Quotes & Sayings About Grief In Hamlet

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly. — Meghan O'Rourke

He exists on two planes. He sees the story as He tells it, while He weaves it, shapes it, and sings it. And He stepped inside it. The shadows exist in the painting, the dark corners of grief and trial and wickedness all exist so that He might step inside them, so we could see how low He can stoop. In this story, the Author became flesh and wandered the stage with Hamlet, offering His own life. In this story, the Author heaped all that He loathed, all that displeased Him, all the wrongness of the world, onto Himself. — N.D. Wilson

Much of Hamlet is about the precise kind of slippage the mourner experiences: the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer, the sense that one is expected to perform grief palatably. (If you don't seem sad, people worry; but if you are grief-stricken, people flinch away from your pain.) — Meghan O'Rourke

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. — Meghan O'Rourke

When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet, "Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty, if you deny your grief to your friends"(III, ii, 844-846), Hamlet responds, "Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me." (III,ii, 371-380) — William Shakespeare

More grief to hide than hate to utter love. Polonius, Hamlet. — William Shakespeare

To persevere
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness: 'tis unmanly grief. — William Shakespeare