Notes on Grief Quotes

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. "Find peace in your memories," I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, "This is what you will never again have.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Does love bring, even if unconsciously, the delusional arrogance of expecting never to be touched by grief?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“A friend sends me a line from my novel: 'Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.' How odd to find it so exquisitely painful to read my own words.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Never' has come to say. 'Never' feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“We don't know how we will grieve until we grieve.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Another revelation: how much laughter is a part of grief. Laughter is tightly braided into our family argot, and now we laugh remembering my father, but somewhere in the background there is a haze of disbelief. The laughter trails off. The laughter becomes tears and becomes sadness and becomes rage. I am unprepared for my wretched, roaring rage. In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Grief is not gauzy; it is substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque. The weight is heaviest in the mornings, post-sleep: a leaden heart, a stubborn reality that refuses to budge. I will never see my father again. Never again. It feels as if I wake up only to sink and sink. In those moments, I am sure that I do not ever want to face the world again.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is: my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth; on my chest, a heavy, awful weight; and inside my body, a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart – my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here – is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“I back away from condolences. People are kind, people mean well, but knowing this does not make their words rankle less.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“A thing like this, dreaded for so long, finally arrives and among the avalanche of emotions there is a bitter and unbearable relief. It comes as a form of aggression, this relief, bringing with it strangely pugnacious thoughts. Enemies beware: the worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“I am afraid of tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after...”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“There is such a thing as the worst day of a life, and please, dear universe, I do not want anything ever to top it.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Part of grief's tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“I wish.. I wish.. the guilt gnaws at my soul. I think of all the things that could've happened, and all the ways the world could've been reshaped to prevent what happened on that day...”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“It is instinctive my recoiling. I imagine the confusion of some relatives, their disapproval even, when faced with my withdrawal; the calls I leave unanswered, the messages unread..”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“But how can it be that in the morning he is joking and talking, and at night he is gone forever?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“It was not supposed to happen like this, not like a malicious surprise..”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Is it possible to be possessive of one's pain?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“The layers of loss make life feel papery thin.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“My sister Uche says she has just told a family friend by text, and I almost scream, “No! Don’t tell anyone, because if we tell people, then it becomes true.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief