19 Quotes Tagged: grief-and-loss

To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul's hall.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

We all know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a time when we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table.

Let them become the name on the trust accounts.

Let go of them in the water.

Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of them in the water.

For my part I have no joy in tears after dinnertime. There will always be a new dawn tomorrow. Yet I can have no objection to tears for any mortal who dies and goes to his destiny. And this is the only consolation we wretched mortals can give, to cut our hair and let the tears roll down our faces.

You are alone. There is a wall now where none existed before, standing between you and the rest of the world.

Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs.

There are no ghost, but up here" — she gestured to her head — "it's a haunted house.

But hers was a strange heart, sad in its very nature, and she could never weep and ease it as other women do, for her tears never brought her comfort.

They explained their concerns and she said, “I feel a kind of isolation that you’ll never be able to understand. What you see is a mere fraction of what’s happening inside, but at least my inner and outer worlds are reflecting each other. You wouldn’t want me to throw worlds off balance, would you?

I'm building a grave for my heart, that it may rest; I spin a cocoon around myself, because everywhere it's winter, in blissfull memories I wrap myself against the storm.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.

It could be argued that death is inherently absurd, and that grinning is not necessarily an inappropriate response. I mean absurd in the sense of ridiculous, unreasonable. One second a person is there, the next they're not.

spring passes
and one remembers one's innocence
summer passes
and one remembers one's exuberance
autumn passes
and one remembers one's reverence
winter passes
and one remembers one's perseverance
there is a season that never passes and that is the season of glass — Season of Glass, 1981

An experience most deeply felt is the most difficult to convey in words. Remembering brings the emptiness, the acutely painful awareness of irreparable loss. ...Every time I see the grave, I get that empty feeling where something was, and isn't anymore, and will never be again.