Phil Elverum Quotes

The new record started out being about loss, but it's morphed into being about how relationships go on even though one person is not in a body anymore.

I don't deal with death very well. My brother, John Candy, my dad, my mom, Brandon Tartikoff just a couple of weeks ago. I mean, you lose a lot of people in your life, and that's one thing I am constantly working on - pain management.

First of all, a lot of people, a lot of women and men, have lost their children. I'm not the only one. But I happen to be blessed that my son gave me all these things to work with so that I get to work out my grief in a way that other people are not able to. So I can't possibly be downtrodden about that.

I had a tough year, losing my dad. And I really needed to have some quiet time, and not be engaged the way I normally would be with the Lakers.

After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.

My grandfather's death was really hard to deal with.

I remember the day my mother died, and it's still hard to talk about it. I just blocked it out.

Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.

There's something about losing friends, particularly young people, where it's not something that you get over. I don't believe there's a healing process.

It's been difficult for me to get my head around Diana's death or talk about it. After she died, things were difficult, very difficult. We all have our own traumas and get on with it. But when it's there in your face year in, year out, it's hard.

I think writers process their own experiences through the characters and situations they write. So for Batman, I used my own experience of losing a loved one. Grief is a strange place; it's like an altered state. You might sleep too much, so you can see the dead in your dreams.

When my mother died, I had to go on air that night and do jokes.

Losing a parent over eight years is a very dark journey. I spent the first four years feeling bad and angry and sorry for myself.

One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone else just wants you to get over it, but of course you don't get over it. You get stronger; you try and live on; you endure; you change; but you don't get over it. You carry it with you.

During my grief, I realised there was nothing I could do for my mother, but I did have a child.

Grief is a terrible, painful place. You can't grind away on grief in a solid way and say, 'I'm going to work on this until it's over' because it will be with you for the rest of your life, whatever you do. So, you deal with it and move on.

When the baby dies, On every side Rose stranger's voices, hard and harsh and loud. The baby was not wrapped in any shroud. The mother made no sound. Her head was bowed That men's eyes might not see Her misery.

There's no road map. There's no textbook on how grief works and when your heart will be open - or if it ever will.

Of course the death of Geoffrey has caused a lot of trauma to me generally.

I have a, you know, a John Ritter-shaped hole in my heart. Nobody can replace that.

The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

I've lost lots of men in my life, besides my mother, which is a whole different loss.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

How could I share with you how I felt when two towers that I loved, two pieces of steel and glass and concrete fell down, when actually they took with them thousands of human lives? That is the actual tragedy. But those towers were almost human for me. I was in love with them, and that's why I married them with a tight rope.