quotations about grief
Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, 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.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Eat
There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
How long shall I harbor sorrow in my soul, grief in my heart day after day? Look, answer me, O Lord, my God!
DAVID
Psalms 13:3-4
In life there is not time to grieve long.
T. S. ELIOT
Murder in the Cathedral
I will instruct my sorrows to be proud: For grief is proud, and makes his owner stoop.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King John
Small leisure have the poor for grief.
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
"The Witch's Daughter"
People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
C. S. LEWIS
letter to Sir Henry Willink, December 3, 1959
The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
If my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine?
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human
The tears I feel today
I'll wait to shed tomorrow.
Though I'll not sleep this night
Nor find surcease from sorrow.
My eyes must keep their sight:
I dare not be tear-blinded.
I must be free to talk
Not choked with grief, clear-minded.
My mouth cannot betray
The anguish that I know.
Yes, I'll keep my tears til later:
But my grief will never go.
ANNE MCCAFFREY
Dragonsinger
Ah, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Adonais
But what was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.
ARUNDHATI ROY
The God of Small Things
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Sonnets
To weep is to make less the depth of grief.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Henry VI, Part III
The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Crime and Punishment
When you spun away in the whirlwind
my grief followed you
a whimpering spaniel
you were gone your absence
was absolute & my grief sat
on my kitchen table
a vase of bloody roses
my grief sprang from my breastbone
a young birch swaying & scabrous
my grief was a dull pot
at the back of the stove.
SANDRA M. GILBERT
"Grief: A History", Aftermath
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
Memoirs of a Geisha
The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
But grief makes a monster out of us sometimes ... and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can't forgive yourself for.
MELINA MARCHETTA
On the Jellicoe Road
I'd sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It's better to know one's robbed than to think one's going to be murdered.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt