James Patterson Quotes

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.

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.

Grief is not just a series of events, stages, or timelines. Our society places enormous pressure on us to get over loss, to get through grief. But how long do you grieve for a husband of fifty years, a teenager killed in a car accident, a four-year-old child: a year? Five years? Forever? The loss happens in time, in fact in a moment, but its aftermath lasts a lifetime.

I think losing a child is unimaginable. It's every person's worst nightmare. It's unimaginably difficult. It shakes your faith in the world. It tests your optimism.

The idea of losing someone that you love could throw you into a situation where you could not see your future and you really would be living in the past.

The loss of my parents was definitely the hardest thing I've had to endure. I just felt really dead inside for a long time.

It's hard to make progress with grief.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Grief is a matter of the heart and soul. Grieve your loss, allow it in, and spend time with it. Suffering is the optional part. Remember that you come into this world in the middle of the movie, and you leave in the middle; and so do the people you love. Love never dies, and spirit knows no loss.

Your dad didn't die, so I won't be able to explain it to you.

I think that, very often there's a pain that's just too painful to touch. You'll break apart. And I think her mother's death and disappearance and abandonment was something she just never could deal with. Eleanor Roosevelt, when she's really very unwell in 1936, she takes to her bed. She has a mysterious flu.

It made me have a much greater understanding of loss, of loneliness, and the level of intense tragedy that so many people have experienced in this world, I take a lot less for granted.

I think the question that nobody wanted to deal with is the question they're posing: did my kid die in vain? Because the answer is too awful.

Grief can choke you. It’s dangerous, something else you have to beat.

When you suffer a loss, there is before the death and after the death - those become your two existences and your two realities.

People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.

I do see that there is an argument against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release.

I can't imagine a pain more all-encompassing than losing a child.

Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn't know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you're picking up the pieces -- down to the last glassy splinter.

The hardest obstacle I've ever had to overcome in my life is losing my mom four years ago. I wouldn't even say that I've overcome it, really. I don't imagine that I ever will.

Anyone with a long-term partner, anyone with a long-term lover, if that lover dies, you could easily see yourself in a situation where you couldn't see your future and you would be living entirely in the past. It's about that loss.

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

[after the death of a loved one] It is when there is nothing more to be done that the reality of the loss often hits with full force.

The idea of what it is like to lose everything is awful.

I might be better able to help parents of dying children, but for quite a while I felt less able, too emotionally involved. And from that time on, I could rarely discuss the death of a child without tears welling up into my eyes.