All Quotes By Tag: Grief

“Trap. Horrible trap. At one’s birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive. When you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasures should be tainted by that knowledge. But hopeful dear us, we forget. Lord, what is this?”

“Later, you told me what your mother had said. How your father, the farmer, rose up slowly. You told me how your mother wailed on the other end of the phone, grieving her loss and complaining about the basketball of a goitre perched on her shoulder. She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze.”

“The name outlaw Christian describes the kind of Christian I am and the kind I’m setting myself free to become: namely, a follower of Jesus who no longer accepts cocky clichés, hackneyed hope, or snappy theodicies—defenses of God’s goodness and power—that explain away evil and suffering with a theo-magical sleight of hand. An outlaw Christian doesn’t condemn questions or discourage doubt. Instead, an outlaw Christian seeks to live an authentic life of faith and integrity, and chooses the defy the unwritten laws governing suffering, grief, and hope that our culture and religious traditions have asked us to ingest. The faith of an outlaw Christian is bold, outspoken, and active in a world of pain.”

“For this reason, it is well said that misfortune is sometimes good for something, for it teaches at the same time that it hurts.”

“Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried.Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn’t see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves,and for one another. We need each other to survive.I wish this for you: to find the people you belong with, the ones who will see your pain, companion you, hold you close,even as the heavy lifting of grief is yours alone. As hard as they may seem to find at times, your community is out there. Lookfor them. Collect them. Knit them into a vast flotilla of light that can hold you.”

“Something about Tilo’s new home reminded Musa of the story of Mumtaz Afzal Malik, the young taxi driver whom Amrik Singh had killed, whose body had been recovered from a field and delivered to his family with earth in his clenched fists and mustard flowers growing through his fingers. That story had always stayed with Musa – perhaps because of the way hope and grief were woven together in it, so tightly, so inextricably.”

“The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is pain in this world that you can’t be cheered out of. You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”

“When you try to take someone’s pain away from them, you don’t make it better. You just tell them it’s not OK to talk about their pain.”

“What we all share in common – the real reason for this book – is a desire to love better. To love ourselves in the midst of great pain, and to love another when the pain of this life grows too large for one person to hold. This book offers the skills needed to make that kind of love a reality.”

“Every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn’t.”

“Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”

“True comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.”

“Acknowledgment–being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one’s own life–is the only real medicine of grief.”

“She who heals others heals herself.”

“When people told me I was so strong for surviving my daughter’s death, I wanted to scream. But the truth is that deep inside we are far more resilient, brave, and incredibly strong for having survived at all. So scream, be brave, and embrace your power. It will become your biggest asset.”