Grief Quotes - Page 47

Separate from the other unnamed billions who walk the earth, each of these little groups of three or five or twelve, brought together by the shuffle of chance, then welded by blood, sees in itself the whole of earth, or all that matters of it. What happens to one of the three or five or twelve will happen to them all. Whatever grief or triumph may touch any one will touch every one, as they are carried forward into the unknowable under the brilliant, terrifying sun which nourishes all.

There is hardly any grief that an hour's reading will not dissipate.

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

If we could not forget, we would never be free from grief.

From the onset, I saw victims on both ends of the gun. I will mourn my son's death for the rest of my life. Now, however, my grief has been transformed into a powerful commitment to change. Change is urgently needed in a society where children kill children.

But what was there to say? Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief. Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.

In our culture I think most people think of grief as sadness, and that's certainly part of it, a large part of it, but there's also this thorniness, these edges that come out.

Family members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own grief, tends to degrade the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person who was once their own.

Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.

I think you have to deal with grief in the sense that you have to recognize that you have it, and say that it's OK to have all the sadness.

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. It is tumbleweed distress that thrives on thin air, growing despite its detachment from the nourishing earth. It can be described only in metaphor and allegory

Funeral: a pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that deepens our groans and doubles our tears.

I have noticed that after a time of deep sorrow the greatest comfort may come from a person you do not know well.

Does the open wound in another's breast soften the pain of the gaping wound in our own? Or does the blood which is welling from another man's side staunch that which is pouring from our own? Does the general anguish of our fellow creatures lessen our own private and particular anguish? No, no, each suffers on his own account, each struggles with his own grief, each sheds his own tears.

Music the fiercest grief can charm, And fate's severest rage disarm. Music can soften pain to ease, And make despair and madness please; Our joys below it can improve, And antedate the bliss above.

To be bowed by grief is folly; Naught is gained by melancholy; Better than the pain of thinking, Is to steep the sense in drinking.

Chorus: Zeus, who guided men to think who laid it down that wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart grief of memory; against our pleasure we are temperate.

Do no cheat thy Heart and tell her, 'Grief will pass away.'

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

Where but in the very asshole of comedown is redemption: as where but brought low, where but in the grief of failure, loss, error do we discern the savage afflictions that turn us around: where but in the arrangements love crawls us through

It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.

When remedies are past, the griefs are ended By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended. To mourn a mischief that is past and gone Is the next way to draw new mischief on. What cannot be preserved when fortune takes, Patience her injury a mockery makes. The robb'd that smiles steals something for the thief; He robs himself that spends a bootless grief.

You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, As full of grief as age; wretched in both.