Alastair Reynolds Quotes

Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and later ask--perhaps more than once--where the dead person is and when he is coming back.

When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

(Grief) is something you never really get over, but you put it in a place inside you and deal with it in the way you have to.

It takes a year, nephew... a full turn of the calendar, to get over losing someone.

We soon cease to feel the grief at the deaths of our friends, yet we continue to the end of our lives to miss them. They are still with us in their absence.

Attachments and bereavements are inseparable.

They say that moving is one of the most stressful things in life. Death in the family is the second most stressful, and moving your dead spouse is the third.

Grief is, of all the passions, the one that is the most ingenious and indefatigable in finding food for its own subsistence.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

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

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S.'s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

With Keith's [my fiance] murder, I was changed. I thought I would be a prosecutor forever, but there were so many days when I would leave the courtroom during a trial, and go down the hall to the ladies' room, and go into a little stall, and cry.

He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

When someone you know passes on, the only thing you can do is keep moving forward.

Grief,she reminded herself, is almost always for the mourner's loss.

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.

It's not the loss of life that makes the death bitter -- it's the obituaries.

Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments.

Those of you who are strong need to be there for those who have lost someone today. We have to be here for each other right now.

People talk about the pain of grief, but I don't know what they mean. To me, grief is a devastating numbness, every sensation dulled.

No one teaches you how to do this. How do you let go of someone who you love so much?

Grief is as contagious as a yawn.