While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.
—Sophocles
Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.
—Trey Parker and Matt Stone
The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.
—William Shakespeare
I just realized that there's going to be a lot of painful times in life, so I better learn to deal with it the right way.
—Unknown
What's gone and what's past help
Should be past grief.
—Unknown
When you're grieving, the times you're happy are so much more tragic than the times that you aren't. Because being happy feels fake and it feels temporary and it feels meaningless.
—Hannah Moskowitz in Invincible Summer
I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.
—Kristin Hannah in The Nightingale
The more loss we feel, the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life not knowing what grief is.
—Frank O'Connor
When a daughter loses a mother, the intervals between grief responses lengthen over time, but her longing never disappears. It always hovers at the edge of her awareness, ready to surface at any time, in any place, in the least expected ways. This isn't pathological. It's normal. It's why you find yourself, at twenty-four, or thirty-five or forty-three, unwrapping a present or walking down an aisle or crossing a busy street, doubled over and missing your mother.
—Hope Edelman in Motherless Daughters
Over and above any spring we may know, outside our windows or in our hearts, there is the illimitable sweep of God's concern for his creation and his creatures; comprehending both suffering and beatitude, and transcending both. No one who has been spared—certainly not I—dare say to the afflicted that they are blessed in their affliction, or dare offer comfort in universal terms for particular griefs. Yet one can dimly see and humbly say that suffering is an integral and essential part of our human drama. That it falls upon one and all in differing degrees and belongs to God's purpose for us here on earth, so that in the end, all the experience of living has to teach us is to say: Thy will be done. To say it standing before a cross; itself signifying the suffering of God in the person of a Man, and the redemption of a Man in the person of God. The greatest sorrow and the greatest joy co-existing on Golgotha.
—Malcolm Muggeridge in Something Beautiful for God
Perhaps it is the greater grief to be left on earth when another is gone.
—Madeline Miller in The Song of Achilles
You see, for me, memories are difficult. Very often, they hurt. A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they're inaccessible.
—Casey McQuiston in White & Royal Blue
Grief is an unfillable hole in your body. It should be weightless, but it's heavy. Should be cold, but it burns. Should, over time, close up, but instead it deepens.
—Emily Henry in A Million Junes