Grief

Always Remember Death Ends a Life Not a Relationship

When grief overtakes your body and you wonder how much more pain you can handle. 
Katie Mather
August 4, 2016
“You go on. You set one foot in front of the other and if a thin voice cries out somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear and keep going.”
— Geraldine Brooks, March
Tagged: Moving On, Moving Forward, Life, Change, Pain, Grief, Loss
“A wounded deer leaps highest.”
— Emily Dickinson, A wounded deer leaps highest
Tagged: Poetry, emily dickinson, writer, Grief, Pain
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days…Lightly, lightly—it’s the best advice ever given me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling.”
— Aldous Huxley, Island
Tagged: Life, Emotion, Trying, Grief, Pain, ENFP
“Tell me again about the part where grief is not my name.”
— Brenna Twohy, Untitled
Tagged: Grief, Break Up, Sad, Spilled Ink, Poetry, Depression
“If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. ”
— Paulo Coelho, By The River Pedra I Sat Down And Wept
Tagged: Pain, Loss, Longing, Love, Grief, Grieving, Death, Breakups, Moving On
“Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”
— Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes
Tagged: Loneliness, Love, Belonging, Being Alone, Pain, Grief, Loss
“My heart might be bruised, but it will recover and become capable of seeing beauty of life once more. It's happened before, it will happen again, I'm sure.”
— Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
Tagged: Love, Pain, Loss, Grief, Breakups
“Sadness does not last forever when we walk in the direction of that which we always desired.”
— Paulo Coelho, The Fifth Mountain
Tagged: Sadness, Desire, Moving On, Moving Forward, Grief, Loss
“When despair for the world grows in me 
and I wake in the night at the least sound 
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, 
I go and lie down where the wood drake 
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. 
I come into the peace of wild things 
who do not tax their lives with forethought 
of grief. I come into the presence of still water. 
And I feel above me the day-blind stars 
waiting with their light. For a time 
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
— Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
Tagged: Nature, Peace, Despair, Grief
“Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.”
— R. R. Martin, A Game Of Thrones
Tagged: Pain, Suffering, Grief, Trauma
“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep… that have taken hold.”
— Frodo, Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King
Tagged: Pain, Loss, Trauma, Grief, Moving On
“Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds—our stories about loneliness, rejection, grief, worthlessness—that we don’t realize they are in the past. They can’t hurt us anymore. We are protecting ourselves from losses that have already happened. It’s possible to come back. To see the life we have now. To take in the its goodness. Our goodness.”
— Geneen Roth, Women Food And God: An Unexpected Path To Almost Everything
Tagged: Pain, Grief, Stories, Perception, Worthlessness, Redemption, Acceptance, Moving On, Moving Forward
“Grandma died in January 1942. No one knows how often I think of her and still love her.”
— Ann Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Tagged: Love Always, Grief, Death, Losing Grandparents
“Sometimes 
it’s 9am on a tuesday morning 
and you’re standing at the kitchen bench waiting for the toast to pop up 
And the smell of dusty sunlight and earl gray tea makes you miss them so much
 you don’t know what to do with your hands.”
— Rosie Scanlan, On Missing Them
Tagged: Love, Missing Someone, Poetry, Breakups, Relationships, Grief
“It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief.”
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies: A Novel
Tagged: Grief, Sorrow, Death, Losing Someone
“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”
— Joan Didion, Where I Came From
Tagged: Loss, Grief, Perseverence, Death
“You are a shadow my body leaves on other girls.”
— Jon Sands, A Working List of Things I Will Never Tell You
Tagged: Loss, Breakups, Poetry, Love, Grief
“How can something be there
and then just not be there?

How do we forgive ourselves
for all the things we did not become?”
— Doc Luben, 14 Lines From Love Letters Or Suicide Notes
Tagged: forgiveness, Change, Pain, Loss, Grief
“I cannot imagine how we forgive ourselves for all of the things we didn’t say until it was too late.”
— Doc Luben, 14 Lines From Love Letters Or Suicide Notes
Tagged: forgiveness, Timing, Too Late, Grief, Regret, Letting Go
“Everybody wants to talk about the politics of my grief but nobody wants to talk about my grief.”
— Jejune Being, via Facebook
Tagged: Grief, Empathy, talk aboout it
“It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Moving On, strength, Starting Over, Trauma, Grief
“The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Grief, Re-invention
“You can either experience pain willingly or unwillingly, and pain that’s embraced by choice is much easier to tolerate than pain that must be endured by consequence.”
— Derek Doepker, Break Through Your BS: Uncover Your Brain's Blind Spots and Unleash Your Inner Greatness
Tagged: Pain, Embracing Pain, Suffering, Grief, Breakups, Moving On
“A good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.”
— Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events (13 Book Series)
Tagged: Weeping, Crying, Sadness, Grief, Loss
“The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world.”
— Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events (13 Book Series)
Tagged: Sadness, Loss, Grief
“If you have ever lost a loved one, then you know exactly how it feels. And if you have not, then you cannot possibly imagine it.”
— Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events (13 Book Series)
Tagged: Pain, Grief, Loss, Love
“Happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.”
— Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events (13 Book Series)
Tagged: Happiness, Sadness, Grief, Despair, Pain
“There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but a crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don’t know and even the people you don’t want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face.”
— Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events (13 Book Series)
Tagged: Crying, Sadness, Pain, Grief, Loss
“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”
— Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events (13 Book Series)
Tagged: Death, Grief, Love
“In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this.
I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away.
I can't say goodbye.”
— China Miéville, The Scar
Tagged: Loss, Pain, Healing, Grief