on the mount

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

Proverb

"He that conceals his grief finds no remedy for it."

Hickman

"And in the holy distillations of this moment, how we are comforted by the blessing of warm sun, soft wind, the green earth."

Alfred Tennyson

"I sometimes hold it half a sin

To put in words the grief I feel;

For words, like nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within."

proust

"there is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life.  such grief, felt in such a way, is always "present" and it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again."

martha hickman

"we were surprised and disappointed that people we thought were good friends became distant, uneasy, and seemed unable to help us.  others who were casual acquaintances became suddenly close, sustainers of life for us.  grief changes the rules, and sometimes rearranges the combinations."

steinbeck

“It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” 

Winterson

“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?” 

Louis de Pointe du Lac

"But all my passion went with her golden hair."

a hole in the world

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night."
~St Vincent Millay~

Irving

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.”

monsoon

"If there was a love strong enough to make you stay...
You'd be here.

But you're not here, 
and with all my tears...
It feels like monsoon every day."

Strand

"Nothing could stop you.
Not the best day.  Not the quiet.  Not the ocean rocking.
You went on with your dying."

Joan Didion

"Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is."

gone

"It is hard to forget, when there is such an empty space when you have gone."

Garden

"Grief can be the garden of compassion. 
If you keep your heart open through everything, 
your pain can become your greatest ally 
in your life's search for love and wisdom."

river runs through it...

"Each one of us here today will, at one time in our lives, look upon a loved one in need and ask the same question: We are willing Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true that we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give, or more often than not, that part we have to give... is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us... But we can still love them... We can love—completely—even without complete understanding..."

Grief

"Life's not a song. 

Life isn't bliss. 

Life is just this: it's living. 

You'll get along. The pain that you feel, it only can heal by living. 

You have to keep on living, so one of us is living."