Phil Elverum Quotes

First, there is no typical grief cycle, and second, it's not something I went through. I'm still grieving.

Cancer is awful. It took 10 years until I didn't think about it every day. Nobody should go through this. Nobody.

There's a general impulse to distract the grieving person - as if you could.

To grieve is something extremely difficult, we don't even know how to begin to grieve, and I don't know how you can be taught to grieve.

I lost my father and went into a process of grief with it that was all about how to replace that grief, how to fill it, and I think there was something very desperate in the way that I was replacing it.

My dad leaving my life. That's the biggest thing that happened to me. I just remember what he tells me, the memories, and try to move on forward each day, knowing that he's still here, looking down on me.

You can't go to Amazon and order a book on how you handle grief. There's books on it, sure. But there's no tried and true manual. You just have to live that out. There's no formula to heal.

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.

I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room-but eventually, you learn to live with it.

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

People talk about grief as if it's kind of an unremittingly awful thing, and it is. It is painful, but it's a very, very interesting sort of thing to go through and it really helps you out.

Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground.

There is no shortcut to grieving.

I cry secretly. I don't really cry in front of anybody. I hate crying. I feel like it's not accomplishing anything. But when I lost my mother, I cried, and I cried big.

that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep

Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.

There's solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her.

I often wish my mother had died so that at least I could get some people's sympathy. But there she was, a perfectly beautiful mother.

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

I had a sister who died and my mother passed away. I know that grief comes in waves. When deep grief hits, I know that it hurts like hell, and then you get a little bit of a respite, and then it comes back, and it hurts like hell. I know it can be survived.

I'd been told of all the things you're meant to feel when your father dies. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you're in no one's shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely.

Now I know that grief is a whetstone that sharpens all your love, all your happiest memories, into blades that tear you apart from within.

That's the paradox of loss: How can something that's gone weigh us down so much?

Madge: I don't know why I keep shouting at them. The Doctor: Because every time you see them happy you remember how sad they're going to be. And it breaks your heart. Because what's the point in them being happy now if they're going to be sad later. The answer is, of course, because they are going to be sad later. ~ The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe

And that's just it, isn't it? That's how we manage to survive the loss. Because love, it never dies, it never goes away, it never fades, so long as you hang on to it.