“You retire when you are sick and when you can't do it any more or when the public retires you. That's the most painful, because that's the one that leaves you wanting to accomplish more.”
Grieving feeling
Grieving Quotes — page 128 of 132
“I feel perhaps my heart is still in China.”
“I think that public grieving is a good thing. People need to be grieved; loss needs to be acknowledged publicly, because it helps to confer a sense of reality on the loss but also because it makes it known that this was a real life.”
“After years of abuse, it was difficult for me to understand God's love. It took me years to truly understand it.”
“I find afflictions to be good for me. I have always found them so. Afflictions are happy means in the hands of the Holy Spirit to subdue my corruptions, my pride, my evil passions, my inordinate love to the creature. Afflictions soften my hard heart, bring me to my knees, increase faith, increase love, increase humility, increase self-denial. Afflictions make me poor in spirit, and nothing in my own eyes.”
“Earth has no sorrow that earth can not heal.”
“He had gone to the higher Sierras... [about Ralph Waldo Emerson's death]”
“His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead, Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed.”
“Many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death.”
“My friends should drink a dozen of Claret on my Tomb.”
“I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave - thank God for the quiet grave”
“Severn - I - lift me up - I am dying - I shall die easy; don't be frightened - be firm, and thank God it has come.”
“Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it back to God, He will use it to do great things in us & through us, because suffering is fertile... it an grow new life.”
“That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence”
“What can we do?" Mom asked again. I shrugged. But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.”
“Funerals...are for the living.”
“I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.”
“I didn't want to see them lower him into the ground in the spot he'd picked out with his dad, and I didn't want to see his parents sink to their knees in the dew-wet grass and moan in pain.”
“Mourning has its place but also its limits.”
“Vanish. Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her. Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes. Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall. I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six. I know what it is I am now experiencing. I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”