David Whyte Quotes

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.

One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.

You must reach inside yourselves where I live like a story, not old, not young laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt sand into something clear and bright.

How could she go on without him? And, at the same time, how could she go on knowing that every moment of their time together had meant so little to him

I had learned this lesson so many times before. It was the great inner truth that didn't require the support of logic. Every time I loved, I lost, and I was diminished. I wondered how much of me would be left after tomorrow.

Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.

Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

You who have inhabited me in the deepest and most broken place, are going, going

Now I am setting out into the unknown. It will take me a long while to work through the grief. There are no shortcuts; it has to be gone through.

But grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

When grief is deepest, words are fewest.

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.

I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

It's the poignancy and sadness in things that gets to me.

Because I had a lot of emotional upheaval in my life, I'm attracted to stories about characters whose lives are full of wounds and secrets. I'm not interested in who's going to ask me to the prom. I never went to a prom.

There is a joy in sorrow which none but a mourner can know.

Losing people is dark, but some things you just have to accept.

At the root of everything I write is tragedy.

If there was a blacker color than black, I would wear it.

My father passed away when I was 18. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, but it is not like that all the time. Not every moment is dark.

I learned that, with grief, you have to take it one day at a time and learn how to find the happiness amid the heartbreak.

All the best songs have an element of sadness.

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.