Grief Quotes

Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.

Ambrose Bierce

I will instruct my sorrows to be proud For grief is proud an't makes his owner stoop

William Shakespeare

They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite

Cassandra Clare

It was too perfect to last,' so I am tempted to say of our marriage. But it can be meant in two ways. It may be grimly pessimistic - as if God no sooner saw two of His creatures happy than He stopped it ('None of that here!'). As if He were like the Hostess at the sherry-party who separates two guests the moment they show signs of having got into a real conversation. But it could also mean 'This had reached its proper perfection. This had become what it had in it to be. Therefore of course it would not be prolonged.' As if God said, 'Good; you have mastered that exercise. I am very pleased with it. And now you are ready to go on to the next.

C.S. Lewis

Love may precede respect but it cannot survive the loss of it.

Joe L. Wheeler

Those things that hurt, instruct.

Benjamin Franklin

If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can't someone be healed by happiness?

Jodi Picoult

The gallantry of his grief did put me into a towering passion.

William Shakespeare

My grief lies all within, And these external manners of lament Are merely shadows to the unseen grief That swells with silence in the tortured soul

William Shakespeare

Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows

William Shakespeare

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.

Victor Hugo

The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.

Orson Scott Card

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aidbeing ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbellyof a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times Istayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that Iwould not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that myfather worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to comehome to a house that felt too big for us.

Jodi Picoult

They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?

C.S. Lewis

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand. Unless, of course, you can literally believe all that stuff about family reunions 'on the further shore,' pictured in entirely earthly terms. But that is all unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs. There's not a word of it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn't be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back. How well the Spiritualists bait their hook! 'Things on this side are not so different after all.' There are cigars in Heaven. For that is what we should all like. The happy past restored.

C.S. Lewis

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

C.S. Lewis

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.

C.S. Lewis

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling action after action had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an harrow to the string then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead through to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once now so many culs de sac.

C.S. Lewis

The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.

J. M. Synge

He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.

Jodi Picoult