Mark Haddon Quotes

I much condole with you on your late loss... pains and diseases of the mind are only cured by Forgetfulness;--Reason but skins the wound, which is perpetually liable to fester again.

There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

Tell me, how can I live without my Husband any longer? This is my first awakening thought each morning, and as I watch the waves of the turbulent lake under our windows I sometimes feel I should like to go under them.

Yes, my mother's death is a terrible sorrow to me. I feel - do you know what I mean - the silence of it so. She was more alive than anyone I have ever known.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Grief is a matter of the heart and soul. Grieve your loss, allow it in, and spend time with it. Suffering is the optional part. Remember that you come into this world in the middle of the movie, and you leave in the middle; and so do the people you love. Love never dies, and spirit knows no loss.

I have to say that since my mother died, I am not the same person anymore. My life has changed a great deal because it's really unbearable to think you can't see her anymore or talk to her anymore.

Grief is natural; the absence of all feeling is undesirable, but moderation in grief should be observed, as in the face of all good or evil.

Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.

People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.

When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?

A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.

The hardest obstacle I've ever had to overcome in my life is losing my mom four years ago. I wouldn't even say that I've overcome it, really. I don't imagine that I ever will.

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.

When somebody dies we usually need reasons for consolation, not so much to alleviate our pain as to excuse ourselves for so readily feeling consoled.

When your mother dies, it really hurts. But with time, you get used to it. That's nature's way.

[after the death of a loved one] It is when there is nothing more to be done that the reality of the loss often hits with full force.

Time doesn’t, as advertised, heal all wounds. Although the wrenching immediacy of grief eventually passed, the settled sorrow that replaced it might in its own way be even more intense.

I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. the only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it.

Her mother died at the age of 29, essentially turning her face to the wall and deciding to die. And so we can only imagine the agony she felt. And Eleanor Roosevelt really wanted to make her mother happier, and - and to make her live, you know, make her want to live. And there's something about, you know, when your mother dies, this sense of abandonment. I think Eleanor Roosevelt had a lifelong fear of abandonment and sense of abandonment after her parents' death.

I had known a couple of people who had died, but the loss of my mother contained something of the profoundly unknowable.

I had a sister who died and my mother passed away. I know that grief comes in waves. When deep grief hits, I know that it hurts like hell, and then you get a little bit of a respite, and then it comes back, and it hurts like hell. I know it can be survived.

My mother's in my life, but at the time you imagine your mom passing away, not being there ... as a kid you try to think of something that hurts you the most ... It was just a tool [in "Hardball"].

A grieving person's like a person treading in deep water--if they've nothing to hold on to, they lose hope. They slide right under.