Jim Parrack Quotes

We can see loss as something missing, but that missing space can be filled with something else, and that creates healing.

I've seen so many women in my family, so many mothers, that have lost children in the war in such absurd ways. I wonder how they do it. How do they keep living? How do they keep smiling?

It took me a long time to write again because Katrina destroyed the home I loved, and that robbed me of hope.

My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.

You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope

I don't think anyone ever gets over anything in life; they merely get used to it.

My book 'Trust Your Heart', which is the story of my life, will be followed by 'Singing Lessons', a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.

The storm came. Lives were washed away. Ancient pains resurfaced. Now it is time for a sea of change.

When you overcome a profound loss, or there's some catalyst in your life that shifts everything, if you're able to take it in stride and heal, it can make for much more three-dimensional and empathetic people.

After you have wept and grieved for your physical losses, cherish the functions and the life you have left.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

I've had a bad time, which we won't dwell on. We were married and we worked together for 52 years, and suddenly with her gone I was a quadriplegic. Slowly I'm crawling back.

Cancer is a very sad thing, but you can always take something from every experience.

I had a husband who stayed with me, and small children, and I had no choice but to pull myself together and rebuild a different kind of life. There was no other choice.

It's a hard thing to imagine how somebody copes with grief and at the same time has to build a new life.

The world, post-Katrina, was a hard time for my city. The hardest time. For people who didn't live through it, no words can fully express the pain, the rage, the grief, and the futility we New Orleanians felt. For the people who did, words seemed like a feeble protest against a relentless night without end.

We salvage the bones of our lives every day, through small tragedies and big tragedies.

I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void: the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning.

My parents and my sister died... very close together, and after that, I lost quite a bit of my sense of humor. Most of it I think has kind of come back, but I know there was a time when I didn't think things were funny anymore. I kind of think they're funny again.

I am here today as an example to all that have gone through a personal hell or are going through it right now, whatever that hell might be for you, that you can become whole again. In fact, you can become stronger than you ever thought possible.

Everybody has losses, and sometimes they're worse than others, but you can always bounce back.

They always say, 'Time heals.' But it really doesn't. You just get used to it. I live life with the mentality of 'OK, I lost the only thing that has ever been important to me.' So going forward, anything bad that happens can't be nearly as bad as what happened before.

Part of life is dying and you just have to pick up where you left off.