Sharon Salzberg Quotes

Grief releases love and it also instills a profound sense of connection.

Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid each other.

Grief is the price we pay for love.

The big relationships you make in your life are with those that you love and if things do go wrong then it's a source of great pain and that lasts.

If our hearts are ready for anything, we can open to our inevitable losses, and to the depths of our sorrow. We can grieve our lost loves, our lost youth, our lost health, our lost capacities. This is part of our humanness, part of the expression of our love for life.

My two best friends have gone through break-ups that were really hard, and I remember thinking, 'How could this be so hard and important to them?' Literally for months they were really upset and they couldn't get over it. I had no idea what it was like. And now that I've been through it, I totally understand.

The only way to take sorrow out of death is to take love out of life.

Finding another person to love is finding another person to lose.

Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother — even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.

There is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way is always present, it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again.

[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)

Have pity, Lord, on those who love and are separated.

...those who love suffer when who they love suffers.

When you truly know the meaning of the word love, you will also know the meaning of the word pain.

Did you love well what very soon you left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache. Never so full, I never was bereft so utterly. The winter evenings drift dark to the window. Not one work will make you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake from your night toward me. The only gift I got to keep or give is what I've cried, floodgates let down to mourning for the dead chances, for the end of being young, for everyone I loved who really died. I drank our one year out in brine instead of honey from the seasons of your tongue.

Disappointment has a name, it's heartbreak

Love itself cannot be divorced from the suffering which comes from being separated from the object of love.

There are some times...when the love for people is strong and warm like a sorrow.

The depth of love is revealed in its departure.

I maintain that all sorrow comes from love of those things of which loss deprives me.

Your life is built on when love dies.

Sometimes we lose friends for whose loss our regret is greater than our grief, and others for whom our grief is greater than our regret.

If you love someone, truly love them, you should never cause them pain. Never fill their eyes with something so close to grief.

I bow in reverence before the emotions of every melted heart....The more intense the delight in their presence, the more poignant the impression of their absence....When the tears of bereavement have had their natural flow, they lead us again to life and love's generous joy.

Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so long he refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.