2.
Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.
Jane Welsh Carlyle
3.
On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world.
Henry David Thoreau
4.
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
Andrew Solomon
5.
When the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Khalil Gibran
6.
I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.
Victoria Hanley
7.
ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee
John Donne
8.
I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
William Faulkner
9.
All of our suffering in life is from saying we want one thing and doing another.
Debbie Ford
10.
Most bereaved souls crave nourishment more tangible than prayers: they want a steak.
M. F. K. Fisher
11.
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
Joyce Carol Oates
12.
Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
C. S. Lewis
13.
It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet tender joy.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14.
Sudden wealth was the great insulator, second only to sudden bereavement.
Joan Aiken
15.
Life Lesson 3: You can't rush grief. It has its own timetable. All you can do is make sure there are lots of soft places around - beds, pillows, arms, laps.
Patti Davis
16.
You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind.
Khalil Gibran
17.
When you lose your parents, the sadness doesn't go away. It just changes. It hits you sideways sometimes instead of head-on. Like now.
Judy Blundell
19.
we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.
Joan Didion
20.
A saved soul has many sorrows. They have their share of bereavements, deaths, disappointments , crosses. What shall enable a believer to bear all this? Nothing but the consolation there is in Christ.
J. C. Ryle
21.
Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.
Sarah Dessen
22.
The death of a beloved is an amputation.
C. S. Lewis
23.
For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms.
Lurlene McDaniel
24.
She heard him mutter, 'Can you take away this grief?' 'I'm sorry,' she replied. 'Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.
Terry Pratchett
25.
Heaven and God are best discerned through tears; scarcely perhaps are discerned at all without them. The constant association of prayer with the hour of bereavement and the scenes of death suffice to show this.
James Martineau
26.
Farewell is said by the living, in life, every day. It is said with love and friendship, with the affirmation that the memories are lasting if the flesh is not.
R. A. Salvatore
27.
To lose what we have never owned might seem an eccentric bereavement, but Presumption has its own affliction as well as claim.
Emily Dickinson
28.
The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal - every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open - this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.
Washington Irving
29.
If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
C. S. Lewis
31.
There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.
Aldous Huxley
33.
If you have ever lost a loved one, then you know exactly how it feels. And if you have not, then you cannot possibly imagine it.
Daniel Handler
34.
Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.
Samuel Johnson
36.
Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.
Jodi Picoult
37.
I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on
Kay Redfield Jamison
38.
It is extraordinary how the house and the simplest possessions of someone who has been left become so quickly sordid. . . . Even the stain on the coffee cup seems not coffee but the physical manifestation of one's inner stain, the fatal blot that from the beginning had marked one for ultimate aloneness.
Coleman Dowell
39.
Attachments and bereavements are inseparable.
Mason Cooley
40.
A thousand goodbyes come after death - the first six months of bereavement.
Allan Gregg
41.
I was fascinated by the lack of a word for a parent who has lost a child. We have no word in English. I thought for sure there'd be a word in Irish but there is none. And then I looked in several other languages and could not find one, until I found the word Sh'khol in Hebrew. I'm still not sure why so many languages don't have a word for this sort of bereavement, this shadowing.
Colum McCann
42.
I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.
Barbara Kingsolver
43.
Cordelia! stay a little. Ha! What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft.
William Shakespeare
44.
It's the only condition I know. Bitter Love, Loneliness, contempt for corruption, blind hope. It's where I live. A permanent state of bereavement. This is nothing new.
Gregory Maguire
45.
A break up is the closest thing to bereavement
Lindsey Kelk
46.
And we will all go together when we go. What a comforting fact that is to know. Universal bereavement, An inspiring achievement, Yes, we will all go together when we go.
Tom Lehrer
48.
When you experience bereavement at a youngish age, you suddenly realise that life is unjust and unfair, that bad things will happen, and you have to take that on board.
William Boyd
49.
The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious.
Francine Prose
50.
I do not believe that grief is ever so great that it can not be contained within.
Judith McNaught