Jidenna Quotes

If you learn the language of loss early, I think you seek out others who have experienced the same thing, who speak that same language of loss.

When I find something at a flea market or an antique store, it feels more special and I'm more inclined to want to wear it.

I found my style in my aunt's attic. She hoarded all her '60s clothes there, along with the tiaras she'd won as a beauty queen, and I'd steal her wedding dress to wear around town.

We have a song, 'Welcome to the Family' - we realized for the first time in our lives that people go through this every day around the world. There is someone very close to them that they're losing, every day. That song is, 'We know how you're feeling.'

How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen today?

We do not want to lose our grief, because our grief is bound up with our love and we could not cease to mourn without being robbed of our affections.

When somebody dies we usually need reasons for consolation, not so much to alleviate our pain as to excuse ourselves for so readily feeling consoled.

I kissed him, trying to bring him back. I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual. I wanted to press every bit of me against him. I wanted to will something into him. I wanted to give him every bit of life I felt and force him to live.

The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.

When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us.

You think the dead we loved truly ever leave us? You think that we don't recall them more clearly in times of great trouble?

You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.

Seeing her this last time, I threw myself on her body. And she opened her eyes slowly. I was not scared. I knew she could see me and what she had finally done. So i shut her eyes with my fingers and told her with my heart: I cah see the truth, too. I am strong, too.

What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.

No one is exempt from grief.

This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in our nature, that, when the heart is touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling, the memory of the dead comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly. It would seem almost as though our better thoughts and sympathies were charms, in virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold some vague and mysterious intercourse with the spirits of those whom we loved in life. Alas! how often and how long may these patient angels hover around us, watching for the spell which is so soon forgotten!

Temporary feelings of regret are a normal part of the mourning process. This helps us retrieve our lost dreams. If we hold on to regret, we risk trapping ourselves in a prison of unrealized dreams from which it is difficult to escape.

Grief is the price Love pays for being in the same world with Death.

There is no single way of grieving. But research suggests that there are some broad similarities among grievers.

I think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.

I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. the only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it.