James Whitcomb Riley Quotes

I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.

Everything that belonged to her husband made her weep again: his tasseled slippers, his pajamas under the pillow, the space of his absence in the dressing table mirror, his own odor on her skin. A vague thought made her shudder: "The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.

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

You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

Cold inthe earthand the deepsnow piled abovethee, Far, far, removed, cold in the dreary grave! Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, Severed at last byTime's all-serving wave?

Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.

The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.

To see him there lifeless and breathless was very emotional for me. But I held myself together because I knew he's very much alive in his spirit, and that was just a shell. But I kissed him on his forehead, and I hugged him, and I touched him and I said, 'Michael, I'll never leave you. You'll never leave me.'

Grief and memory go together. After someone dies, that's what you're left with. And the memories are so slippery yet so rich.

Those that he loved so long and sees no more, Loved and still loves,-not dead, but gone before,- He gathers round him.

As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

Yes, I will go. I would rather grieve over your absence than over you.

Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight like fists. - "Indian Boy Love Song #1

If you no longer live, if you my beloved, my love, if you have died, all the leaves will fall in my breast, it will rain in my soul night and day, the snow will burn my heart, I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow, my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but I shall live

Is not absence death to those who love?

I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.

When somebody leaves this plane—or, if you like, goes into another room—those left behind sometimes try and stop loving—but this is a mistake, because even if you have loved only once in your life, you’re ruined.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride, In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.

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

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.

When someone dies, you don't get over it by forgetting; you get over it by remembering, and you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our life and loved us, as we have loved them.

With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution to my being of happiness, strength and understanding remains to sustain me in an altered world.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind, for those that were here we see no more.