loss and recovery Quotes

The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not "get over" the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.

It's hard to make progress with grief.

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

Grief is so far from retrieving a loss that it makes it greater; but the way to lessen it is by a comparison with others' losses.

One of the freedoms you get if you earn a lot of money from a book is to throw away what you want. And if you throw a lot away, the good stuff always comes back; nothing is lost.

I had a sister who died and my mother passed away. I know that grief comes in waves. When deep grief hits, I know that it hurts like hell, and then you get a little bit of a respite, and then it comes back, and it hurts like hell. I know it can be survived.

I hoped that grief was similar to the other emotions. That it would end, the way happiness did. Or laughter.

A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.

We can roam the bloated stacks of the Library of Alexandria, where all imagination and knowledge are assembled; we can recognize in its destruction the warning that all we gather will be lost, but also that much of it can be collected again; we can learn from its splendid ambition that what was one man's experience can become, through the alchemy of words, the experience of all, and how that experience, distilled once again into words, can serve each singular reader for some secret, singular purpose.