Julian Barnes Quotes

Grief is exhausting.

Grief jumps out at you when you're least expecting it.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Every day is a new sense of tearing my heart out of my body again when I see other children who have been killed, and I know what their families are going through.

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

In our culture I think most people think of grief as sadness, and that's certainly part of it, a large part of it, but there's also this thorniness, these edges that come out.

I know what it's like to lose.

Despair is part of love.

My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief; we could think of nothing else. All night long we had only snatches of sleep, waking up perpetually to the sense of a great shock and grief. Every one is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling.

In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality.

Grief is the price we pay for love.

My daughter, Grace, was not killed by a gun. She died suddenly at age 5 from a virulent form of strep. As I stood stunned in a church at her memorial, one of the hardest things I heard someone say was, 'I'm going to go home and hug my child a little tighter.' 'Well, good for you,' I thought. 'I'm going to go home and scream.'

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

Nothing dries sooner than tears.

With grief, you have reason to despair; it's a human thing.

Grief is so human, and it hits everyone at one point or another, at least, in their lives. If you love, you will grieve, and that's just given.

When Michael died I was tipped over the edge. I was beyond grief.

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.

Grief is an emotion that's almost unplayable because you're in a separate emotional state; it's an inconsolable emotion.

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

Grief causes suffering and disease.