Jane Welsh Carlyle
Essayist, Writer
"Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement."
Bereavement quotes
Bereavement
56 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Henry David Thoreau
Writer, Philosopher
"On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world."
Khalil Gibran
Poet, Writer
"When the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance."
John Donne
Poet, Cleric
"ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee"
William Faulkner
Novelist, Poet, Playwright
"I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town."
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Bereavement quotes (page 1 of 3)
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"There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it."
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"Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love."
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"It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy."
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"Life Lesson 3: You can't rush grief. It has its own timetable. All you can do is make sure there are lots of soft places around - beds, pillows, arms, laps."
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"You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind."
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"Grief is a process, not a state."
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"we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all."
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"The death of a beloved is an amputation."
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"She heard him mutter, 'Can you take away this grief?' 'I'm sorry,' she replied. 'Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for."
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"If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love."
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"To lose what we have never owned might seem an eccentric bereavement, but Presumption has its own affliction as well as claim."
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"The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude."
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"There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example."
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"Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates."
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"No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep."
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"It was the meanest moment of eternity."
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"I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you."
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"For precious friends hid in death's dateless night."
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"Cordelia! stay a little. Ha! What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft."
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