quotations about grief
The person who grieves, suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.
EDMUND BURKE
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Happiness is beneficial for the body but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
MARCEL PROUST
In Search of Lost Time
There is an art to grieving. To grieve well the loss of anyone or anything--a parent, a love, a child, an era, a home, a job--is a creative act. It takes attention and patience and courage. But many of us do not know how to grieve. We were never taught, and we don't see examples of full-bodied grieving around us. Our culture favors the fast-food model of mourning--get over it quick and get back to work; affix the bandage of "closure" and move on.
ELIZABETH LESSER
Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
Grief is itself a med'cine.
WILLIAM COWPER
Charity
It does not require a flood of grief to drown a child's heart.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Shake hands with Pain, give greeting unto Grief,
Those angels in disguise, and thy glad soul
From height to height, from star to shining star,
Shall climb and claim blest immortality.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Immortality"
In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life.
NICHOLAS SPARKS
The Notebook
Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
Eat
What most people don't realize is that after the funeral, the hard work of grieving is just beginning. Between three and nine months after the death, the full impact of the loss hits. You may find that a whole year goes by in which you use all your energy just to keep up the pretense of functioning. Gradually, you come to the realization that things will never go back to the way they were before your loved one died, but you will survive.
LORENE HANLEY DUQUIN
Grieving with the Help of Your Catholic Faith
Faded smiles oft linger in the face,
While grief's first flakes fall silent on the heart!
ALFRED AUSTIN
"Unseasonable Snows", Soliloquies in Song
Ruin is strong and swift--
She outstrips them all by far, stealing a march,
leaping over the whole wide earth to bring mankind to grief.
HOMER
The Iliad
There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
If my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine?
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human
Grief tears his heart, and drives him to and fro,
In all the raging impotence of woe.
HOMER
The Iliad
The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
How long shall I harbor sorrow in my soul, grief in my heart day after day? Look, answer me, O Lord, my God!
DAVID
Psalms 13:3-4
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C. S. LEWIS
A Grief Observed
People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
C. S. LEWIS
letter to Sir Henry Willink, December 3, 1959
Concealed griefs are the most consuming, as secret maladies are the most fatal.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite.
CASSANDRA CLARE
Clockwork Prince