Roger Angell Quotes

There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.

That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.

Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight like fists. - "Indian Boy Love Song #1

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor's mind toward some resolution which it may never find.

The tragedy of loss is not that we grieve, but that we cease to grieve, and then perhaps the dead are dead at last.

When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind, for those that were here we see no more.

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering?

There's something about losing friends, particularly young people, where it's not something that you get over. I don't believe there's a healing process.

Losing a parent is always a terrible thing for anybody. It's no more or no less for me.

And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it's not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother's death, I'd catch myself thinking about her as alive; and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone.

The songs of the dead are the lamentations of the living.

Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.

The bustle in a house The morning after death Is solemnest of industries Enacted upon earth,-- The sweeping up the heart, And putting love away We shall not want to use again Until eternity

It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do note weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.

New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.

Is not absence death to those who love?

I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving.

How do you know, Dan? You were so young when they died. Do you really remember them?" "Not in my mind," Dan replied, gazing at the passing scenery. "But everyplace else.

Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.