ones who betrayed him." "...Wow, when you put it that way... sure, I think I'll buy a copy just to try reading, why not?" Mandy replied with a smile." revenge shakespeare grief loss reading diffcult dog-eared bookstore coffee tea geek nerd hamlet classic Rebecca McNutt
6ab8ad6 "The sentiment that one "should have done something more" reflects, it seems to me, an underlying wish to control the uncontrollable. After all, if one is guilty about not having done something that one should have done, then it follows that there is something that could have been done - a comforting thought that decoys us from our pathetic helplessness in the face of death." grief loss psychology Irvin D. Yalom
0f85ff5 She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop. grief loss hope staples stapler Jonathan Safran Foer
b265f1f Dying is a very solitary thing. The only thing we can do it be there when she wants us there. grief family died mourn dying Lois Lowry
8e189a5 "I don't want anything else bad to happen," she whispered, her voice choked with tears. "I'm so sick to death of bad things happening, of seeing bad things that happened in the past! And I'm guilty of so many things. I'm sorry that I killed Mrs. Matthias and wrecked her stupid greenhouse back in the Eighties and I'm sorry I left you here alone while I went around the world." "I wasn't alone though, I knew you were doing what you wanted to do and that you were still alive, so I wasn't really alone, I knew you were still there somewhere," Alecto told her. His damaged smile and downcast, sorrowful eyes were draped in the shadow of the night, saving Mandy the trouble of seeing." hopelessness grief murder travel world sorrow death friendship love greenhouse eighties apart lonliness damaged bad together omen friend crying shadow smile tears trouble guilt Rebecca McNutt
de5625f "Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell puts it, "with one skin-layer missing." grief loss sorrow sensitivity intensity Kay Redfield Jamison
d6f2c13 Nothing has changed. It's still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much. But how would it be if that feeling was gone? I would not want that to happen. I told the shrink: it would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore. grief love Sigrid Nunez
bb5c2ef Goodbyes are not easy, but I'm ready to move on. I'm not reluctant, Emma, not holding back. I don't have answers to the questions, but I have some good questions. I have loved life, but I believe that life is to be loved, it is a gift. grief love Madeleine L'Engle
c7418ba His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed. grief suppressed-anger an-occult-history-of-britain thomas-cromwell anger suppression Hilary Mantel
fdbd7a0 "In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband's death--his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently--"shrewdly" and "reasonably"--she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection--a "hospital" infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance!" grief love widowhood Joyce Carol Oates
d76d8ac How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell. grief loss sadness love sad Jodi Picoult
1c3e4d9 Thus ended the first and adventurous part of his existence. What followed was so different that, but for the reality of sorrow which remained with him, this strange part must have resembled a dream. pain grief past change-of-scene changes-in-life loss-of-love grit rebirth heartache new old life-after-death Joseph Conrad
ed9e3ab Our relationship had been doomed form the start, because it was based on grief, and unlike love, grief eventually passed. grief love Ilona Andrews
82f407c The bastard. How dare he? I was drowning in a fucking river that he was still attempting to save me from, and he was telling me he was going to push me back in and hold me under. My father's death had nearly destroyed me. Cal's death would finish me. grief T.J. Klune
e63c8b5 His face looked almost as gray as his suit, and the pouches beneath his eyes looked like little bags for holding all the sadness that his head couldn't hold. grief sadness suit broken-hearted funeral lonely memorial Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
72f0ffc "Mid-Term Break I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying-- He had always taken funerals in his stride-- And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram When I came in, and I was embarrassed By old men standing up to shake my hand And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'. Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest, Away at school, as my mother held my hand In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs. At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses. Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him For the first time in six weeks. Paler now, Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot. grief loss Seamus Heaney
dbc933f The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning? mourning grief Julian Barnes
742b8bc Why shouldn't the living cords which lace our being together flick softly against a loved one in the very moment of their unraveling?...Sometimes, all the miles between are as nothing, sometimes, they are narrowed to the little silence between the beats of a heart. grief Colleen McCullough
712a42c ...love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down grief loss love Jeanette Winterson
4299a25 "Why do they lie?" she asked herself aloud. "They say time makes losing someone you loved easier to deal with, but it only makes it worse." mourning time grief loss love bereavement saying death-dying death-of-a-friend deal death-of-a-loved-one worse ask lie easy Rebecca McNutt
4f1bac4 When I complain about the bandages she says: 'I promise you that when you take them off you'll be just as you were before.' And it is true. When she takes them off there is not one line, not one wrinkle, not one crease. And five weeks afterwards there I am, with not one line, not one wrinkle, not one crease. And there he is, lying with a ticket tied around his wrist because he died in a hospital. And there I am looking down at him, without one line, without one wrinkle, without one crease... motherhood grief death birth baby grief-and-loss mother hospital scars Jean Rhys
5ac577c "With Pollution, emotion is irrelevant, it is not their nature," Mearth sighed, making a face as if she were talking to an ignorant small child. "I didn't create them, humans created the Pollution. Cheryl Nobel, Alecto Steele, Albert Sanders, Olivia Campbell, all my pretty little Representations, there aren't many of them left these days but they're still very dangerous! They're here to tell society all about its mistakes! You don't understand the world of Representations." suicide earth grief loss nature fear death imagination chernobyl entity hazardous love-canal tar tar-sands toxic-waste sydney-tar-ponds cape-breton nova-scotia recycle hippie disturbing smog mother-earth imaginary chemicals representation coal green steel environment canada pollution storm dying scared Rebecca McNutt
8d8faaf What is love for, if not to intensify our affections--both in life and death? But, O, do not be bitter. It is tragically self-destructive to be bitter. grief emotions John Piper
0335ae5 You're my phantom limb, Mouse. I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid, Mouse. Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me. grief her-fearful-symmetry julia-poole valentina-poole Audrey Niffenegger
739c692 There was a super-8 steel town somewhere, where all the forgotten things in the cruel world ended up eventually, Mandy was sure of it... this place, she decided, was called Smog City. grief heaven death kodak kodachrome super-8 concept smog steel canada forgotten film cruel city nostalgia Rebecca McNutt
b8b2676 "Why did you revive me?" Alecto repeated. "Well... uh, well...." Mandy hesitated, her voice full of sudden misery. "They say there are five stages of grief, you know... five stages. denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Not in any particular order. Anyhow, I denied your death, I was angry about it, I bargained with Mearth to try and get her to un-bury your site and I was depressed about the whole ordeal. One thing I just froze up on though was acceptance. I just couldn't accept your death. It was really cruel the way you died, and I missed you so much... Mearth, my parents, the cops, Dr. Pottie, they all thought I was crazy. When people think you're crazy, that label automatically dehumanizes you, because people can use it to discredit everything you say with, "oh, pay no mind to her, she's just this crazy lunatic with a dead imaginary friend." I just wanted to do something, anything to make it all go away, and I decided that I wanted to revive you." mourning grief loss depression death sadness friendship bargaining discredit imaginary-friend revival dehumanization death-of-a-loved-one anger denial help friend crazy lunatic dying Rebecca McNutt
ca17bbf We kept on cooking and walking the dog, taking the kids to the park, cleaning the kitchen, and letting Sara and Adam hate what was going on when they needed to. Sometimes we let them resist finding any meaning or solace in anything that had to do with their daughter's diagnosis, and this was one of the hardest things to do -- to stop trying to make things come out better than they were. We let them spew when they needed to; we offered the gift of no comfort when there being no comfort was where they had landed. Then we shopped for groceries. grief Anne Lamott
ae034c2 Jeanne's sisters thought nothing of themselves.... Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper and froze them in tight-lipped containers.... Helen was the baker of the family. What she felt could not be purchased. She grieved from scratch. grief death Allegra Goodman
66ddb2c If we enter our story in heartache, we will hear the whisper of the name that will one day be ours. grief lament healing true-self Dan B. Allender
38b3956 Why do we feel guilty, even when we've done nothing to bring on illness or death--even when we've done everything possible to prevent it? Suffering feels like punishment, as cultural anthropologists observe; no doubt that's one reason why people still tell the story of Adam and Eve, which interprets suffering that way. mourning illness grief loss suffering death bible punishment guilt Elaine Pagels
080c3c2 "...I love you," he said to her, although at that point he was certain she could no longer comprehend the words. "I'd trade places with you in an instant, Mandy Valems... you never deserved this... why would anyone do something so terrible!?" A cold chill froze his heart when he saw her empty eyes again. The fluorescent lights in the dim room sparked to life all of a sudden, brightness so sharp that it startled him. In a flash, sharp and sudden, quicker than a lightning strike, the bulbs flickered and exploded with a few jingling pops." grief loss death friendship heart love dim bulb fluorescent lobotomy psychosurgery explode electricity mental-hospital depressing tragic empty i-love-you hospital eyes Rebecca McNutt
7103481 "If you were me you'd do the right thing, help your friends, because you're not a coward," Mandy sighed sadly. "I covered up a murder because I was scared to go to jail and I did the wrong thing... well, now's my chance to do the right thing, to save someone's life, because I don't want you to die." "Save someone's life? I'm no one," Alecto laughed morbidly. "A hundred and twelve years is definitely way too long to have survived. You'd be wasting your time and risking your own life...." "This is my life," Mandy declared, smiling sincerely. Alecto just looked concerned and very doubtful as the rain drizzled down the roads and sidewalks, towards the harbour where it fell into the ocean, indistinguishable from all the other water in the world." -- suicide grief murder loss wrong death friendship disturbance moral-values seaside imaginary-friend cape-breton nova-scotia coward jail rescue help friend misery crime scary right morals ocean dying Rebecca McNutt
9c38c2c I did not want to die, but desperately wanted to be anywhere but there; the pain was unbearable. Yet in that vision, or whatever it was, I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved, and that nothing else could have kept us in this world. mourning grief loss death religion Elaine Pagels
c7cf634 "I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be "only human," subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief." grief humanity Don DeLillo
9673a85 Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random.... If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature. mourning pain grief loss suffering nature death guilt Elaine Pagels
37fcf01 What clear is that meaning may not be something we . We found no meaning in our son's death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to meaning. mourning grief loss meaning Elaine Pagels
d7a05f3 "No longer married, suddenly I was . From Latin, the name means "emptied." Far worse; it felt like being torn in half, ripped apart from the single functioning organism that had been our family, our lives. Shattered, the word kept recurring; the whole pattern shattered, just as the mountain rocks had shattered his body." mourning grief loss relationships widows families Elaine Pagels
5fb7156 Alas, I had always loved sorrow and grief, but only for myself, for myself; for them I wept in my pity. I stretched out my arms to them in my despair, accusing, cursing, and despising myself. I told them that I had done all this, I alone, that I had brought them corruption, contagion, and lies! grief sorrow despair Fyodor Dostoyevsky
ed964aa Hope is not logical. It always comes as a surprise, just when you think all hope is lost. Hope is the cousin to grief, and both take time: you can't short-circuit grief, or emptiness, and you can't patch it up with your bicycle tire tube kit. You have to take the next right action. time grief hope emptiness surprise Anne Lamott
733cf38 "...Look, I'm real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot," Mandy apologized gloomily. "It's wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution." "It's alright, I think she wants to be remediated," Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did. "You don't have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you," Mandy pointed out. "People shouldn't be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don't want to." grief loss depression fear death friendship hope love grief-stricken removal remediation confusion lonliness pollution help uncertainty memory Rebecca McNutt
65f3895 Why shouldn't his death bring you into some total scandal of garment-rending grief? Why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him up if you can walk along the hall and find a way to place him within reach? Sink lower, she thought. Let it bring you down. Go where it takes you. grief Don DeLillo
42cc496 I'm glad for the rain...It's good camouflage. grief Lisa Schroeder
67f0333 I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying. grief death eternity Ursula K. Le Guin
ea9cb2e Just as a snowflake went on to feed a puddle that filled a stream and then the river, the pumpkin patch is a gathering of molecules from my old goats, chickens, and cats, feeding the underworld of dirt creatures. And somewhere, my father's ashes mingle with birds, air, and sea. grief katherine-dunn Katherine Dunn
924beae The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they'll say even before I write them. grief loss omniscience unreality Sigrid Nunez
463f1f5 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) loneliness grief sadness daemon miss-coulter dust Philip Pullman
775cd5a "Melly is the only woman friend I ever had," she thought forlornly, "the only woman except Mother who really loved me. She's like Mother, too. Everyone who knew her has clung to her skirts." grief loss love Margaret Mitchell
5e3060f Understand something people, we will be hated by many in the name of Christ, ridiculed, mocked, stoned, slaughtered. We will be fined, jailed and killed for our love for Christ. You are supposed to see better with your eyes today, how close this is happening, just prepare your heart and soul to be braver than Peter and not deny Christ in the moment your life might be in jeopardy for Him and what you believe. Apostle Pauls says to live is Christ to die is gain. money words time pain love-quotes literature marriage mind grief feminism loss history reading prayer nature world depression people women freedom dream joy future politics friends leadership quote work inspirational-quotes life-quotes living motivation family destiny imagination fantasy dreams sadness positive-thinking strength music friendship motivational spiritual heart endtime fiction-food-for-though humanity-humour intelligence-is-attractive life-and-living-life-philosophy magic-spirit meditation-men passion-peace patience-johnson pentecost reality-relationship trust-war earning motivational-quotes repentance wisdom-quotes society purpose quotes forgiveness self-improvement power self-help soul patience psychology Patience Johnson
791c80b , though Peter. 'Eat,' said Leo Matienne again, very gently. Peter looked the truth of what he had lost full in the face. And then he ate. grief loss family food Kate DiCamillo
7b427fe from under the ground, from under the waters, they clutch at us, they clutch at us, we won't let go. grief loss poetry dreams poetic dreaming grieving nightmares nightmare Margaret Atwood
8f1dc67 Pulling away, I realized I had no place to go and nothing I wanted to do except satisfy my curiosity about a woman who was coming on like gangbusters and a big load of grief. grief women lust James Ellroy
480bd1b Saeed prayed a great deal, and so did his father, and so did their guests, and some of them wept, but Saeed had wept only once, when he first saw his mother's corpse and screamed, and Saeed's father wept only when he was alone in his room, silently, without tears, his body seized as though by a stutter, or a shiver, that would not let go, for his sense of loss was boundless, and his sense of the benevolence of the universe was shaken, and his wife had been his best friend. mourning grief loss sorrow weeping Mohsin Hamid
2f07ad3 But I can't do anything for him and he can't do anything for me. We must wail in our own corners. grief comfortless the-message-to-the-planet iris-murdoch isolated Iris Murdoch
70f9aaa "Isn't it complicated to be human, though?" she said. "Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally...And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn't make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance..." "The one thing," Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, "the thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won't ever see her grow up. She'll have to do it without whatever I could have given her." "Time, too, time and everything that one could do in it, and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It's so important to us because we see it so close. We're individuals, we're full of ourselves, and so we're bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of sudden there's so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we'd always been and always intended to be...do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there's so much to feel and I'm greedy?" grief loss suffering humanity death love Wallace Stegner
6438b85 "(The death of his child) "was the first experience of his life, so far as we know, which drove him to look outside of his own mind and heart for help to endure a personal grief. It was the first time in his life when he had not been sufficient for his own experience." grief trials weakness Elton Trueblood
96d43e4 ...trust in God could impose an additional burden on good people slammed to their knees by some senseless tragedy. An atheist might be no less staggered by such an event, but nonbelievers often experienced a kind of calm acceptance: shit happens, and this particular shit happened to them. It could be more difficult for a person of faith to get to his feet precisely because he had to reconcile God's love and care with the stupid, brutal fact that something irreversibly terrible had happened. tragedy grief Mary Doria Russell
1d04919 And so the explanation for why Agatha Christie is the most popular author in the history of the world. Her appeal is as wide and her dissemination as great as the Bible's, because she is a modern apostle, a female one--about time, after two thousand years of men blathering on. And this new apostle answers the same questions Jesus answered: What are we to do with death? Because murder mysteries are always resolved in the end, the mystery neatly dispelled. We must do the same with death in our lives: resolve it, give it meaning, put it into context however hard that might be. grief loss jesus-christ Yann Martel
7cc8857 As tree shapes from mist / Her young death / Loose / In you. grief poetry Anne Carson
35a2e9e "Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after... you know... after the funeral we haven't had the money for any of your weird little games and I was hoping you'd be more mature now that Jud's gone," her father had disappointedly added. "How much'd that cake cost you?" "It's paid for," Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. "I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy's last year and I... it was my birthday, dad!" "You can't even be normal about this one thing, can you?" her father had complained. Mandy hadn't cried, she'd only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. "...I'm normal." money mourning grief loss depression death-of-a-sibling sibling brother cake argument birthday funeral parent normal father memory nostalgia Rebecca McNutt
84f5790 When we are sad...it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to things that don't change. grief loss comforting possessions Donna Tartt
baaaa72 That had day changed him. It had changed the entire village. Shaken by the death of a boy they had loved, each person found ways to be more worthy of the sacrifice he had made. They had become kinder, more careful, more attentive to one another. grief kindness sacrifice death redemption Lois Lowry
899eef4 "Tell yourselves whatever you'd like, but I'm afraid it doesn't make it true," Mearth sighed, beginning to look impatient. "Step aside Mandy, I have to remediate him, otherwise you'll find yourself in a whole mess of trouble." "You can't do this, it's wrong," Mandy insisted. "You don't have a choice, Mandy! Either you let his life compromise the lives of everybody else in the world, or you let me remediate him and get it over with," Mearth icily declared. "...Do what she says, Mandy Valems...." Alecto added, standing up and staring with glazed eyes at Mearth. "I can't," said Mandy. "...Go away!" Alecto shouted at her suddenly, glaring with narrowed eyes, speaking in a voice that hardly sounded like his own. "Get out of here, Mandy Valems! I hate you, I want you to leave me alone! Go home and don't ever come back here!" "I...." Mandy started, looking totally shocked. "I said I hate you, don't you understand anything? Go away, get out of here!" Alecto repeated menacingly, stepping forward in a threatening manner. He looked like a mad dog, shivering as he chased her away from his site. She tearfully took off running, seeming both shocked and horrified, and he watched her leave for a moment with a blank expression, his dark eyes hollow. He looked like he was going to black out, but Mearth walked quickly towards him, for once not smiling at all. If it weren't for her eyes, she would've looked like a person. "That was very cruel of you to do, Sydney Tar Ponds. I thought you loved her," she disappointedly exclaimed. "I do love her, she's my friend, and that's why I said that stuff to her," Alecto replied forlornly. "None of it's true, I don't hate her at all... but I know what's going to happen and I don't want her to see it, so I lied to her and told her I hated her... can you explain to her after... why I said all that to her?" illness earth grief loss depression faith death friendship hope life love nova-scotia environment rescue pollution help dog dying Rebecca McNutt
67cf1b2 A week later, I walked to Gwyneth's house. She and Dorothy and I shared tea and we wept for Jacob. We talked. We smiled a little. Then I left and waited for Cullah, and thought what a great emptiness was left by Jacob's passing. At last, I sat at the front door, on the chair where Patience had died. I held my hands folded at my heart, and ached for all who had passed from my world mourning grief heartache Nancy E. Turner
61a6846 And there I lie in these damned bandages for a week. And there he lies, swathed up too, like a little mummy. And never crying. But now I like raking him in my arms and looking at him. A lovely forehead, incredibly white, the eyebrows drawn very faintly in gold dust... Well, this was a funny time. (The big bowl of coffee in the morning with a pattern of red and blue flowers. I was always so thirsty.) But uneasy, uneasy... Ought a baby to be as pretty as this, as pale as this, as silent as this? The other babies yell from morning to night. Uneasy... When I complain about the bandages she says: 'I promise you that when you take them off you'll be just as you were before.' And it is true. When she takes them off there is not one line, not one wrinkle, not one crease. And five weeks afterwards there I am, with not one line, not one wrinkle, not one crease. And there he is, lying with a ticket tied around his wrist because he died in a hospital. And there I am looking down at him, without one line, without one wrinkle, without one crease... motherhood grief death birth baby grief-and-loss nurse mother hospital Jean Rhys
67a6049 Je parle de cette douleur qui est tellement grande qu'elle ne semble meme pas naitre a l'interieur de vous, c'est plutot comme si vous aviez ete enseveli par une avalanche. grief sadness deuil mort Rosa Montero
a144562 she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison. No wonder they gave them out free to the soliders. Lucky Strikes. pain grief smoking Colum McCann
746bfff My mother and I were on a plane. Before we left I talked with Elf. She didn't talk at all. I told her things would be okay, truly, that I needed her, that I understood her, that I loved her, that I'd miss her, that I'd be back for her, that being together in Toronto for a while would be amazing, that Nora was really looking forward to it too, that I understood that just because she didn't want to live didn't mean that she necessarily wanted to die it's just that that's sort of how that one goes, that she wanted to die the way she'd lived, with grace and dignity, that I needed her to be patient, to fight a little longer, to hold on, to know she was loved, to know I wanted to help her, that I would help her, that I needed to do some stuff, that mom and I had to go to Aunt Tina's funeral in Vancouver, that I'd be back, that she'd stay with me in Toronto for a while, a total break, that Nic was here now, back in Winnipeg, that he'd see her every day, that I had to go, that I had to know she'd be okay while I was gone, that I would bow down before her suffering with compassion, that she could control her life, that I understood that pain is sometimes psychic, not only physical, that she wanted nothing more than to end it and to sleep forever, that for her life was over but that for me it was still ongoing and that an aspect of it was trying to save her, that the notion of saving her was one that we didn't agree on, that I was willing to do whatever she wanted me to do but only if it was absolutely true that there were no other doors to find, to push against or storm because if there were I'd break every bone in my body running up against that fucking door repeatedly, over and over and over and over. grief sadness sisters Miriam Toews
77004d2 In writing you can always change the ending or delete a chapter that isn't working. Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable. grief memoir Ariel Levy
6d9152d It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now. This is not uncommon after loss of love-- blue and black and red blasting the crater open. I am interested in anger. grief loss love breaking-up loss-of-love Anne Carson
6949aa6 And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight-isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've ever experienced before? You see things more clearly and you KNOW that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is every talking about. Moments like this. grief growth Jonathan Franzen
abf2ad6 "True grief never goes away. We learn to live with it. After a while our friends stop asking and we stop discussing our sorrows. It doesn't help us that much and we realize that almost everyone who we have confided in carries grief deep in their hearts too. We often decide that once again, our job is to cheer others up. Grief isn't just something to endure; it is also a reflection of our capacity to love. It allows us to understand the most profound human experience at the most intimate level. Facing our grief requires openness and courage. We must explore it with curiosity and patience and we must allow it to stay in our hearts until it is ready to leave. Over time, by simply abiding with our sorrows, they will lessen. Yet as poet Linda Pastan wrote, "Grief is a circular staircase," We feel better and then we feel worse. Holidays...trigger grief reactions. we may have a rather good Year Two and then be felled by Year Three. With intention and skills, we move forward on our journey, but not without spiraling in the waters." grief loss Mary Pipher
d073445 "In the kitchen, her family nibbled Helen's lemon squares. Melanie urged brownies on the nurses. "Take these," she told Lorraine. "We can't eat them all, but Helen won't stop baking." "Sweetheart," Lorraine said, "everybody mourns in her own way." Helen mourned her sister deeply. She arrived each day with shopping bags. Her cake was tender with sliced apples, but her almond cookies crumbled at the touch. Her pecan bars were awful, sticky-sweet and hard enough to break your teeth. They remained untouched in the dining room, because Helen never threw good food away." -- mourning grief loss end-of-life Allegra Goodman
afcafea She loved your mother', Taliesin said gently. 'This is her farewell.' As he spoke, a chanted melody began inside the chamber, a song without words. Yet it spoke of the beauty in the heart of the flame, of the passing glory of the white bird on the wing, and the blossom of the sea spray under the shining prow. It sang of a mother with her baby, of the hard love between men and women, and the gentle rest that comes at last to all. grief farewell Rosalind Miles
8ddd31c Now she and the widow had something in common, though loss did not pass from one person to another like a baton. It just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And she thought, scratching the coarseness of the horses's mane, it did not leave, once lodged, did it? It simply changed form, and asked repeatedly for attention and care as each year revealed a new knot to cry out and consider, smaller, sure, but never gone...Out of my body, these beautiful monsters. grief loss the-devourings Aimee Bender
585d6b8 Grief is not necessarily any prettier than death, and the grief-stricken do not wander like lambs grateful for the shepherd's guidance. They can be more like wounded wolves, snapping at those who would help them. grief Piers Anthony
06b7371 Only the survivors of a death are truly left alone. The connections that made up their life--both the deep connections and the apparently (until they are broken) insignificant connections--have all vanished. loneliness grief death human-connection survivors Joan Didion
69cf2e2 He knew as deeply as he knew anything that sedation was the prelude to anxiety, stimulation the prelude to exhaustion and consolation the prelude to disappointment, and so he lay on the red velvet sofa and did nothing to distract himself from the news of his mother's death. grief patrick-melrose funeral Edward St. Aubyn
21b544c And the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world that I had taken for granted: familiar faces, glad greetings: hey manito! For I had thought that this last touchstone of the past, at least, would be where I'd left it. grief loss home nostalgia Donna Tartt
9f7dce0 To draw me out, the therapist asks what I did for the holidays. When I tell him he says gently (he says everything gently), Sounds like that's one of the ways your loss has affected you: not wanting to be with other people. Hating to be with other people, I don't say. Terrified of being with other people. mourning solitude loneliness grief loss isolation Sigrid Nunez
7ed737e I confess to sudden rages. Walking in Midtown, rush hour's peak, people streaming in both directions, I find myself seething, ready to kill. Who are all these fucking people, and how is it fair, how is it even possible that all of them, these perfectly ordinary people, should be alive, when -- mourning rage grief loss death life Sigrid Nunez
a78cdca A friend of mine who is working on a memoir says, I hate the idea of writing as some kind of catharsis, because it seems like that can't possibly produce a good book. You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing, warns Natalia Ginzburg. Turn then to Isak Dinesen, who believed that you could make any sorrow bearable by putting into into a story or telling a story about it. grief loss sorrow writing Sigrid Nunez
b6d33f7 Sometimes I sit at my window looking out on the towers of the Abbas and weep silently. No one must know how I suffered. No one must know how I failed. Sometimes I go and stand in the ring of stones and it seems to me that my fate is more wretched then theirs. They were turned to stone while they were dancing defiance. I wish I could have been. grief sorrow Victoria Holt
41618ed In the months following James' death, on thought had returned time and again as she passed others in the street. What secrets did these people hold? What had they endured? She wondered how many people rushing in and out of shops, or on their way to their work, had lost a love, or known deep disappointment or grief, fear, or want, yet summoned the resilience to go on. Those lines across foreheads, those mouths downturned --- what were the ruts on life's road that wrought such marks, those signs of scars on the soul? sympathy grief resilience Jacqueline Winspear
fb37938 One sequence of these diary notes had lasted longer than most, and by their content he saw that they came from the time right after his father had died. One line stuck him like a thorn: Alone in the house. Must get used to it. He stared at her crabbed handwriting. He saw how it must have been, and sat down in the nearest chair. A spasm of sorrow passed through him, followed after a while by a wash of relief, as he realized that his mom was now finally freed of the intense burden of staying happy after his father was gone. Twenty years of driven, relentless effort. grief family diary Kim Stanley Robinson
8888681 "Will you be all right?" she asked me. It was not an empty question; she genuinely listened for my reply. "In time," I told her, and for the first time, I admitted that was true. As disloyal as the thought felt, I knew that as time passed, I would be myself again. And in that moment, I felt for the first time the sensation that Black Rolf had tried to describe to me. The wolfish part of my soul stirred, and, I heard near as clearly as if Nighteyes had truly shared the thought with me." grief loss love grieving-process recovery Robin Hobb
adb5f94 She understood loss, understood how it could leach into every fiber of one's being; how it could dull the shine on a sunny day, and how it could replace happiness with doubt, giving rise to a lingering fear that good fortune might be snatched back at any time. grief loss Jacqueline Winspear
ad486ad Doshla si vk'shchi malko sled polunoshch. Khv'rlila se na legloto s drekhite i zapushila, paleiki tsigara ot tsigara, za da go izchaka da sv'rshi pismoto, koeto tia znaela, che shche b'de d'lgo i trudno, i malko predi tri chasa, kogato zavili kuchetata, slozhila na og'nia voda za kafe, obliakla se v p'len traur i otriazala v dvora p'rvata roza, razts'fnala v utrinta. Ot izvestno vreme doktor Urbino be razbral kolko mnogo shcheshe da nenavizhda spomena za taia nepovtorima zhena i mu se struvashe, che znae zashcho: samo chovek bez printsipi mozheshe da se otdade s takava naslada na m'kata. grief love Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
069dd70 She had learned, long ago and in the intervening years when she was apart from all she loved, that to endure the most troubling times she had to break down time itself--one carefully crafted stitch after the other. If consideration of what the next hour might hold had been too difficult, then she thought only of another half and hour. time grief Jacqueline Winspear
1842053 They don't want to see me lose my home. They want me to come to my senses before it's too late. I need a better way to cope with my feelings of loss and guilt. I need bereavement therapy. Here are some names. I should think about medication. Here's what worked for them. There are books. There are websites. There are support groups. Healing won't come from withdrawing into a fantasy world, isolating myself, spending all my time with a dog. There is such a thing as pathological grief. There is the magical thinking of pathological grief, which is a kind of dementia. Which in their collective opinion is what I have. mourning grief loss bereavement healing intervention Sigrid Nunez
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