Ted Olson Quotes

Depression is a feeling without a cause. Mourning has a cause.

My mother was killed in a plane crash, so I hate travelling in planes. Death is so unexpected. I would actually rather stay at home and not go anywhere.

When tragedy strikes, feeling helpless is understandable.

It's kinda hard to be optimistic, When your homies lying dead on the pavement twisted.

My book 'Trust Your Heart', which is the story of my life, will be followed by 'Singing Lessons', a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.

That's the thing about suicide. Try as you might to remember how a person lived his life, you always end up thinking about how he ended it.

My daughter, Grace, was not killed by a gun. She died suddenly at age 5 from a virulent form of strep. As I stood stunned in a church at her memorial, one of the hardest things I heard someone say was, 'I'm going to go home and hug my child a little tighter.' 'Well, good for you,' I thought. 'I'm going to go home and scream.'

I just didn't want to admit that he was dead.

I want to tell you what it was really like to think death is imminent, but I can't. It's a taste in your mouth. And an emptiness.

All of a sudden their husband's dead and maybe a child is dead and they have absolutely nothing - and they're heading through the desert at night.

I just lost my best friend, I have been crying hysterical for a full day.

You women will live as if father is still alive and in the next room.

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

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

Certainly after the tragedy in Neil's life, we were holding out hope for his recovery. It wasn't too promising at the time and obviously you get to the point of thinking that that is it.

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.

I watched children dying. That will be the image that will stay with me.

Nobody likes a child to die or losing an election.

I was taking a nose dive somewhere between eleven and twelve because my sister had died and I was practicing something that siblings do which is follow in their footsteps and die as well.

I feel like everyone else in this country today. I am utterly devastated.

I'm not devastated over a baseball game. If somebody came to me and said, 'Your wife is terminally ill.' Or, if my kids and wife get on a plane and I got a call that said, 'Something happened with the plane,' that's devastating.

I'd see an old person on the street and start crying. I couldn't understand how people could cope, knowing they only had so long left. It would be like dominoes and then the last one fell and I'm a little heap on the floor. Doctors put me on anti-depressants for a couple of years.

My son died from cancer. My granddaughter died from cancer. I have a lot of reasons to think that reality is not a friendly neighborhood. And the stories that I tell distract me, and if I do the job right, they distract people from things that are happening to them that they wish had never happened.

A piece of each of us died.