grieving Quotes

If art can help us grieve, can help us mourn, then lean on it.

“It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.”

“We knelt down together, with my child pressed to my heart, and my other arm round the faithful, loving old friend I was about to leave forever.”

“When I thought about Jakob, I realized that his cold dedication to Find helped me get over my separation from Ethan—there was no time for grieving. I had too much work to do.”

″ ‘You be as angry as you need to be,’ she said. ‘Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not your grandma, not your dad, no one. And if you need to break things, then by God, you break them good and hard.’ ”

“Mass movement do not usually rise until the prevailing order has been discredited. The discrediting is not an automatic result of the blunders and abuses of those in power, but the deliberate work of men of words with a grievance.”

“Our psyches seem to protect us until we’re able to confront the pain, and then the internal alarm clock rings, telling us it’s time to wake up and go to work.”

“Someone did us all a grave injustice by implying that mourning has a distinct beginning, middle, and end.”

“When a daughter loses a mother, she learns early that human relationships are temporary, that terminations are beyond her control, and her feelings of basic trust and security are shattered. ”

“I miss her when I can’t remember what works best on insect bites, and when nobody else cares how rude the receptionist at the doctor’s office was to me. (...) It’s the fact that I can’t ask her for these things that makes me miss her all over again.”

“When my mother died, a lot of people tried to comfort me by saying, ‘Well, you still have your father. You still have a brother and sister. You have a wonderful husband and beautiful children.’ And you know what? That’s all true. That’s all completely true. But I still don’t have my mother.”

“It’s impossible to undo fifteen or twenty years of learned behavior with a mother in only a few months. If it takes nine months to bring a life into this world, what makes us think we can let go of someone in less?”

“But the missing her, the wanting her, the wishing she were still here—I will not lie to you, although you probably already know. That part never ends.”

“There’s no good way to lose a loved one—just, in the words of one twenty-six-year-old woman, ‘different kinds of hell.’ ”

“When a mother dies, a daughter’s mourning never completely ends.”

“Every cause is painful, and every loss leaves us wondering how we could have acted otherwise to prevent the death. But because different causes of death provoke sufficiently different responses, the specific way a mother dies or leaves influences how her daughter will respond.”

“Tears alone were sweet to me, for in my heart’s desire they had taken the place of my friend.”

“Matthias, don’t be ashamed, I know why you cry and grieve. It is because you are kind and good not a hardhearted pitiless rat like Cluny.”

“The grieving have urgent reasons, even an urgent need, to feel sorry for themselves.”

“The cat said: She’s upstairs in her room. Mourning and grieving. Bemoaning her plight. Because old Mr. Fox is dead.”