Jodi Picoult Quotes

Losing a wife can be very hard. In my case, it was almost impossible.

When you lose someone you love, you die too, and you wait around for your body to catch up.

Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind toward some resolution which it may never find.

[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.

This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

I have to say that since my mother died, I am not the same person anymore. My life has changed a great deal because it's really unbearable to think you can't see her anymore or talk to her anymore.

Many grievers experience intense yearning or longing after a death - more than they experience, say, denial.

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

Grief is not just a series of events, stages, or timelines. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through grief. But how long do you grieve for a husband of fifty years, a teenager killed in a car accident, a four-year-old child: a year? Five years? Forever? The loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, but its aftermath lasts a lifetime.

No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

When you lose someone, a whole lot of perfectly normal circumstances suddenly take on different meaning. You see it in a different light. You wonder if they knew. I wondered. Doctors have told me that people do have a sense of their own approaching death.

Yes, my mother's death is a terrible sorrow to me. I feel - do you know what I mean - the silence of it so. She was more alive than anyone I have ever known.

I was horrified. Absolutely heart sick. All I could think of was that after 23 years together, I'd lost my faithful ally. I couldn't sleep, couldn't get the loss out of my mind. It was like discovering that someone in my family had died.

A terrific sadness swept over Jerry. As if somebody had died. The way he felt standing in the cemetry that day they buried his mother. And nothing you could do about it.

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.

When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?

The hardest obstacle I've ever had to overcome in my life is losing my mom four years ago. I wouldn't even say that I've overcome it, really. I don't imagine that I ever will.

I think losing a loved one must be a little like losing a leg. First there is the shock, then the anesthetic, and the painkillers; the attention of doctors and nurses, flowers and cards and visits from friends. But sooner or later you have to learn to walk without it.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

When somebody dies we usually need reasons for consolation, not so much to alleviate our pain as to excuse ourselves for so readily feeling consoled.

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.

With Keith's [my fiance] murder, I was changed. I thought I would be a prosecutor forever, but there were so many days when I would leave the courtroom during a trial, and go down the hall to the ladies' room, and go into a little stall, and cry.

A sea of red lights, and I slow down. My job now is to gather everyone together and tell them we have to let her go. I won't tell anyone over the phone, because I didn't like hearing the news from the doctor that way. I have maybe a week to handle the arrangements, as the doctor said, but the arrangements are overwhelming. How do I learn how to run a family? How do I say goodbye to someone I love so much that I've forgotten just how much I love her?