Alexandra Bracken Quotes

Grief can choke you. It’s dangerous, something else you have to beat.

New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.

I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of your head, a wrecking ball coming at you again and again, until finally, the words crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart.

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes--is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch.

the pain of that first lost was still raw. You could deal with it, endure it, but never escape it.

I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les be" tes l'ont mange . Don't search any further for my heart; wild beasts ate it.

I remember the day my mother died, and it's still hard to talk about it. I just blocked it out.

Grief is exhausting.

When my young men began the killing, my heart was hurt.

I am my heart's undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.

To touch a sore is to renew one's grief.

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.

Some things you just don't get over.

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.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

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.

Grief causes suffering and disease.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

To be perfectly frank, there is an odd place after losing a child, where you think somehow your life is worth less.

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