Seneca the Younger Quotes

There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.

In all the silent manliness of grief.

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are.

There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.

She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.

Sorrow was all my soul; I scarce believed, Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived.

Everyone understands the pain that accompanies death, but genuine pain doesn't live in the spirit, nor in the air, nor in our lives, nor on these terraces of billowing smoke. The genuine pain that keeps everything awake is a tiny, infinite burn on the innocent eyes of other systems.

Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.

Fans say I have a lot of sorrow in my eyes. It's true.

Words are less needful to sorrow than to joy.

Mama had her little cough. Once or twice, some quiet sobbing, out of sight... Or the slamming of kitchen cupboard doors. That was her language.

Away from the bright motion of the party, she carried her sadness like a dark stone clenched in her palm.

I lay in bed at night crying to myself. The only one who loved me and watched over me was someone I couldn't see or hear or touch.

My thoughts, imprisoned in my secret woes, with flamy breaths do issue oft in sound.

Or-but this more rarely happened-she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it.

The easiest thing to feel is sadness.

Though my heart is filled with feelings I want to convey You see, I can't express them in words If I had not met you I wouldn't even have such an embarrassing pain

I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off ... Do not for ever with thy vailed lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust.

There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.

Deep in my heart subsides the infrequent word, And there dies slowly throbbing like a wounded bird.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.