#grief

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

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

What madness, to love a man as something more than human! I lived in a fever, convulsed with tears and sighs that allowed me neither rest nor peace of mind. My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry. Everything that was not what my friend had been was dull and distasteful. I had heart only for sighs and tears, for in them alone I found some shred of consolation. ↗

— Augustine of Hippo

#friendship #grief #loss #friendship

Few of us will forget the wail of mingled grief, rage and horror which rose from the camp when the Indians returned to it and recognized their slaughtered warriors, women, and children. ↗

— John Gibbon

#children #few #forget #grief #horror

It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me...was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn't have gone through and couldn't get back to the place I hadn't meant to leave. Actually, it was other way round: I hadn't gone anywhere and nothing was changed, so far as the roof over our heads was concerned, it was just that she was in the cemetery. ↗

— William Maxwell

#change

He saw so many emotions mingled on her face: anger disappointment, fear – and defiance. Like her daughter, thought Fenoglio again. So uncompromising, so strong. Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn’t break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out, very slowly. ↗

— Cornelia Funke

#men #women #anger

I realized, it is not the time that heals, but what we do within that time that creates positive change. ↗

— Diane Dettmann

#loss #renewal #spouse #widows #change

The depth of the feeling continued to surprise and threaten me, but each time it hit again and I bore it...I would discover that it hadn't washed me away. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#grief #faith

Grief is only the memory of widowed affections. ↗

— James Martineau

#affections #grief #memory #only #widowed

Here’s what I know: death abducts the dying, but grief steals from those left behind. ↗

— Katherine Owen

#heroine-s-journey #loss #love #romance #death