Quotes on Grief

“Grief turns into healing when you relinquish the pain and helplessness you feel, because there is nothing you can do to bring the deceased person back, and

shift your thoughts to what you can do to honor that person’s memory. The best remembrance of a loved one is to carry on what that person stood for. 

What unique qualities did that person possess?  What were his or her interests or wishes?  To insure that the meaning of that person’s life continues after

death, you can’t dwell on your feelings of loss indefinitely.  If you allow them to consume you, your focus becomes fixed on you – your rage, your sorrow, your

loneliness – rather than the person who is gone.  Shift your focus to doing justice to that person’s memory, and your pain will begin to diminish.” 

--Maxine Schnall  from: What Doesn't Kill You Makes you Stronger: Turning Bad Breaks into Blessings

"The cycle of grief has its own timetable. Until that cycle is honored and completed we are moving along life's path with an anchor down."

--Ann Linnea in Deep Water Passage

“... joy and sorrow are inseparable. . .

together they come and when one sits alone with you .

remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.” 

--Kahil Gibran

"Tears have a wisdom all their own.  They come when a person has relaxed enough to let go and to work through his sorrow.

They are the natural bleeding of an emotional wound, carrying the poison out of the system.  Here lies the road to Recovery." 

-- F. Alexander Magoun

"Even hundredfold grief is divisible by love." 

-- Jareb Teague
 

 “There is no grief like the grief that does not speak"

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss – that is all.  It will take mind and memory

months and possibly years to gather the details and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.”

--Mark Twain

"Grief doesn't proceed in a linear fashion.  It circles.  You feel better. You feel yourself heal. 

And then, wham! -- you're back on your emotional knees.  Still, as the days pass, the circles widen. 

When grief returns again, it finds you stronger." 

 “In the months after my daughter’s death, I filled four notebooks with entries – writing sometimes daily,

sometimes several times a day, sometimes only once in several days…  It was a means of moving the grief away,

getting it down somewhere else, siphoning it off.”

-- Martha Whitman Hickman

"I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them.  The gratitude

has finally conquered the loss.

--Rita Mae Brown

"The caterpillar dies so the butterfly could be born. And, yet, the caterpillar lives in the butterfly and they are but one. So, when I die, it will be that I have

 been transformed from the caterpillar of earth to the butterfly of the universe.

-- John Harricharan

“I would say to my friends – when I cannot come out from my house of grief, put your hand to the open window

and I will hold on for dear life.”

-- Unknown

“Grief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding, and softens the heart.”

--John Adams

“Pain is the most individualizing thing on earth.  It is true that it is the great  common bond as well, but that realization

comes only when it is over.  To suffer is to be alone.  To watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us

away by himself.”

--Edith Hamilton

"A great religious tradition does not deny the pain of loss. In the words of the Kotzker Rebbe, 'The only whole heart is a broken one.' No awake spirit can move

 through this world without enduring a broken heart. There is nothing real that makes life painless. Accepting the pain of living, knowing one's heart will — and

 should — be broken, is the beginning of wisdom."

--David Wolpe in Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times

“To fashion an inner story of our pain carries us into the heart of it, which is where rebirth inevitably occurs.” 

--Sue Monk Kidd

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice,

solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a

moment of despair or confusion…who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us  the reality of our powerlessness,

that is a friend who cares.”  Henry Nouwen

 “An individual doesn’t get cancer, a family does.” 

 --Terry Tempest Williams

“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches.  If suffering alone taught,

all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning,

understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.” 

--Ann Morrow Lindbergh

 “Sometimes, with the best of intentions, friends don’t know how to help. 

They may feel that to bring up the subject of our loss is to risk making us feel worse,

so they avoid it and talk of other things while the presence of the unspoken builds up

to an almost intolerable pressure.” 

--Martha Whitmore Hickman

“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. 

If suffering alone taught,

all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. 

To suffering must be added mourning,

understanding, patience, love, openness,

and the willingness to remain vulnerable.” 

Ann Morrow Lindbergh

“Sometimes, with the best of intentions, friends don’t know how to help. 

They may feel that to bring up the subject of our loss is to risk making us feel worse,

so they avoid it and talk of other things while the presence of the unspoken builds up

to an almost intolerable pressure.” 

--Martha Whitmore Hickman

"There is no despair so absolute as that which comes from the first moments

of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known

what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and recovered hope."

--George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

"Where there is sorrow there is holy ground."

--Oscar Wilde

 
"When tears come, I breathe deeply and rest. I know I am swimming in a hallowed stream where many have gone before. I am not alone, crazy, or having a

 nervous breakdown . . . My heart is at work. My soul is awake."

--Mary Margaret Funk in Thoughts Matter

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."

C. S Lewis

"People say, 'time heals.' Yet time by itself doesn't heal. If a person in grief sits in a corner waiting for time to take care of bitter sorrow, time won't do

 anything. It is what we do with time that can heal."

--Reverend Arnoldo Pangrazzi