Grief Management Quotes

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

When somebody walks out, it leaves a hole in you. Some people fill it up, the good and the bad, and get on that way. Some people leave it open, maybe long enough to heal, maybe too long, picking at it now and then so it doesn't heal all the way.

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.

This is not to say I don’t feel my own grief, which can hit powerfully at unexpected times. It’s just that the telling does not automatically bring on my own upset, as people assume. I deal more with their reaction than they do with mine, and so you have to choose your timing.

How do we transform loss? ... Time's healing balm is essentially a hoax.

Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.

Grief is exhausting. When you learn - maybe through my age or experience - trying to harness the energy, whatever it is, muted energy or a concentration to find yourself in a place? You try to use it for when it's really necessary and can arrive.

Mobilizing the love of life is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead.

Being reminded of your past doesn't mean that you have to live with constant grief. It simply means that you have been given the opportunity to transform your past into something positive.

My parents passed away when I was a teenager, so I had to learn different survival techniques, I think, in comedy. You know, using comedy as a pressure release, as a release valve in life really kept my sanity.

In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.

Grief is natural; the absence of all feeling is undesirable, but moderation in grief should be observed, as in the face of all good or evil.

I don't move away from grief, rather through it.

People deal with grief in many different ways. And some people in show business parade their relationships around like an accessory, and others like to keep it separate from business and commerce. It's perfectly fine to say, 'I actually don't want to talk about my love because that's not part of the fantasy world I created in commerce.'

All griefes with bread are lesse.

My son and daughter lost their father quite young, so we keep him present with us. It's just a daily practice.

...he who remains passive when over-whelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering his elasticity of mind.

In my business, if I get too close to you and you die, it hurts me. And so you develop a natural inclination not to be close to the patient, so that if things don't work out ideally, you can still get up the next day and care for the next patient.

When one has lost a friend one's eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation.

If you live in a graveyard, you can't weep for everyone.

Mourning has its place but also its limits.

She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs-- she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison.

Grief is no more necessary when we understand death than fear is necessary when we understand flying.

The violence of sorrow is not at the first to be striven withal; being, like a mighty beast, sooner tamed with following than overthrown by withstanding.