John Steinbeck Quotes

A strange thing has happened, do you know? I am in darkness. There is a person who, departing, took away the sun.

Weep, for the light is dead.

T is the work of many a dark hour, many a prayer, to bring the heart back from an infant gone.

The obliterated place is equal parts destruction and creation. The obliterated place is pitch black and bright light. It is water and parched earth. It is mud and it is manna. The real work of deep grief is making a home there.

For in hope's absence, a miracle arrived

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone, only darkness every day.

For since mine eyes your joyous sight did miss, my cheerful day is turned to cheerless night.

My hopes were all dead --- struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive.

I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day!

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn Which once he wore; The glory from his gray hairs gone For evermore!

Every night when I go to bed, I hope that I may never wake again, and every morning renews my grief.

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

It would be a lie to say that people are coming to adoption with joy at all times. Hope, perhaps, but it would be disingenuous to say that every part coming to an adoption isn't seriously grieving.

Absence from whom we love is worse than death, and frustrates hope severer than despair.

I lost my faith in God when I lost my daughter to Cancer, the beast. I begged, I cried, I offered my life for hers, and day by day, I watched that beautiful little Angel slip off. So, excuse me for not taking my seat next to you on Sunday in Church, I feel too cheated to worship.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

How disappointment tracks the steps of hope.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

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.

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

I just can't think how I would go on without children having lost Edith already... It's too upsetting for me to write about them. Naturally, I still hope, and wait, wait, wait.