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Grief Quotes

    “At some point we will all confront a dark moment in life. If not the passing of a loved one, then something else that crushes your spirit and leaves you wondering about your future. In that dark moment, reach deep inside yourself and be your very best.”

    William A. McRaven, Make Your Bed (Page 81) | ★ Featured on this book list.

      “That kind of violence… it tears open a hole, it’s like a black hole. It sucks language and meaning and all sense and whenever we show up and try to make sense of it, it reins hallow because there’s no making sense of this kind of mass violence—mass suffering. And when people have just survived it, it’s like you’re sitting on the edge of that black hole and you’re about to be sucked in and the only way that you don’t fall in is if someone is holding your hand. That’s all it takes.”

      Valarie Kaur

        “There is no fixing grief—there is only bearing it. And only by bearing it together do we survive it. There are no right words. There are no perfect words. If you need words you say, ‘You are grieving but you are not grieving alone.’”

        Valarie Kaur

          “It’s OK to cry. When Marcus’ [Aurelius] tutor died, he cried uncontrollably. He wouldn’t allow anyone to try to calm him down or remind him of the need for a prince to maintain his composure. ‘Neither philosophy nor empire,’ Marcus’s stepfather Antoninus said, ‘takes away natural feeling.’ The same goes for you. No matter how much philosophy you’ve read. No matter how much older you’ve gotten or how important your position or how many eyes are on you. It’s OK to cry. You’re only human. It’s okay to act like one.”

          Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog

            “I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season, how without grief (it seems) they can let go and go deep into their roots for renewal and sleep… Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”

            May Sarton

              “You have to shift from the gloom and doom and focus instead on what you love. That’s all you can do in the face of these things. Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”

              Katherine, via Between Two Kingdoms (Page 312)

                “Grief isn’t meant to be silenced—to live in the body and be carried alone.”

                Katherine, via Between Two Kingdoms (Page 308)

                  “Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.”

                  Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 190)

                    “For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.”

                    Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 122)

                      “The core of life is about losses and deaths both subtle and catastrophic, over and over again, and also about loving and rising again. The cancer, the car accident—these are extreme experiences of other trajectories we’re on—aging, the loss of love, the death of dreams, the child leaving home. Grief and gladness, sickness and health, are not separate passages. They’re entwined and grow from and through each other, planting us, if we’ll let them, more profoundly in our bodies in all their flaws and their grace.”

                      Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise (Page 68)

                        “…Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”

                        William Faulkner, The Wild Palms, via Sunbeams (Page 113)

                          “Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard, and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.”

                          Oscar Wilde, via Sunbeams (Page 82)

                            “[Closure] is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.”

                            Stephen Grosz, The Examined Life (Page 210)

                              “I was dying.  And I couldn’t gain any kind of control on the situation.  There was no, ‘mind over matter-ing’ it for me.  My lungs were failing.  And I got hit with this huge wave of grief.  Which is not something that I had expected.  As someone who had always known that I would die young—and I had always accepted that and been okay with that—I was expecting maybe some fear, maybe some hesitation, maybe to turn into a 5-year-old then cry and want my mom… But I wasn’t expecting grief.  And what I felt grief for wasn’t the fact that I was dying, it wasn’t about fear of the unknown, it was none of that.  I felt grief for the life I could’ve lived.  I felt grief for life itself.  For all of the possibilities that it held.  And I was mad at myself.  I spent, literally, 30 minutes as my CO2 levels were rising and I slowly started to hallucinate, being thoroughly pissed at myself for waiting around for the world to tell me I was okay even though I was sick.  For waiting around for someone to tell me that I was healthy enough, that I was better enough, I was good enough to live a life that I wanted to live.  I wish that I yelled at every single person that had come into the room and said that they were sorry for me.” ~ Claire Wineland (20), EEM LA 2018

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