Annie Proulx Quotes

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.

(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

It took about five years until we were properly over Freddie's passing. You learn to live with it.

We’re built to move on. Someone dies, no matter how close you are to them, you move on. That helps in a lot of ways.

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.

The time at length arrives, when grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity and the smile that plays upon the lips, although it may be deemed a sacrilege, is not banished.

Life Lesson 3: You can't rush grief. It has its own timetable. All you can do is make sure there are lots of soft places around - beds, pillows, arms, laps.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not "get over" the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.

You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.

only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it.

Mourning has its place but also its limits.

When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.

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

When my father passed away two or three years ago, I didnt listen to music for four days - thats a long time for me.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

I never know what to tell them. I mean, there's nothing you can say to make a person stop hurting. Half the time, I just feel like telling them the truth. I'd say that for 3 months, you're going to feel worse than you've ever felt and you cope as best you can. And that after 6 months, the pain isn't so bad, but it still hurts more than you think it will. And even after years, you still find yourself thinking about the person you lost and get sad about it. And you still miss them all the time.

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.

It was like a death in the family: You go through the mourning stage, then the rebellion, and then all of a sudden you have to find life by yourself. . . . I loved everything about marriage. I loved having a companion to wake up with and have barbecues with. But things happen and people grow apart. I don't really ever talk about the divorce because it was a heart-wrenching thing to go through.

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

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.

and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended

I've lost someone, too; someone I loved. I know how you feel." - Does it get easier? "Yes. But you'll never be the same again.