GRIEF QUOTES

quotations about grief

Grief quote

Slowly, grief tires and sleeps, but never dies. In time it grows used to its prison, and a relationship of respect develops between prisoner and jailer.

JOSEPHINE HART

Damage

Tags: Josephine Hart


Compare your griefs with other men's, and they will seem less.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust

Tags: Eliza Cook


Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system. Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity. Ice congeals in the stomach. Frost spiderwebs in the lungs. The heart fills with warm rain that turns to mist and evaporates through a colder artery.

ADAM RAPP

Nocturne

Tags: Adam Rapp


You do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot

Tags: Julian Barnes


Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

JOAN DIDION

The Year of Magical Thinking

Tags: Joan Didion


Grief comes, a giantess, with strength to bind;
She grips our hand and glares into our eyes;
If we but kiss her mouth, she daily dies,
Fades into air, and leaves a flower behind.

WILLIAM WILSEY MARTIN

"Grief"

Tags: William Wilsey Martin


grief is a house
where the chairs
have forgotten how to hold us
the mirrors how to reflect us
the walls how to contain us

JANDY NELSON

The Sky Is Everywhere


It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as if grief could be lessened by baldness.

CICERO

Tusculan Disputations

Tags: Cicero


It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.

SUE MONK KIDD

The Secret Life of Bees

Tags: Sue Monk Kidd


It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

The Brothers Karamazov

Tags: Fyodor Dostoevsky


Joy and grief are things of great hazard and danger in the life of man: The one breaks the heart; the other intoxicates the head.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE

Moral and Religious Aphorisms

Tags: Benjamin Whichcote


Oh, what grief not to have
grief, and to spend your life
on the colorless grass
of the undecided path!

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

"Crossroads"

Tags: Federico Garcia Lorca


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

The Little Stranger


Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags,
being careful between the trees to leave extra room.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

"Burlap Sack"

Tags: Jane Hirshfield


Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears?

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Written on the Body

Tags: Jeanette Winterson


Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

RUMI

attributed, The Philosophy Book

Tags: Rumi


Grief does not change you.... It reveals you.

JOHN GREEN

The Fault in Our Stars

Tags: John Green


Grief never mended no broken bones.

CHARLES DICKENS

Sketches by Boz

Tags: Charles Dickens


Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.

SOPHOCLES

Antigone

Tags: Sophocles


Grief--unlike sex, music, and cheating at cards--was not a skill that could be honed by practice.

TIM PRATT

Cup and Table