#grief

And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fullfilment. you should be free indeed when your days are not without care nor your nights without a word and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked unbound. ↗

— Kahlil Gibran

#grief #strength #freedom

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I’d begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin. He slid it across the counter to me—Don’t worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change. ↗

— Laura Anderson Kurk

#family #glass-girl #grief #laura-anderson-kurk #love

I was helpless in trying to return people's kindness, but also helpless to resist it. Kindness is a scarier force than cruelty, that's for sure. Cruelty isn't that hard to understand. I had no trouble comprehending why the phone company wanted to screw me over; they just wanted to steal some money, it was nothing personal. That's the way of the world. It made me mad, but it didn't make me feel stupid. If anything, it flattered my intelligence. Accepting all that kindness, though, made me feel stupid. Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous. We know the universe is out to burn us, and it gets us all the way it got Renee, but we don't burn each other, not always. We are kind people in an unkind world, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens. How do you pretend you don't know about it, after you see it? How do you go back to acting like you don't need it? How do you even the score and walk off a free man? You can't. I found myself forced to let go of all sorts of independence I thought I had, independence I had spent years trying to cultivate. That world was all gone, and now I was a supplicant, dependent on the mercy of other people's psychic hearts. ↗

— Rob Sheffield

#grief #kindness #intelligence

Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, expels diseases, softens every pain, subdues the rage of poison, and the plague. ↗

— John Armstrong

#each #every #exalts #grief #joy

He that is thy friend indeed, he will help thee in thy need: if thou sorrow, he will weep; if you wake, he cannot sleep; thus of every grief in heart he with thee doth bear a part. ↗

— Richard Barnfield

#cannot #doth #every #friend #grief

...nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaningless itself. ↗

— Joan Didion

#meaningless #void #experience

But grief is a walk alone. Others can be there, and listen. But you will walk alone down your own path, at your own pace, with your sheared-off pain, your raw wounds, you denial, anger, and bitter loss. You'll come to your own peace, hopefully, but it will be on your own, in your own time. ↗

— Cathy Lamb

#anger

Grief is the price we pay for love. ↗

— Elizabeth II

#love #pay #price

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage. ↗

— Paul Engle

#bled #delight #drip #grief #head

Take any emotion—love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. “But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment’. ↗

— Mitch Albom

#detachment #emotions #grief #life #love