Grief And Depression Quotes & Sayings

An observant friend will recognize the signs of the rise of grief: eyes that easily well with tears, a smile that is difficult to sustain, a tendency to withdraw. And ultimately, perhaps we each need to create our own symbol of grieving - to wear our version of black, or maybe to color with black crayons for a while. — Sandy Oshiro Rosen

The more you want to dig a hole and burry yourself in it, the more you need to run and be ALIVE and do things. The more you want to do nothing, the more you need to do something. The more you want to be selfish, just think about yourself and your own pain, the more you need to look outward and try to cheer other people up. Then you will find happiness for yourself, when you give yourself away in any way you can. — Lisa Bedrick

Friends are the real superheroes. They battle our worst enemies - loneliness, grief, anxiety, depression, fear, and doubt - every time they come around. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Despair, grief, and depression are not things that people can simply stop, any more than someone can will an end to a toothache or the pain of withdrawal. Acutely suicidal people have lost all sense of having power over their pain. To tell them to magically acquire will power is like asking a crippled person to race against a champion. It does not help them do the thing in question; it just makes them feel worse. — David L. Conroy

If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief. — Brene Brown

There is a basic emotional spectrum from which we cannot and should not escape, and I believe that depression is in that spectrum, located near not only grief but also love. Indeed I believe that all the strong emotions — Andrew Solomon

I lived my grief; I slept mourning and ate sorrow and drank tears. I ignored all else. — Robin Hobb

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Cleckley reported that psychopaths never experience grief, honesty, deep joy, or genuine despair. From my own experience, I would add to Cleckley's observations that the psychopath never ruminates on anything.

Rumination is a process that often contributes to depression and in extreme forms to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The process of rumination is often associated with some anxiety or subjective feeling of concern or worry, and this can help precipitate change in the individual in order to reduce the anxiety.

The psychopath experiences none of this.

Indeed, if you ask a psychopath if he has ever worried about whether he left the house with the stove on (a common problem among those with obsessive-compulsive disorder), he will look at you like you are an alien, in stunned disbelief. — Kent A. Kiehl

I don't think grief of grief in a medical way at all. I think that I and many of my colleagues, are very concerned when grief becomes pathological, that there is no question that grief can trigger depression in vulnerable people and there is no question that depression can make grief worse. — Kay Redfield Jamison

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Maman's death: perhaps it is the one thing in my life that I have not responded to neurotically. My grief has not been hysterical, scarcely visible to others (perhaps because the notion of "theatralizing" my mother's death would have been intolerable); and doubtless, more hysterically parading my depression, driving everyone away, ceasing to live socially, I would have been less unhappy. And I see that the non-neurotic is not good, not the right thing at all. — Roland Barthes

Century after century, the belief that an individual's physical health was independent of his or her emotional health has so dominated medical thought that there has even been open contempt for anyone who would dare to claim that a person's physical well-being is the sum of its internal and external influences. — Sandy Oshiro Rosen

You go to bed different ... tossing and turning is the norm ... you wake to a sunny day but clouds follow you wherever you go. You wonder if you are strong enough to climb out of the depression you are living in and your prayers to God seem empty because you are sooo very tired of telling him the same thing over and over again ... if we are really being real ... there may even be moments after impact you forget how to pray ... maybe you don't even want to. — Erica Stone

Change the way you think and you will change the way you feel. — Charmaine Smith Ladd

I saw the world in black and white instead of the vibrant colours and shades I knew existed. — Katie McGarry

The train blows through town
delivering reality,
slapping my face and screaming,
"You are alone"
Rose colored memories drown,
taking their last breath. — Kellie Elmore

God is a creation of human brain — Durgesh Satpathy

Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled. — Andrew Solomon

It's like I have this large black hole in my brain and it's sucking the life out of me. The answers are in there so I sit for hours and stare. No matter how hard and long I look, I only see darkness. — Katie McGarry

When Dad was in the middle of a description of the hotel's laundry facility, I interrupted. "Why haven't you told me today, like you do every day, that Mom's going to be better soon?"
He looked up then. His gaze locked with mine and held a promise that no matter what he said or didn't say, he and I would ride this out together. "I haven't told you that today, Meg, because I don't know. — Laura Anderson Kurk

I can't see the logic in medicating a grieving person like there was something wrong with her, and yet it happens all the time... you go to the doctor with symptoms of profound grief and they push an antidepressant at you. We need to walk through our grief, not medicate it and shove it under the carpet like it wasn't there. — Richard Wagner

Depression isn't the almighty ruler of your destiny. Even its familiar traits - grief, anger, despair - you find that you can use in other ways. I can create with them in my writing and my life, mix them up with excitement and pleasure. I can name that terrible, numbing paralysis and know it will pass. — Margo Jefferson

But as the years passed, he missed her more, not less, and his need for her became a cut that would not scar over, would not stop leaking. — Dennis Lehane

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-
woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

We are all damaged. We have all been hurt. We have all had to learn painful lessons. We are all recovering from some mistake, loss, betrayal, abuse, injustice or misfortune. All of life is a process of recovery that never ends. We each must find ways to accept and move through the pain and to pick ourselves back up. For each pang of grief, depression, doubt or despair there is an inverse toward renewal coming to you in time. Each tragedy is an announcement that some good will indeed come in time. Be patient with yourself. — Bryant McGill

The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom's voice came to me, repeating things she'd said for months. Like, "My skin is melting off my face, isn't it?" And, "My whole body feels dead from the crap they're pouring into me. Do I look green to you?" And, "When I'm naked, I can see my heart beating. — Laura Anderson Kurk

It was strange how in that moment of tragedy, it had seemed so unreal, like an old-fashioned movie reel playing on a screen for my eyes only. The pain and broken heart were blocked off for a little while, leaving me numb with disbelief. Shock is what Dad called it. But after a while, the cruel reality started to seep into my tissues, and my body became a sponge, just sucking it all up until, finally, there was so much grief inside, I couldn't help feeling it.
That's how it happened for me. First, the numbness right after she died, next the agonising pain and then the place I was at now - the land of perpetual depression. — Karen Ann Hopkins

What I'm trying to say is: it gets boring when nothing meaningful is discussed about it. It's the same thing when a woman poet writes about suffering - it's a "woman's tendency to depression and grief." It's not a human, universal tackling of something that exists in all of us. It's suddenly a "woman issue." — Fady Joudah

When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating ... As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression. — Robert Bly

Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future. — Sivananda Saraswati

It doesn't get better," I said. "The pain. The wounds scab over and you don't always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you'll never be the same. — Katie McGarry

Inertia: Inertia means giving in to old habits and conditioning. Whatever the cause of depression, anxiety, trauma, insecurity, or grief, these states linger if you take a passive attitude. "That's just how things are" is the motto of inertia. Become aware of how doing nothing is actually the way you've trained yourself to keep things the same. Do you sit and dwell on your suffering? Do you reject helpful advice before even considering it? Do you know the difference between griping and genuinely airing your feelings with the intention of healing them? Examine the routine of your suffering and break out of it. — Deepak Chopra

With a damp palm, I turned the knob and cracked open the door. She was asleep in her freshly made bed. I can't explain how relieved I felt for this simple mercy. She was here and safe on clean sheets. — Laura Anderson Kurk

When I'm talking about depression, I'm talking about the more severe forms of depression, and I think that conceptualising as a form of grief is probably not the most effective way of looking at it. I mean, at the end of the day, people suffer enormously, and you want to treat it. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after ... you know ... after the funeral we haven't had the money for any of your weird little games and I was hoping you'd be more mature now that Jud's gone," her father had disappointedly added. "How much'd that cake cost you?"
"It's paid for," Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. "I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy's last year and I ... it was my birthday, dad!"
"You can't even be normal about this one thing, can you?" her father had complained.
Mandy hadn't cried, she'd only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. " ... I'm normal. — Rebecca McNutt

If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard. — Robin Hobb

Poverty, oppression, grief and depression will increase, if a country does not live according to the rules of God. — Sunday Adelaja

In the lowest of lows you can learn the highest of highs, and that often when you get to the point of wanting to die, it's because you already have and are truly aching to live. — Jackie Haze

Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety ... One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine. — Victor Hugo

Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.
Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart. — Simon Armitage

In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and remind us to go all in, because life is short. The joy edges the pain and gives us a reason to rise. — Anna White

No, it really isn't, but trust me, getting divorced and having to start over is the least in life that isn't fair. I had to watch the parents of a way too young girl realize that their daughter died for no other reason than people can't figure out how to be nice to each other. It isn't that hard, just be nice and people might not have to suffer needlessly, but that isn't the world we live in, so young girls die. That isn't fair, Mom. People falling out of love is vicious and it sucks, but there are far worse things you could be going through. I know that sounds harsh but it's very true. — Jay Crownover

When you feel sad, you are participating in a venerable experience, to which I, this monument, am dedicated. Your sense of loss and disappointment, of frustrated hopes and grief at your own inadequacy, elevate you to serious company. Do not ignore of throw away your grief — Alain De Botton

Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind,
And makes it fearful and degenerate;
Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep. — William Shakespeare

According to Elizabeth Kubler Ross, there are fivestages of grief a person passes through after the death of aloved one: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. — Colleen Hoover

He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much. — Nina LaCour

The terrible truth about depression, and the part of its nature that terrifies me the most, is that it appears to operate beyond reason; feelings happen to you for no apparent cause. Or rather, there is usually an initial cause, a 'trigger'as they say in therapeutic circles, but in severe depression the feelings of sadness, grief, loneliness and despair continue long after the situation has resolved itself. It is as if depression has a life of its own, which is perhaps why so many sufferers refer to it as a living thing, as some sort of demon or beast. — Sally Brampton

If adversity and hopeless grief have quite taken away the taste for life; if an unfortunate man, strong of soul and more indignant about his fate than despondent or dejected, wishes for death and yet preserves his life without loving it, not from inclination or fear but from duty, then his maxim has moral content. — Immanuel Kant

All the whackjob psychologists out there will tell you that grief is a process. Some say it has five stages. Others say that grief should only last two years at the lost, otherwise it's "abnormal". Putting an expiration date of grief though is like putting out the flame on a burning candle. It might stop the candle from melting down and falling apart, but in the long run the candle goes solid, freezes in a catatonic state. Take away a person's grief and guaranteed they'll only be a frozen shell of a human being afterwards. Grief is only love, it's nothing to hide or send away with happy pills and mother's little helpers. Grief is a lifeline connecting two people who are in different realms together, and it's a sign of loyalty and hope. — Rebecca McNutt

The worst feeling in the world is not losing your friend forever, but rather having patronizing people tell you that the love you have for your friend and the connection and emotion you have towards them is an illness to be cured, a problem to be covered up and hidden away by the power of mood-altering drugs. I used to trust doctors when I was younger... now I've lost my trust in all mental health professionals forever. — Rebecca McNutt

I have become conscious of my own "cry face." My face puckers like the business end of a hot dog except for my mouth, which stretches in a grimace so wide as to accommodate said hotdog horizontally within it. It's not pretty. — Kelly Wilson

I felt like I was being carried over the threshold of a sisterhood of loss. I knew I was not walking alone, and that eventually I would bob back up to the surface of the deep, because the women around me showed me what healing looks like. — Anna White

God gifted a Zoo; with a paralyzed care taker. — Durgesh Satpathy

She said once that time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic. — Dennis Lehane

She started beating it against the walls and floor until it was nothing but pieces, nothing but a memory of a guitar. I had an idea, though not yet clear, that it wasn't her arms that beat what once could sing, but her heavy heart, as she once said that even the Rock of Gibraltar had ten thousand holes. — Jackie Haze

The worst type of crying wasn't the kind everyone could see
the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived. For people like me and Echo, our souls contained more scar tissue than life. — Katie McGarry

There was no more meaningless phrase in all of language than "Cheer up!" The only way to get someone to cheer up was to help them forget, and saying "cheer up" had quite the opposite effect, only reminding the person why he or she was depressed in the first place. — Koji Suzuki

I was sprawled out in my usual position on the couch, half asleep but entirely drunk, torturing myself by tearing memories out of my mind at random like matches from a book, striking them one at a time and drowsily setting myself on fire. — Jonathan Tropper

The interesting thing about grief, I think, is that it is its own size. It is not the size of you. It is its own size. And grief comes to you. You know what I mean? I've always liked that phrase "He was visited by grief," because that's really what it is. Grief is its own thing. It's not like it's in me and I'm going to deal with it. It's a thing, and you have to be okay with its presence. If you try to ignore it, it will be like a wolf at your door. — Stephen Colbert

They say grief occurs in five stages. First there's denial followed by anger. Then comes bargaining, depression and acceptance. But grief is a merciless master. Just when you think you're free you realize you never stood a chance. — Emily Thorne

I realized at that moment that depression and I will always be linked, tugging back and forth, like the drunken uncle who still gets invited to the family reunion even though everyone knows he's going to make a messy scene. — Kelly Wilson

Emotions have their own movement. They move like waves: huge tsunami waves, choppy rapids, or long slow tides. The best way I know to work with emotion, especially strong and difficult emotion is to let it move like a wave, allow it to complete its movement and, eventually, to leave. If the movement gets held back, if it gets trapped and stagnates, or an inner turbulence stirs, the unexpressed emotion and grief can turn into physical illness, fatigue, depression, anxiety, or other displaced emotion. — Sharon Weil

The fact is that when you admit that you can't blame anyone or anything else, you begin to blame yourself. The human mind gives up trying to find an executioner, but still it must blame someone. Anger that is not expressed tends to turn inward and, instead, attacks the very one who feels it. You move from anger and guilt into depression. — Kate McGahan

We will remember what it was like to lose you, our pain the black background of our electric blue joy. We will remember that there are few answers to our questions; the questions that seem to float into an endless expanse of sky. — Kelly Wilson

There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness, of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails. — Olivia Laing

If you are working with a therapist counselor social worker grief expert minister priest or anyone else who is trying to help you navigate the wilderness of grief and they start talking about the groundbreaking observations of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross suggesting there is an orderly predictable unfolding of grief please please please. Do yourself a favor. Leave. People who are dying often experience five stages of grief: denial anger bargaining depression and acceptance. They are grieving their impending death. This is what Elizabeth Kubler Ross observed. People who are learning to live with the death of a beloved have a different process. It isn't the same. It isn't orderly. It isn't predictable. Grief is wild and messy and unpredictable — Tom Zuba

Someday, beyond the clouds and all the world's wrongs, there will be love, compassion and justice, and we shall all understand. — Flavia Weedn

It ... whatever 'it' is, has swallowed me and I lie here in the pit of its cold dark stomach being eaten alive by its bile and I ... I don't even know if I want to be saved. — Kellie Elmore

To multiply the years and divide by the desire to live is a kind of false accounting. — Peter Heller

Time is ungovernable, but grief presents us with a choice: what do we do with the savage energies of bereavement? What do we do with the memory - or in the memory - of the beloved? Some commemorate love with statuary, but behavior, too, is a memorial, as is a well-lived life. In death, there is always the promise of hope. The key is opening, rather than numbing, ourselves to pain. Above all, we must show our children how to celebrate existence in all its beauty, and how to get up after life has knocked us down, time and again. Half-dead, we stand. And together, we salute love. Because in the end, that's all that matters. How hard we loved, and how hard we tried. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn't grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, no door. — Etgar Keret

I have prayed many times that God would give me wisdom and I concur with Solomon here when he says that with "much wisdom there is much grief." The more you know, the harder life is. The more pain and suffering you see, the more you come to realize that "it is a grievous task which God has given to the sons of men. — Lisa Bedrick

The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality - the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood. Once we have experienced and become familiar with this world, it is no longer strange and threatening. — Alice Miller

In some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief, and they really need to be treated for depression. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions and crowds them out. Such depression takes up bodily occupancy in the eyelids and in the muscles that keep the spine erect. It hurts your heart and lungs, making the contraction of involuntary muscles harder than it needs to be. Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come. The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge. — Andrew Solomon

My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She'd set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I'd begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin.
He slid it across the counter to me - Don't worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change. — Laura Anderson Kurk

I have attempted for years to make fun of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is a dangerous game. It's similar to poking fun at the largest, scariest bully at your school and assuming you won't get beat up. — Kelly Wilson

Kache did not know how to rewind his life, how to undo the one thing that had undone him. His world was indeed flat, and he'd fallen off the edge and landed stretched out on a sofa, on pause, while the television pictures moved and the voices instructed him on everything he needed to know about everything--except how to bring his mom and his dad and Denny back from the dead. — Sere Prince Halverson

Caring for others tends to be the first cut when we review our personal time budget. It does not necessarily fulfill the goals of my ambition; it will not pave the way for my success; it takes away from my own depleted emotional resources. It is an imposition in every way. To some of us, it is an inconvenience from which we unashamedly run. We have become experts in maintaining a grand scope of friendships and amateurs in genuine intimacy and care. Unwittingly, we have sacrificed everything on the altar of self-sufficiency - only to discover that we have sold our souls to isolation. — Sandy Oshiro Rosen

... Look, I'm real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot," Mandy apologized gloomily. "It's wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution."
"It's alright, I think she wants to be remediated," Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did.
"You don't have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you," Mandy pointed out. "People shouldn't be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don't want to. — Rebecca McNutt

People are more likely to fall intensely in love when they are anxious and their self-esteem is lowest.... Feeling inadequate, unhappy, and empty are virtual prerequisites for falling and staying desperately in love; at least temporarily, the ecstasy of desire seems to cure everything that ails you. There is a connection between aversive states of mind -- loneliness, shame, even grief and horror -- and a propensity to feel overwhelming passion; this is one reason why romances blossom in times of war or natural disasters, as well as during the private disasters of our everyday lives. — Jeanne Safer