GRIEF QUOTES
quotations about grief
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Grief comes, a giantess, with strength to bind;
She grips our hand and glares into our eyes;
If we but kiss her mouth, she daily dies,
Fades into air, and leaves a flower behind.
WILLIAM WILSEY MARTIN
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"Grief"
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It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.
SUE MONK KIDD
The Secret Life of Bees
Compare your griefs with other men's, and they will seem less.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
grief is a house
where the chairs
have forgotten how to hold us
the mirrors how to reflect us
the walls how to contain us
JANDY NELSON
The Sky Is Everywhere
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
JOAN DIDION
The Year of Magical Thinking
Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
RUMI
attributed, The Philosophy Book
Excess of grief for the deceased is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.
XENOPHON
attributed, Day's Collacon
For wherein is life sweet to him who suffers grief?
AESCHYLUS
fragment, Hoplon Krisis
Ye, O ye
Shall grieve, and ye shall grieve, and ye shall grieve.
Your Life shall bend and o'er his shuttle toil,
A weaver weaving at the loom of grief.
SIDNEY LANIER
"The Jacquerie: A Fragment"
Whatever sorrow thy young heart have found,
Open it well, this ever-sacred wound
Dealt by dark angels--give thy soul relief.
Naught makes us nobler than a noble grief.
EMMA LAZARUS
"Muse"
Joy and grief are things of great hazard and danger in the life of man: The one breaks the heart; the other intoxicates the head.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as if grief could be lessened by baldness.
CICERO
Tusculan Disputations
Receding from grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
It's funny, how one can look back on a sorrow one thought one might well die of at the time, and know that one had not yet reckoned the tenth part of true grief.
JACQUELINE CAREY
Kushiel's Dart
You do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
Grief is like the wake behind a boat. It starts out as a huge wave that follows close behind you and is big enough to swamp and drown you if you suddenly stop moving forward. But if you do keep moving, the big wake will eventually dissipate. And after a long time, the waters of your life get calm again, and that is when the memories of those who have left begin to shine as bright and as enduring as the stars above.
JIMMY BUFFETT
A Salty Piece of Land
Love is an engraved invitation to grief.
SUNSHINE O'DONNELL
Open Me
I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
The Return of the King
We postpone the finality of heartbreak by clinging to hope. Though this might be acceptable during early or transitional stages of grief, ultimately it is no way to live. We need both hands free to embrace life and accept love, and that's impossible if one hand has a death grip on the past.
KRISTIN ARMSTRONG
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.
C. S. LEWIS
A Grief Observed