Bethany > Bethany's Quotes

“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
― Anne Lamott

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses. ”
― Colette

“It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine it.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.”
― Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

“My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here's what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it's still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it's been too long since you missed them last.”
― Kristin O'Donnell Tubb, The 13th Sign

“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”
― Roland Barthes

“When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.”
― Pat Schweibert, Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“For a week, almost without speaking,
they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous
reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
― Marcel Proust

“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, The Year of Magical Thinking

“It was the meanest moment of eternity.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“...you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help... And then finally, the way through grief is grieving.”
― Jane Hamilton

“Gifts of grace come to all of us. But we must be ready to see and willing to receive these gifts. It will require a kind of sacrifice, the sacrifice of believing that, however painful our losses, life can still be good — good in a different way then before, but nevertheless good. I will never recover from my loss and I will never got over missing the ones I lost. But I still cherish life. . . . I will always want the ones I lost back again. I long for them with all my soul. But I still celebrate the life I have found because they are gone. I have lost, but I have also gained. I lost the world I loved, but I gained a deeper awareness of grace. That grace has enabled me to clarify my purpose in life and rediscover the wonder of the present moment.”
― Jerry Sittser, A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss

“All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.”
― Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men

“Saving You

The darkness takes him over,
the sickness pulls him in;
his eyes—a blown out candle,
I wish to go with him.

Sometimes I see a flicker—
a light that shone from them;
I hold him to me tightly,
before he's gone again.”
― Lang Leav, Love & Misadventure

“Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so long he refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Mermaid Chair

“That time
I thought I could not
go any closer to grief
without dying

I went closer,
and I did not die.
Surely God
had his hand in this,

as well as friends.
Still, I was bent,
and my laughter,
as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.
Then said my friend Daniel,
(brave even among lions),
“It’s not the weight you carry

but how you carry it -
books, bricks, grief -
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,
put it down.”
So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?

Have you heard
the laughter
that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger
to admire, admire, admire
the things of this world
that are kind, and maybe

also troubled -
roses in the wind,
the sea geese on the steep waves,
a love
to which there is no reply?”
― Mary Oliver

“We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world--the company of those who have known suffering.”
― Helen Keller, We Bereaved

“The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses