Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

The front windows as are the watchmen of grief - I've been looking beyond expectation - Beyond myself - and I do not know as I love you - Which one of us is missing.

And even though he felt pitiful and ridiculous, he didn't want it to end, because he knew the absence of her would hurt more than any breakup ever could.

When a loved one disappears, you continue to live with the accompaniment of that person. One has to find a balance between joy and sorrow.

I always miss my mom. Mother's Day would be just one more day I'd feel her absence but for the relentless commercialization. Thanks to that, this day is even harder to deal with.

I can't speak for others, but I miss my father.

For women who do not love us, as for the "disappeared", knowing that we no longer have any hope does not prevent us form continuing to wait. We live on our guard, on watch; women whose son has gone asea on a dangerous exploration imagine at any minute, although it has long been certain that he has perished, that he will enter, miraculously saved, and healthy.

Arms now empty will be filled and hearts now hurting from broken dreams and yearning will be healed.

I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

Will that light come again, As now these tears come...falling hot and real!

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

That is the saddest part when you lose someone you love - that person keeps changing. And later you wonder, Is this the same person I lost? Maybe you lost more maybe less, then thousand different things that come from your memory or imagination - and you do not know which is which, which was true, which is false.

Each day the sun would rise and set, the flag would be raised and lowered. Each Sunday I would have a date with my dead friend’s girl. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was going to do.

There is an empty place within me where my heart once was.

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.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.

I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.

Somewhere in his body--perhaps in the marrow of his bones--he would continue to feel her absence.

It hurts every day, the absence of someone who was once there.

My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy - but it's never him, and each time it isn't, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.

Here, take this, she would say, take this, and tell me where he is. Tell me whether he's dead or alive, so I can walk as his widow or his wife. No one would, or could, tell her, and so she continued to cook, and to learn new things all the while searching for an answer among the outcasts. The way he carried his body, the way he walked in my life, Tatiana thought, declared that he was the only man I had ever loved, and he knew it. And until I was alone without him, I thought it was all worth it.

Missing rubs the soul raw.

I do not tolerate a world emptied of you. I have tried. For a year I have called every black tree Marya Morevna; I have looked for your face in the patterns of the ice. In the dark, I have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.

I don't need any drug to show me Heaven And I sure know how to spend plenty of time cleaning Hell But I'm missin' that feeling of falling.

Your absence has gone through me