They tell me, Lucy, thou art dead,
That all of thee we loved and cherished
Has with thy summer roses perished;
And left, as its young beauty fled,
An ashen memory in its stead.
John Greenleaf Whittier
Grief has a quality of healing in it that is very deep because we are forced to a depth of emotion that is usually below the threshold of our awareness.
-Steven Levine
When an emotional injury takes place, the body begins a process as natural as the healing of a physical wound. Let the process happen. Trust that nature will do the healing. Know that the pain will pass, and, when it passes, You will be stronger, happier, more sensitive and aware.
- Mel Colgrove
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it in full.
- Marcel Proust
I knew that… the full acceptance of the finality of loss, and all the pain that goes with it, need not diminish life but could five it a new quality of fulfillment. I also knew that this could not be achieved without going through the agonies of grief and mourning.
-Marcel Proust
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left
undone.In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if
your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the
chest - without asking to be paid.
Chinua Achebe
Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my
honor.
Joseph Addison
Death is better, a milder mover; for what thing
without Zeus is done among mortals?
Aeschylus
Of all the gods, Death only craves not gifts: Nor
sacrifice, nor yet drink-offering poured Avails; no altars hath he, nor is
soothed By hymns of praise. From him alone of all The powers of heaven
Persuasion holds aloof.
Aeschylus
O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray, To come
to me: of cureless ills thou art The one physician. Pain lays not its touch Upon
a corpse.
Aeschylus
A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to
sleep, and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.
Stewart Alsop
I answer the heroic question "Death, where is they sting?" with "It is here in my heart and mind and memories."
Maya Angelou
Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.
Francis Bacon
Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh.
Robert Bolt
Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.
Julie Burchill
i shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
Willa Cather
Unable are the Loved to die
For Love is Immortality.
Emily Dickinson
Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What greater pain could mortals have than this:
To see their children dead before their eyes?
Euripedes
We who are left how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?
Wilfred Wilson Gibson
Our brains are seventy - year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Come, for the House of Hope is built on sand: bring wine, for the fabric of life is as weak as the wind.
Häfiz
A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
Thomas Mann
Neither fear your
death’s day nor long for it.
Marcus Valerius Martialis ‘Martial’
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
Iris Murdoch
He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.
Antoine de Saint - Exupéry
Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple...Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond.
George Bernard Shaw
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw
Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the
ocean.
David Searls
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential - there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost...It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.
Mark Twain
Science says: "We must live," and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable, wisdom says: "We must die," and seeks how to make us die well.
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo
Our life is made by the death of others.
Leonardo da Vinci
Grief is a powerful, universal feeling, but it is survivable.
-Kirsti A. Dyer, MD, MS
Great joys make us love the world. Great sadnesses make us understand the world.
-Kent Nerburn
All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life
not knowing what grief is.
-Frank O'Connor