Michael Ondaatje Quotes

Life Lesson 3: You can't rush grief. It has its own timetable. All you can do is make sure there are lots of soft places around - beds, pillows, arms, laps.

I just know that I’m not willing to let anything happen to you. When Nynia died, I was so lost and cold, and I haven’t been warm since. Not until I felt your hands on me. The only way I’ve been able to cope without you is to bury what I feel, but I can’t seem to do that anymore. When I’m with you all I can do is feel and need. (Talon)

How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?

Cripple crow say something for our grieving, where do we go once we start leaving. Well close that wound or else keep on bleeding and change your tune, it's got no meaning.

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.

I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn't yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn't believe it, would not believe it.

I hoped that grief was similar to the other emotions. That it would end, the way happiness did. Or laughter.

You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

Out of sorrow entire worlds have been built out of longing great wonders have been willed they're only little tears darling let them spill and lay your head upon my shoulder.

Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart. Heart is so new to this. I want them back, says heart. Head is all heart has. Help, head. Help heart.

Dr. Holmes says, both wittily and truly, that crying widows are easiest consoled.

Grief best is pleased with grief's society.

But I guess that's the way it is. When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost. you mourn for yourself.

Tell them, that, to ease them of their griefs, Their fear of hostile strokes, their aches, losses, Their pangs of love, with other incident throes That nature's fragile vessel doth sustain In life's uncertain voyage, I will some kindness do them.

I'm sure there's just such a desperate feeling if you've lost a child. You'd probably feel so desperate that you would do anything. Even if they came to the door and put a gun to your head, you'd just be happy to see them.

When I lacked even the self-respect to keep myself alive, she dabbed my cuts and I fell back into being a son; I fell as easily as you fall into your pillow at night. And I didn't want it to end. That's the best way I can explain it. I knew it was impossible. But I didn't want it to end.

[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.

Huging my pillow to my chest, I told myself, At least soon you won't have so much time to miss him. Soon school will start again, and then you'll be busier. Wait. Am I reduced to HOPING for school to start? Somehow, I have discovered a whole new level of pathetic.

I didn't miss any games, but Coach Knight came out and spent three days with my family in Chicago when my dad passed away. I came back and played and it was good therapy for me. Having a basketball family and a coach who understood and actually became like a father figure for that time was comforting to me, and I'm sure that will be comforting to Coleman.

In all disappointments sympathy is a great balm.

There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual.

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 think we grieve forever, but that goes for love too, fortunately for us all.

No, I don’t live in heartache. I don’t cry myself to sleep or any of that. I am, I tell myself, over it. But I do feel a void, icky as that sounds. And—like it or not—I still think about her every single day.