“Grief does not end and love does not die and nothing fills its graven place. With grace, pain is transmuted into the gold of wisdom and compassion and the lesser coin of muted sadness and resignation; but something leaden of it remains, to become the kernel arond which more pain accretes (a black pearl): one pain becomes every other pain ... unless one strips away, one by one, the layers of pain to get to the heart of the pain - and this causes more pain, pain so intense as to feel like evisceration.”
Grieving feeling
Grieving Quotes — page 93 of 132
“The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.”
“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.”
“Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.”
“Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.”
“This will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.”
“The loss of a job may be the wake up-call needed to redeem the fire of your genius.”
“One is not allowed a grief for a life never lived. Yet one has buried the fruit of love, and a great deal of hope and many dreams.”
“I soon began to dream. ... I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. ... I left my bed and wandered downstairs. ... There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers, 'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin.''”
“The fever called "living" Is conquer'd at last.”
“The spirit walks of every day deceased.”
“Virtue alone has majesty in death.”
“He mourns the dead who lives as they desire.”
“Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.”
“The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek's soul had become the bow. He was playing his life...He played that which he would never play again.”
“Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.”
“Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.”
“The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.”
“O Death, O Beyond, Thou art sweet, thou art strange!”
“So mothers have God's license to be missed.”