Grief Faces Quotes & Sayings

All I could remember was her smile. Unable to picture the loved face, however strenuously I tried to make myself remember it, I was for ever irritated to find that my memory had retained exact replicas of the striking and futile faces of the roundabout man and the barley-sugar woman, just as the bereaved, who each night search their dreams in vain for the lost beloved, will find their sleep is peopled by all manner of exasperating and unbearable intruders, whom they have always found, even in the waking world, more than dislikable. Faced with the impossibility of seeing clearly the object of their grief, they come close to accusing themselves of not grieving, just as I was tempted to believe that my inability to remember the features of Gilberte's face meant that I had forgotten her and had stopped loving her. — Marcel Proust

Good morning, Sassenach, — Diana Gabaldon

You can't tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy.
He wasn't even sixteen but his coffin's the same size as a man's would be.
It's not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did; that's what the faces here say.
I think about him, in there, with all that space, and I want to stop them. I want to open the box and climb in with him. To wrap him up in a duvet. I can't bear the thought of him being cold.
And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb: Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love? — C.J. Flood

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering. — Sylvia Plath

He had never seen such eyes before, not even in the faces of soldiers unmanned in the midst of great carnage. Eyes like black mirrors, at once shallow and bottomless. He had the feeling that if he pressed his finger to one of those eyes, it would shatter and fall inward through a black cavern of grief and loss that could never be filled. — Greg Iles

And wilt thou have me fashion into speech
The love I bear thee, finding words enough,
And hold the torch out, while the winds are rough,
Between our faces, to cast light on each? -
I dropt it at thy feet. I cannot teach
My hand to hold my spirits so far off
From myself
me
that I should bring thee proof
In words, of love hid in me out of reach.
Nay, let the silence of my womanhood
Commend my woman-love to thy belief, -
Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed,
And rend the garment of my life, in brief,
By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude,
Lest one touch of this heart convey its grief. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Frank Johnson was recognized as one of the great federal judges of American history, I suppose. He was a law-and-order judge. He was a classical, I think, conservative. But he believed that civil rights provided in the Constitution applied to everybody. — Jeff Sessions

When a group of people are forced to navigate a minefield together, everyone feels a grudging sense of comfort when someone else gets blown up. Though there may be other unseen landmines left in the ground, each death creates a safe spot. A landmine cannot explode twice in the same place. Sure, the explosion robs the survivors of a comrade. Still, each death makes everyone's next step marginally safer. So everyone keeps walking with grief on their faces, and relief in their hearts. Their own deaths are further postponed by the end of another life. — Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

The Lesson You've Got
to learn is the someday you'll someday
stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears
shed, ready to poke your bovine head
in the yoke they've shaped.
Everyone learns this. Born, everyone
breathes, pays tax, plants dead
and hurts galore. There's grief enough
for each. My mother
learned by moving man to man,
outlived them all. The parched earth's
bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched
the instants I trod it.
Other than myself, of course.
I've made a study of bearing
and forbearance. Everyone does,
it turns out, and note
those faces passing by: Not one's a god. — Mary Karr

I'm in complete remission. I'm alive and well. — Gene Wilder

If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive facades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas - all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me, not because it's unfamiliar but because I don't know what it is. The world has slipped away. And in the bottom of my soul - as the only reality of this moment - there's an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room. — Fernando Pessoa

Afterwards the members of the little war party felt fine. Torturing whites was a splendid way to spend the afternoon. — Larry McMurtry

It's something that was very interesting to me to be a part of and all of them again because of the relationship. Some of the superhero movies are better than others. — Blair Underwood

My grief and my smile begin in your face, my son. — Gabriela Mistral

They were, perhaps, so unwearyingly fond of good things not least because they could, when put to it, do without them, and could survive rough handling by grief, foe, or weather in a way that astonished those who did not know them well and looked no further than their bellies and their well-fed faces. Though — J.R.R. Tolkien

I find poignancy in the moments when a person realizes that she has made mistakes. I am not as interested in the mistakes themselves as I am with the consequences and how the person responds to her realization. — Dana Spiotta

Just days after Joseph died, we sat down to eat dinner at the dining room table. We each sat there, choking down our food, tears streaming down our faces, and no one speaking. There was no one in his chair; his side of the table had a gaping hole. A large part of the nightly conversation was missing. Everything felt wrong. — Shelley Ramsey

I'm not prepared for Rue's family. Her parents, whose faces are still fresh with sorrow. Her fiver younger siblings, who resemble her so closely. The slight builds, the luminous brown eyes. They form a flock of small dark birds. — Suzanne Collins

Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same. — NoViolet Bulawayo

Having traveled across America and to 24 counties as the first-ever UN Youth Champion, I'm inspired by the desire of young people everywhere to make the world a better place. At GimmeMo', our goal is to build a global community of enlightened young people - those who wish to be the change they wish to see in the world, to borrow a phrase from Gandhi - and to raise awareness surrounding some of the biggest challenges that Millennials face both in the U.S. and around the world. — Monique Coleman

I am further back, surrounded on all sides by wailing men, their faces shiny with tears. Uncle Al promised three dollars and a bottle of Canadian whiskey to the man who puts on the best show. You've never seen such grief
even the dogs were howling. — Sara Gruen

I love the friendly faces of old sorrows;
I have no secrets that they do not know. — Karle Wilson Baker

If all the skies were sunshine Our faces would be fain To feel once more upon them The cooling splash of rain. If all the world were music, Our hearts would often long For one sweet strain of silence, To break the endless song If life were always merry, Our souls would seek relief, And rest from weary laughter In the quiet arms of grief. — Henry Van Dyke

It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding. — Markus Zusak

Her bark is worse than her bite. — Deborah Harkness

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough. — Pat Conroy

What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory. — George Saunders

For my part I have no joy in tears after dinnertime. There will always be a new dawn tomorrow. Yet I can have no objection to tears for any mortal who dies and goes to his destiny. And this is the only consolation we wretched mortals can give, to cut our hair and let the tears roll down our faces. — Homer

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. — Tim O'Brien

Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that there, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly. — Paul Klee

Vengeance is a way of clinging to what we have lost. A wedge in the Last Door, and through the crack we can still glimpse the faces of the dead. We strain towards it with all our being, break every rule to have it, but when we clutch it, there is nothing there. Only grief. — Joe Abercrombie