It will be hard for you not to ask why this must be. God knows why, and that may be as good to us as though we knew a thousand reasons. I pray God to hold you quiet and patient and uncomplaining, and help you bear the weight of this seemingly unintelligible sorrow. I hope you will remember that this is the only world in which a Christian can suffer, and suffer patiently and meekly. We cannot suffer by and by. God helps us to glorify Him now, when we can.
You'll live astride the line that separates life from death. You'll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won't wait until people die to grieve for them; you'll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgment falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.
Grief doesn't change you. It reveals you.
At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.
In desperate hope I go and search for her in all the corners of my house. I find her not. My house is small and what once has gone from it can never be regained. But infinite is thy mansion, my lord, and seeking her I have come to thy door.
Great joys, like griefs, are silent.
Success is not worth rejoicing over, failure is not worth grieving over.
All those who try to go it sole alone, Too proud to be beholden for relief, Are absolutely sure to come to grief.
[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
The proof of a well-trained mind is that it rejoices in which is good and grieves at the opposite.
It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity, two of the best qualities that heaven gives them, and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.
Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.
Fashion is only complete when it is worn by ordinary people who exist now, managing their lives, loving and grieving.
And when that bad news washes over you and that pain sponges in, I just hope you feel like you've always got two choices. One, you can swirl and twirl and gloom and doom forever. Or two, you can grieve, and then face the future with newly sober eyes.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
I don't feel quite normal if I haven't written for a while. I doubt I will ever again write anything as popular as the "Harry" books, but I can live with that thought quite easily. By the time I stop writing about Harry, I will have lived with him for 13 years, and I know it's going to feel like a bereavement. So I'll probably take some time off to grieve, and then on with the next book!
Sorrows come to stretch out places in the heart for joy.
A Christian's wit is offensive light, A beam that aids, but never grieves the sight; Vig'rous in age as in the flush of youth, 'Tis always active on the side of truth.