Joseph Epstein Quotes

It's never nice to lose someone close to you; unfortunately, life goes on, and we have to make peace with it and move on.

Forgiveness has its comforts, but it can never give you back what you've lost.

I know you loved her, but it's okay to let it go now. You know that, don't you? You've got to be able to let it go.

This is a lifetime of good-byes. In our time, we will say good-bye to cherished people, things, and ideas. Eventually, we say good-bye to life itself with our death. Learn to say a good good-bye. Allow yourself to mourn each loss. As with a physical wound, the body has its own schedule for healing. It will tell you when it has healed.

But Laila has decided that she will not be crippled by resentment. Mariam wouldn’t want it that way. ‘What’s the sense?’ she would say with a smile both innocent and wise. ‘What good is it, Laila jo?’ And so Laila has resigned herself to moving on. For her own sake, for Tariq’s, for her children’s. And for Mariam, who still visits Laila in her dreams, who is never more than a breath or two below her consciousness. Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.

We postpone the finality of heartbreak by clinging to hope. Though this might be acceptable during early or transitional stages of grief, ultimately it is no way to live. We need both hands free to embrace life and accept love, and that's impossible if one hand has a death grip on the past.

Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.

The tears I have cried over Germany have dried. I have washed my face.

Finally there was a moment when it just hit me. John wouldn't want me to sit on my butt for the rest of my life feeling sorry for myself or sorry for him. As cheesy as it sounds, he would have wanted us to go on.

The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.

Relationships ending are painful, and you can choose to carry that, or you can choose to reframe it.

I think, for other people who have lost someone and have loved again, it's a beautiful thing. But it's just not really on my horizon.

It feels good when you learn to move on in life.

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.

When one's head is gone one doesn't weep for one's hair!

You don't have to move on to let go.

Some people, they can't just move on, you know, mourn and cry and be done with it. Or at least seem to be. But for me... I don't know. I didn't want to fix it, to forget. It wasn't something that was broken. It's just...something that happened. And like that hole, I'm just finding ways, every day, of working around it. Respecting and remembering and getting on at the same time.

Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.

So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it.

A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.

Forgiving the past means remembering the love there, and releasing all the rest as the illusion that it really was.

So goodbye, I'll be leaving, I see no sense in this crying and grieving. We'll both live a lot longer, if you live without me.

Closure isn't closure until someone's ready to close the door.

Didn't help to ponder things that were forever gone. It only made a body restless and fill up with bees, all wanting to sting something.