Dan Quisenberry Quotes

Poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.

Our past is who we are, and death is one of our experiences. I lost my husband a long time ago, but it's always yesterday.

I think whenever you lose somebody close to you, there's always a part of you that wishes you could have done something differently.

There are moments when the grief comes bubbling up. The first time I saw Chris's chair empty, that was really hard. And it was hard when I started folding up some of his sweaters that I so imagine him wearing.

The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living.

It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do note weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.

The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.

O, sorrow! Why dost borrow Heart's lightness from the merriment of May?

I stare at the pile of discarded remnants and think of my mother. Did she touch that pillar there? Does her scent still linger in a fragment of glass or a splinter of wood? A terrible emptiness settles into my chest. No matter how much I go about living, there are always small reminders that make the loss fresh again.

Everything I loved became everything I've lost.

I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.

But pain may be a gift to us. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift.

Grief is only the memory of widowed affection. The more intense the delight in the presence of the object, the more poignant must be the impression of the absence.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

Mourn for me rather as living than as dead.

A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.

I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.

In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish.

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.