Roz Chast Quotes

We live in grief for having left the womb, for having left the teat, then school, then home. In my case, it was leaving marriages, and the death of my wife.

Half the bloody world is going through a divorce; more than that are having children. All of us have parents who are dying or have died. It's just the life cycle.

I think you grieve different elements, you grieve your wife who's gone, you grieve the fact she had cancer and you had to watch her die, you grieve the fact the life you built isn't going to be the same as the one going forward. All these different elements hit you at different times.

I was 33 when my father passed away.

Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.

A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

We die as often as we lose a friend.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer, so we ended up burying him a year to the day that he was diagnosed.

Life is precious, and when someone dies it's an opportunity to realise how precious it is. My brother drowned when I was 17. He was 15. I think I grew from that. My father didn't. It really crushed him.

IN April 1882 my father died; and I was at once whirled out of my land of dreams into a very different sphere.

I'm not great at dealing with death, I have to say. I find death very hard: my mum, my dad, Sid Vicious. I'm not a monster; I feel it and it scares me. One death at a time, please, is all my heart will bear.

To me, death is dark, pain, grief.

I began writing 'The Cold Song' in the months following my father's death, when I felt this sense of loss, disappearance, of being right in the middle of life and wondering: 'What now? How to proceed?'

My sister died in Brooklyn.

I was studying architecture at Berkeley when my father passed away in 2007. We knew he had cancer, but we didn't expect it to escalate so rapidly. In my mind, it was like, 'He'll pull through.' When he didn't, I didn't understand. I was 21, and my best friend had died.

You're never prepared to lose anybody in your family.

A fundamental and unfortunate part of being alive is to suffer loss and to suffer grief.

I had never experienced the death of someone close to me until my grandfather passed away.

I've not really had a bad Christmas. Apart from serious things, like when my father died. He rather spoiled the party and I've never forgiven him for falling off the twig on Christmas Day.

Come not, when I am dead, To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave, To trample round my fallen head, And vex the unhappy dust thou wouldst not save. There let the wind sweep and the plover cry; But thou, go by. Child, if it were thine error or thy crime I care no longer, being all unblest; Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time, And I desire to rest. Pass on, weak heart, and leave me where I lie: Go by, go by.

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.

Death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

All of my best friends are dead people. Someday I've got to figure out how that happened.

Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that-what we felt, what it meant- that's done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.