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Grief Quotes

    “If you are in pain––be it in life, work or love––reflect on a time you were hurting so deeply and so gutturally. If you retrace your steps and walk back to this broken place, you will surely find a bed of wildflowers growing there. Raid them. Cut them. Bunch them into a bouquet. Place them on your kitchen counter. On the days when your heart is so heavy, you wish you could pluck it out of your chest and wring it out in the kitchen sink––don’t. Instead, gaze upon the flowers on the counter and remind yourself that healing takes time.”

    Cole Schafer

      “There was this coffee shop we used to go to, at the university. We’d just sit together, together but silent. Happy silent. Reading newspapers, drinking coffee. It was hard to avoid places like that. We used to walk around everywhere. His troublesome soul lingered on every street… I kept telling his memory to piss the fuck off but it wouldn’t. Grief is a bastard. If I’d have stayed any longer, I’d have hated humanity. So, when a research position came up in Svalbard I was like, yes, this has come to save me… I wanted to be somewhere he had never been. I wanted somewhere where I didn’t have to feel his ghost. But the truth is, it only half works, you know? Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life.”

      Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 120)

        “It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable.”

        Nick Cave

          “I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love. The only way that I can “handle” Grief, then, is the same way that I “handle” Love — by not “handling” it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.”

          Elizabeth Gilbert 

            “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)