Julian Barnes Quotes

Grief makes one hour ten.

Grief, for me, is a moment-to-moment experience.

I haven't cried since Mom died. I mean, after something like that, what's left to cry about, right? But I let myself cry now. Loss is loss. Doesn't take death to create it. (266)

I never know what to tell them. I mean, there's nothing you can say to make a person stop hurting. Half the time, I just feel like telling them the truth. I'd say that for 3 months, you're going to feel worse than you've ever felt and you cope as best you can. And that after 6 months, the pain isn't so bad, but it still hurts more than you think it will. And even after years, you still find yourself thinking about the person you lost and get sad about it. And you still miss them all the time.

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.

Ah, grief makes us precise!

I think losing a loved one must be a little like losing a leg. First there is the shock, then the anesthetic, and the painkillers; the attention of doctors and nurses, flowers and cards and visits from friends. But sooner or later you have to learn to walk without it.

It hurts every day, the absence of someone who was once there.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

Grief is a matter of the heart and soul. Grieve your loss, allow it in, and spend time with it.

Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.

I bow in reverence before the emotions of every melted heart....The more intense the delight in their presence, the more poignant the impression of their absence....When the tears of bereavement have had their natural flow, they lead us again to life and love's generous joy.

I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow - getting into my morning bath is usually one of them - that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.

She was such a good loving mother, my best friend. Oh, who was happier than I when I could still say the dear name "Mother," and it was heard, and whom can I say it to now?

The sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart... converted it into a tomb.

Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.

I was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, 'Susy was peacefully released today.' It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

Sorrow is not a raven perched persistently above a chamber door. Sorrow is a thing with teeth, and while in time it retreats, it comes back at the whisper of it's name.

What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other.

Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.

The cold, the changed, perchance the dead, anew, The mourn'd, the loved, the lost,-too many, yet how few!

[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.

The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.

Nothing remained but loneliness and grief.