Imelda Staunton Quotes

'Harry Potter' changed my life in more ways than one, and it helped me get through my mother's death.

Growing up in Ireland, when my family received important news, good or bad, we would boil water and make tea. It was the first thing I did when my father died in 1984. This ritual allowed me a moment to take in the enormity of what had happened.

When we are dealing with death we are constantly being dragged down by the event: Humor diverts our attention and lifts our sagging spirits.

I'm a much nicer person since my wife died. I found out what pain is, so on that level I'm much nicer.

I don't mean to sound like a touchy-feely California type here, but I knew that I could finally get over the death of my father only by having kids of my own.

Anyone who loses a parent, you have to find those parts of yourself that your parent held true in themselves, especially if they're supportive parents.

My father I liked, but it was only after his death that I got to know him by writing the play.

In 1991, my father passed away and I went on a spiritual quest. It was a light one, not too terribly deep because I'm not terribly deep, and neither was my father.

I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy, the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

On top of trying to find my way in this business and losing my mother and trying to figure out what family meant to me and everything - 2016, there was a lot of anger from me and a lot of anger all around. I think the hardest part was to really realize that all these things, it's worth it.

It took about five years until we were properly over Freddie's passing. You learn to live with it.

The struggle through the grief was a huge growing process for me. There were gifts that came from it. I learned a lot about myself. I got into a mode very much like my father's own mode of seeking - seeking solutions, seeking teachers, seeking information - to try to alleviate my own suffering.

For a while, Mirabelle believes there will be a moment when he will cave in and let himself love her, but eventually she lets the idea go. She hits bottom. She dwells in the muck for several months, not depressed exactly, but involved in a mourning that at first she thinks is for Ray but soon realizes is for the loss of her old self.

People talk about grief as if it's kind of an unremittingly awful thing, and it is. It is painful, but it's a very, very interesting sort of thing to go through and it really helps you out.

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.

When someone we love dies, we get so busy mourning what died that we ignore what didn't.

Now I am setting out into the unknown. It will take me a long while to work through the grief. There are no shortcuts; it has to be gone through.

When my father died, I was 21, and he'd been sick for a few years. He changed during his illness. He kind of softened during it.

Obviously, at this age, I've lost people in my life. But with a parent, it's just different. I was very attached to my father and had this naive little-girl notion that he'd always be around. So I'm finding acceptance of my father's death is the hardest thing to accept.

I think, in real life, when we're facing death - that is, when we come out on the other side of it, whether it's death of a friend or a family member - you come out on the other side of the mourning cherishing your life that much more.

Mourning is not forgetting... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust.

When my dad died a lot of songs came, and they're still coming.

One of the wonderful things about this glorious holiday trip I'm on is that I'm in public with people. It hasn't been inclined... I don't know - something to do with the death of my wife. It's inclined to make me isolated.

I think everyone understands grief, the journey it takes us on, whether it's the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a disappointment. Some people don't deal with it, the power of it. Some do. Some feel the weight of it and it informs their choices. I've had to open up to grief in different contexts.

I missed my father so much when he died that writing about his life and mine was a way of bringing him back to life and getting me to sort of understand more about him and what made him the father, the husband and the man that he was, and how that made me the man, husband and father that I am.