Quotes on Grief

Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature's way of letting in only as much as we can handle.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

It’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are .. muffled, sort of. Then, ever now and then, I lift the corner of the blanket just to check, and .. whoa! Like a knife! I’m not sure that will ever change.

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.

There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.

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.

Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived.

Whoever happens to give birth to mischievous children lives always with unending grief in his spirit and heart.

Spiritual Love is born of sorrow. . . . For men love one another with spiritual love only when they have suffered the same sorrow together, when through long days they have ploughed the stony ground buried beneath the common yoke of a common grief. It is then that they know one another and feel one another and feel with one another in their common anguish, and so they pity one another and love one another.

Grief walks upon the heels of pleasure; married in haste, we repent at leisure.

The really unhappy person is the one who leaves undone what they can do, and starts doing what they don't understand; no wonder they come to grief.

Do I get grief for the fact that in communicating, say, about the baboons I'm doing so much anthropomorphizing? One hopes that the parts that are blatantly ridiculous will be perceived as such. I've nonetheless been stunned by some of my more humorless colleagues - to see that they were not capable of recognizing that.

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.

Neither happiness nor grief are everlasting in this life - but one of the two is everlasting in the next. Which one do you want?

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.

Deem no man happy until he passes the end of his life without suffering grief.

I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss, and gratitude for her all-too-short life. It is a chance to show to the whole world the British nation united in grief and respect.

Grief, like Covid-19, mutates and escapes the inoculation of both time and the reassurance of loving friends. It is less sledgehammer and more screwdriver, drilling little holes in your head and heart, leaving you haunted by the ifs and buts of your decisions.

To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief - that to do so would be taboo somehow.