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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #grief
I’m not sure about all the particulars that led to this moment. Do I believe life is a series of dots to be connected…or that no one can outrun destiny…or that all roads lead to truth and coincidence is a lie to distract us? The reason I was in this place no longer mattered. The harsh reality stared me in the face and demanded an immediate decision. Walk away and blame it on my age. Or stay and try to help a woman who had slowly become my friend over the last few weeks. ↗
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand. Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions 'on the further shore,' pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There's not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn't be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the Spiritualists bait their hook! 'Things on this side are not so different after all.' There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored. ↗
I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it - assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks you from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But on that day, ... almost a year after Khader's death, I couldn't understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I'd too long denied. I couldn't understand it, so i tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can't bite down on assassin grief and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss. ↗
Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing." Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me. But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kindness." He wiped my cheeks, saying Ssshh. I buried my face in his shoulder. True kindness is stabilizing," I went on. "When you feel it and when you express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. Like all there is to achieve. It's life, demystified. A place out of self, a network of simple pleasures, not a waltz, but like whirls within a waltz." You're the one now," Jack said definitively. "That's why you met her. She had something she had to pass on." (p. 95) ↗
If suddenly you do not exist, if suddenly you no longer live, I shall live on. I do not dare, I do not dare to write it, if you die. I shall live on. For where a man has no voice, there, my voice. Where blacks are beaten, I cannot be dead. When my brothers go to prison I shall go with them. When victory, not my victory, but the great victory comes, even though I am mute I must speak; I shall see it come even though I am blind. No, forgive me. If you no longer live, if you, beloved, my love, if you have died, all the leaves will fall in my breast, it will rain on my soul night and day, the snow will burn my heart, I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow, my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but I shall stay alive, because above all things you wanted me indomitable, and, my love, because you know that I am not only a man but all mankind. ↗
He was like the other half of myself,' says Boris...Ulrich says, 'You haven't lost {him}, you know. I don't know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes. 'He'll find his way inside you, and you'll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you'll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinons, or your hair has turned like his. 'There are no more facts about him -- that part is over. Now is the time for essential things...Gradually you'll grow older than him, and love him as your son. 'You'll live astride the line that separates life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them; you'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgment falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being. ↗
I am not functioning very well. Living with the knowledge that the baby is dead is painful. I feel so far away from you, God. I can only try to believe that you are sustaining me and guiding me through this. Please continue to stand by my side. ↗
Snapping shut his mobile, Dalgliesh reflected that murder, a unique crime for which no reparation is ever possible, imposes it own compulsions as well as it's conventions. He doubted whether Macklefield [the murder victim's Will attorney] would have interrupted his country weekend for a less sensational crime. As a young officer he, too, had been touched, if unwillingly and temporarily, by the power of murder to attract even while it appalled and repelled. He had watched how people involved as innocent bystanders, provided they were unburdened by grief or suspicion, were engrossed by homicide, drawn inexorably to the place where the crime had occurred in fascinated disbelief. The crowd and the media who served them had not yet congregated outside the wrought-iron gates of the Manor. But they would come, and he doubted whether Chandler-Powell's [owner of the Manor where the murder was committed] private security team would be able to do more than inconvenience them. ↗
