Natasha Trethewey Quotes

I think what I was unconsciously expressing in 'Black Rainbow' was a very abstract and metaphorical grief, in the way I had suppressed my grief about my mother dying. In retrospect I realise I started writing 'Mandy' as a sort of antidote to that, to sort of express those emotions, to purge that grief.

When Dick Avedon died, I was so upset that I just started painting.

I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.

I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do.

One often calms one's grief by recounting it.

Growing up in Ireland, when my family received important news, good or bad, we would boil water and make tea. It was the first thing I did when my father died in 1984. This ritual allowed me a moment to take in the enormity of what had happened.

In poetry you can express almost inexpressible feelings. You can express the pain of loss, you can express love. People always turn to poetry when someone they love dies, when they fall in love.

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

The power of elegy, even in the face of an unbounded grief, to provide a containing form is vividly embodied by Anne Carson's 'Nox,' a nocturne with carefully controlled visual and tactile properties.

You don't go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be.

When my dad passed, there's a lot of sadness right below the surface, and I think there will be until the day I die. So, writing sad songs helps it. And when I sing them, it's pure therapy for me.

When I need to cry, I think of very sad things, mostly about animals.

My dad passed away before my freshman year, and it altered how I thought. I was depressed - I didn't hang out with my friends. I worked through it by dancing.

Everything I was feeling, all the hurt and the pain and the emotion I was going through, I put into my music.

For me, grief is a static thing, and my movies have an extremely dynamic sort of movement.

My son and daughter lost their father quite young, so we keep him present with us. It's just a daily practice.

Michael died five years ago this January, and the first thing that really struck me about the script was the part about her peeling off from the funeral and just getting into a rowboat and having a real kind of cry where nobody was.

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

You have moments of grief in life, and if you can put pen to paper and capture that, that's something wonderful. I can revisit actual songs about past deaths, and I know that emotion is as true now as it was then.

Laughter, and the broader category of humor, are key elements in helping us go on with our life after a loss.

I started writing after the death of my grandfather - memories, poems, etc. It was very personal; for years I did not share my writing with anyone.

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. At the end of the day, it gets you through because you have to reform your relationship, and you have to figure out a way of getting to the future.

Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.

I started putting down my thoughts on paper out of loneliness while I was studying in America. I was very close to my grandfather, and when he died, I couldn't visit home. I started scribbling those thoughts.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.