Quotes on Grief Observed

For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. _x000D_ Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.

For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.

I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?

The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.

God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.

Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear

I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't.

Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac?

It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.