Quotes About Grief And Mourning

#1. Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.

William Shakespeare

#2. Upon that foreign soil he chose
Died he! For ever laid
Low, in the kindly shade,
He left behind no tearless grief,
No measured mourning, dull and brief,
These eyes are wet
With weeping yet,
Nor know I how to find relief."

Antigone

Sophocles

#3. Family members have a personal stake in honoring and mourning their dead and objecting to unwarranted public exploitation that, by intruding upon their own grief, tends to degrade the rites and respect they seek to accord to the deceased person who was once their own.

Anthony Kennedy

#4. I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts.

Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

#5. Mourning is one of the most profound human experiences that it is possible to have ... The deep capacity to weep for the loss of a loved one and to continue to treasure the memory of that loss is one of our noblest human traits.

Edwin S. Shneidman

#6. Perhaps that's what she caught, not Life Fatigue but just grief over a broken heart--and the bitterness that comes with being cheated too early of something true--like a young husband's love.

Joseph G. Peterson

#7. [W]e've learned that grief can sometimes get loud, and when it does, we try not to speak over it.

Bill Clegg

#8. It preoccupies me until it's time to leave. It seems such the right expression of grief. I am sad, so in whatever small way I can, I will tear myself apart. They've taken what's on the inside and made it visible. If I thought it wouldn't be inappropriate I'd do it myself.

Jael McHenry

#9. I realized that whilst crying over the loss, the living did not seem adequate because they were not my loved one. The room full of strangers hurt me profusely. Even as I saw thousands of young people; I felt incomplete and more saddened because the one I wanted to see was buried.

Phindiwe Nkosi

#10. God has broken me in every way possible. I spent a year not caring, a year trying to figure out what I'd done to deserve it. and a year trying to make it right.

Cassandra Giovanni

#11. Bereavement seemed to work on him as a kind of blanket allergy, making him edgy and irritable to all the outside world. And of course it was reciprocal; the world receded on him.

Peter R. Pouncey

#12. In both England and the United States, he observed, the contemporary trend was to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.

Joan Didion

#13. What is the difference between grief and mourning? Mourning has company.

Roger Rosenblatt

#14. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

John Banville

#15. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, and be the one who ended up in that accident, completely dead ... but you know what? It wouldn't change anything. All I can do now that they're dead is to go through the actions of living without really living, and hope it improves someday.

Rebecca McNutt

#16. You can't love your mother or father if you don't also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.

Glenn Beck

#17. There are places I cannot visit. Places of unbearable sadness, grief, mourning. They say places are made by people. I say places are defined by the memories they conjure - the lunge of a curse, a shared and shattered history, a loved one drowned and lost in the ocean of forgetting.

Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

#18. I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.)
for:
the "Work" by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love, grief) cannot be liquidated hastily: for me, it is accomplished only in and by writing.

Roland Barthes

#19. Question me now about all other matters, but do not ask who I am, for fear you may increase in my heart it's burden of sorrow as I think back; I am very full of grief, and I should not sit in the house of somebody else with my lamentation and wailing. It is not good to go on mourning forever.

Homer

#20. I lived my grief; I slept mourning and ate sorrow and drank tears. I ignored all else.

Robin Hobb

#21. More often writing soliloquies of suffering and consolation than collective songs like the dirge, elegists have discovered that lyric sequences can provide a powerful means of addressing the tensions between grief's inchoate emotion and social rituals of mourning.

Susan Stewart

#22. I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov's description, in 'Speak, Memory,' of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.

Michael Chabon

#23. Those who do not care, escape the anguish of mourning but never know the delights of love. The meaning of life forever eludes them.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

#24. I've grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It's weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition.

Rosie Thomas

#25. One I love is taken from me, we will never walk together over the fields of earth, never hear the birds in the morning. Oh, how I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone away. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all my days.

Victoria Hanley

#26. Still others, like Kavita, just sit and sit, sometimes for hours. They are the ones, she now understands, who are mourning. Like her, they mourn a loss so wide and sodeep and so all-encompassing that it threatens to wash them away with grief.

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

#27. We'd all mourn for a while, but at the end of the day we were a tough lot, and we'd survive.

Suzanne Johnson

#28. To this day, she's still sad. Because there's not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I'm just saying that I took the pain that was inside of her at that moment and made it my own. And it didn't hurt me at all.

Tom Perrotta

#29. Mourning has a pace and rhythm of its own. It cannot be rushed.

Christian McEwen

#30. Grief is always sudden as winter, no matter how long the autumn.

J. Aleksandr Wootton

#31. The face which had long since forgotten how to be young and yet absolutely impenetrable, absolutely serene: no mourning, not even grief

William Faulkner

#32. Proper mourning leaves one nothing to do but mourn, and I've concluded this isn't a good thing. Grief crowds in closely enough without the rest of life being shoved aside to make way for it.

Grace Burrowes

#33. 'The Killing' has a really great combination of qualities: Even though it's very sad and deals with mourning and grief, it's still exciting. It's about real people and it doesn't shy from the painful points of life.

Joel Kinnaman

#34. Mourning our losses is the first step away from resentment and toward gratitude. The tears of our grief can soften our hardened hearts and open us to the possibility to say thanks.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

#35. I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.

Victoria Hanley

#36. The afterlife is mostly a dream state where you confront the good and evil within you. The text repeatedly explains that the images the deceased sees and the sounds one hears are hallucinations created by one's own thoughts.

Paul Lowe

#37. It was possible, I found, to both mourn a loss and yet be grateful it happened.

Jennifer S. Brown

#38. Regardless of your religious beliefs, you should never tell a mourning mother that it was "God's plan." For some people, that can be worse than saying nothing at all. For a non-believer, the words that are meant to console a religious person can do quite the opposite.

David G. McAfee

#39. And yes, being lovesick is like being in mourning. Because you die, because your future dies and you with it...There is a hurting time. It lasts for so long. But it gets better. I know that now.

Nina George

#40. Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

Julian Barnes

#41. We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.

C.S. Lewis

#42. Good had defeated evil, people proclaimed, a justification for atrocities best left forgotten. They would cling to this oversimplified truth while trading pats on the back and placing flowers on graves.

Kristina McMorris

#43. Melanie Klein wrote that children go through states of mind comparable to mourning, and that this early mourning is revived when grief is experience in later life.

Helen Macdonald

#44. The English social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1965 Death, Grief, and Mourning, had described this rejection of public mourning as a result of the increasing pressure of a new "ethical duty to enjoy oneself," a novel "imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others.

Joan Didion

#45. It's odd, isn't it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it's a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you're not alone.

Kristina McMorris

#46. Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

Meghan O'Rourke

#47. It's like a 'Fragile' sticker's on my forehead, and instead of taking a chance and saying something that might break me, they'd rather say nothing at all. But the silence is worst.

Angie Thomas

#48. Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.

Pablo Neruda

#49. She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

Dennis Lehane

#50. Mindful grief means mourning and letting go of the past without expectation, fear, censure, blame, shame, control and so forth. Without such mindful grief, neither past nor person can be laid to rest.

David Richo

#51. And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself - more birds than women flocking round his body!

Homer

#52. What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

John Banville

#53. How can it be that there is such a colossal gap between what we think we know about grief and mourning and what we actually find out when it comes to us?

Jim Beaver

#54. I, his mistress, mad with grief, shall follow him ... I shall share his glory. You speak of widowhood and deny me the white gown - the mourning of queens.

Jean Genet

#55. And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.

Sarah Waters

#56. Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn't true.

Sara Sheridan

#57. There is no grief amount wolves. Nature has a wonderful way of making you face reality. You can sit and weep if you want, but you are likely to be killed while you're still in your mourning, because you let your guard down.

Jodi Picoult