All Quotes By Tag: Grief

“You thought it would break you in two, but it made you twice as strong.”

“Dreams hit the fan? Life unexpectedly take a turn for the worst? Here’s what you do:First thing I think is to realize God didn’t do this to you. It’s just life.Second, know that it sucks. It does.Third, it’s a tunnel not a cave.Fourth, it still sucks.Fifth, it’s not hopeless. Assign meaning to it. Choose for these horrible things to bring you closer to family and god and not farther apart.Praying for you”

“Minute by minute, a day passed.”

“I limp along through my mourning.”

“She had learned, long ago and in the intervening years when she was apart from all she loved, that to endure the most troubling times she had to break down time itself–one carefully crafted stitch after the other. If consideration of what the next hour might hold had been too difficult, then she thought only of another half and hour.”

“Time heals everything, that’s what everyone says. Wounds heal and leave only scars behind. But some wounds run too deep to heal, and pierce the deepest layers of one’s soul. They stay there unhealed and ready to ooze blood at the first sign of grief.”

“Goodbye forever” is the perfect joke, because forever is impossible. Every night I say it, and every morning I see my father again. Forever is meaningless. Tough talk, an empty threat. Forever is our secret handshake. Our code word. Our decoder ring. Not a measurement of time at all. I know this because “Goodbye Forever” comes easily. The passage of actual time is much more difficult.”

“His days swelled with the monotony of hours, piling up in colossal heaps before and after him, the used the same as the new.”

“Somehow everything always came down to time, she realized with perfect lucidity. There was either too much or too little. It either passed too quickly or too slowly. It didn’t belong to anyone—it was simply a gift, bestowed by God, and yet eternally taken for granted. She closed her eyes for a moment, wishing Time could be tamed—reigned in—and tethered, synchronized with human needs and wants. But that wasn’t the case, was it?”

“Love is circumstantial; we can love anyone if need be; and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past.”

“… Now to die of griefwould mean, I’m afraid, to die belatedly, while latecomersare unwelcome, particularly in the future. …”

“Grief … gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.”

“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.”

“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.”

“It’s funny, how one can look back on a sorrow one thought one might well die of at the time, and know that one had not yet reckoned the tenth part of true grief.”