Elif Safak Quotes

I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to people when they ask how it feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?

After losing Steve, it does kind of feel like I'm free-falling.

When my stepfather died, I just kind of fell apart. I felt pretty vulnerable, like there literally could be no tomorrow.

Darkness does not leave us easily as we would hope.

Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else.

A grieving person's like a person treading in deep water--if they've nothing to hold on to, they lose hope. They slide right under.

My heart burnt within me with indignation and grief; we could think of nothing else. All night long we had only snatches of sleep, waking up perpetually to the sense of a great shock and grief. Every one is feeling the same. I never knew so universal a feeling.

Grief is exhausting.

My daughter, Grace, was not killed by a gun. She died suddenly at age 5 from a virulent form of strep. As I stood stunned in a church at her memorial, one of the hardest things I heard someone say was, 'I'm going to go home and hug my child a little tighter.' 'Well, good for you,' I thought. 'I'm going to go home and scream.'

Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists.

When Michael died I was tipped over the edge. I was beyond grief.

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

I have no words for my reality.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

I can't even say what my greatest fear is because I, I can't even imagine. Being without my family... I can't even say it because it makes me cry.

Every day is a new sense of tearing my heart out of my body again when I see other children who have been killed, and I know what their families are going through.

Grief causes suffering and disease.

To be perfectly frank, there is an odd place after losing a child, where you think somehow your life is worth less.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

I'm in a great rage now, as I understand how many lives we have lost.

It was the saddest day of my life.

When it was all over, and I was left alone in my office, I put my face in my hands and wept. I could do nothing less.

I know what it's like to lose.

My music comes from heartbreak - from feeling what it's like to lose everything and not being able to express it through words because it doesn't make sense.

After the tragic events of Manchester, with the senseless loss of life and the fear that came from knowing my family was unsafe and that I was completely powerless to protect them, I went to a very dark place with no tools to handle the feelings that came along with the devastation of the attack.