Quotes about grief

"...I learned that it's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief...lessens. It may not ever go away completely, but after a while it's not overwhelming."

Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief.

No promise was as solemn as one sworn to the dead.

How can a father outlive so many strong young sons?

As for those she served with, she did not even want to even know their names. That only made it hurt worse when they died.

“The clerk is dying, Rosemund is dying, you’ve all been exposed. Why shouldn’t I give up hope?”

“God has not abandoned us utterly,” he said. “Agnes is safe in his arms.”

Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark.

Aye, it is hard when those we love leave the world. No denying it.

There is no logic to grief.

But now Jonas had experienced real sadness. He had felt grief. He knew that there was no quick comfort for emotions like those.

Now he saw another elephant emerge from the place where it had stood hidden in the trees. Very slowly it walked to the mutilated body and looked down. With its sinuous trunk it struck the huge corpse; then it reached up, broke some leafy branches with a snap, and draped them over the mass of torn thick flesh. Finally it tilted its massive head, raised its trunk, and roared into the empty landscape.

If, indeed, grief is a response to the presence — seeming or real — of the dead, then the end of grief might correspond to some necessary turning away on their part.

Lewis had been his mainstay in this half-year of sounding the depths of his grief. It was he who had said that Davy's death was a severe mercy. A severe mercy — the phrase haunted him: a mercy that was as severe as death, a death that was as merciful as love. For it had been death in love, not death of love. Love can die in many ways, most of them far more terrible than physical death; and if all natural love must die one way or another, Davy's death — he and she in love — was the death that hinted at springtime and rebirth. Sitting there on the rough wood of the bridge, he remembered his absolute knowing — something beyond faith or belief — in the moments after her death, in that suddenly empty room, that she still was. She had not ceased with that last light breath.

She and he would meet again.