Joy Harjo Quotes

I don't think you could get anything worse than losing a child. I think if my child died, I would prefer it if I were dead.

To me, death is dark, pain, grief.

A piece of each of us died.

I was slapped down to the ground when my son Wade died in 1996, in April of 1996.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

Grief jumps out at you when you're least expecting it.

Grief is the price we pay for love.

I lost my parents very early in my life. My mom died three weeks after I graduated from high school, and my dad died two years after I got married.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

Grief is so human, and it hits everyone at one point or another, at least, in their lives. If you love, you will grieve, and that's just given.

I don't mourn the dead. I mourn the living.

Grief is an emotion that's almost unplayable because you're in a separate emotional state; it's an inconsolable emotion.

I think any time we lose people, it's a hard moment.

I hate death; it takes people away from you. You're left feeling rudderless.

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 had to go on without my mother, even though I was suffering terribly, grieving her.

Love is the funeral of hearts.

I think loss of loved ones is the hardest blow in life.

In our culture I think most people think of grief as sadness, and that's certainly part of it, a large part of it, but there's also this thorniness, these edges that come out.

Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

The war has carried mourning into almost every home … it can almost be said that the heavens are hung in black

At the root of everything I write is tragedy.

I lost my husband, and it's a horrific thing to live through.

My father died when I was 28, and within two-and-a-half years of that, I lost my first son.