#gr

Why are the photographs of him as a little boy so incredibly hard to look at? Something is over. Now instead of those shiny moments being things we can share together in delighted memories, I, the survivor, have to bear them alone. So it is with all the memories of him. They all lead into blackness. All I can do is remember him, I cannot experience him. Nothing new can happen between us. ↗

— Nicholas Wolterstorff

#grief #loss-of-child #nicholas-wolterstorff #death

Strange combination, isn't it--gratitude and resentment? But this is the way I think. Actually, I think everybody thinks that way. Even the children of the humans who died long ago, I think they lived their lives holding similar contradictory thoughts about their parents. They were raised to learn about love and death, and they lived out their lives passing from the sunny spots to the shady spots of this world. ↗

— Otsuichi

#contradictions #contradictory #death #epiphany #gratitude

Death doesn't happen instantly. For a little while, you hover around your body, confused. What you want more than anything is to go home, to be safe, to know you're okay. But my life was over. ↗

— Caroline Flohr

#death-and-grief #flohr #flor #grieving #heaven

It's not that I am not moved by these things, that I don't them in my life. But lately, their power has diminished." - 140 ↗

— Robin Romm

#death-of-a-loved-one #grief #death

She took the posters downtown that afternoon. She filled a rolling suitcase with them ... she took a stapler. And a box of staples. And hope. I think of those things. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape, the hope. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and hop. ↗

— Jonathan Safran Foer

#grief #hope #loss #stapler #staples

This is death. I don't want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#long-life #monograph #time #death

In many ways. . .the completeness of biography, the achievement of its professionalization, is an ironic fiction, since no life can ever be known completely, nor would we want to know every fact about an individual. Similarly, no life is ever lived according to aesthetic proportions. The "plot" of a biography is superficially based on the birth, life and death of the subject; "character," in the vision of the author. Both are as much creations of the biographer, as they are of a novelist. We content ourselves with "authorized fictions. ↗

— Ira Bruce Nadel

#biography #death

Iar gclos báis Mháire i dtuairim cháich má fágbhadh m'ainnir faoi fhód, níor bhuadhaigh bás ar Mháire im mheabhair-se fós. ↗

— Pádraigín Haicéad

#death #gaeilge #gaelic #grá #ireland

There is a phantom that flies with the banshees. It strangles the throat, pierces the heart and consumes the body with pain that only time and tears can expel. ↗

— Susan Denning

#grief #death

In the middle of the cemetery is a grassy plane, strangely vacant. There are no granite tombs or crumbling concrete, just a sun-washed treeless patch of green known as "No Man's Land." Here 1,500 unidentified bodies are buried. At one time, their skin burned with yellow fever; now they lie in a cool, dark place where long ago their arms and legs, hands and feet, were intertwined for eternity. ↗

— Molly Caldwell Crosby

#elmwood #graveyard #graveyards #medicine #yellow