Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it’s less like stages and more like different states of feeling. – Meghan O’Rourke
I guess I’m curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I’m also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years. – Dan Chaon
Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. – Edward Hirsch
No one feels another’s grief, no one understands another’s joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by. – Franz Schubert
It’s a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there’s a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there’s a private TV show viewing our lives. – Darin Strauss
Humans have a sense of spontaneity and emotion. We have a dichotomy between grief and happiness. – Morena Baccarin
Having dealt with a lot of real firefighters, I know there are a lot of guys who, for lack of a better term, become addicted to the grief because it has kept them connected to these guys that they felt responsible for having lost. – Denis Leary
As you say goodbye to lingering disappointments and unattended grief, you will discover that every person, situation and painful incident comes bearing gifts. – Debbie Ford
I wasn’t prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn’t just sadness, and it wasn’t linear. Somehow I’d thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better – like getting over the flu. That’s not how it was. – Meghan O’Rourke
You don’t go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be. – Nigella Lawson
I believe in the importance of individuality, but in the midst of grief I also find myself wanting connection – wanting to be reminded that the sadness I feel is not just mine but ours. – Meghan O’Rourke
Grief is at once a public and a private experience. One’s inner, inexpressible disruption cannot be fully realized in one’s public persona. – Meghan O’Rourke
This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands. – Meghan O’Rourke
Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn’t serve anyone, and it’s painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you’re magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person. – Patti Smith
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal. – Meghan O’Rourke
I remember tearing up the first time I read Nabokov’s description, in ‘Speak, Memory,’ of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering muzhiks, with its astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning. – Michael Chabon
You have moments of grief in life, and if you can put pen to paper and capture that, that’s something wonderful. I can revisit actual songs about past deaths, and I know that emotion is as true now as it was then. – John Lydon
Grief at the absence of a loved one is happiness compared to life with a person one hates. – Jean de la Bruyere
We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country. – Kevin Rudd
The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The belief that a person can and should only feel grief over one sad event at a time is a truly disturbing estimate of our emotional capacity. – Jennifer Armintrout
It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness. – Marcus Tullius Cicero
The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. – John Millington Synge
Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca
