Quotes

Are we dwelling on our loss? Absolutely. But we are learning to dwell on it constructively, to dwell on it without guild and without the isolation we have all felt. We learn how to reach out (in time) to others with a compassion that brings healing to others as well as to ourselves. --Philip Barker

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn. --Hal Borland

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. --Albert Camus

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief. --Marcus Tullius Cicero

I can never lose one whom I have loved unto the end, one to whom my soul cleaves so firmly that it can never be separated, does not go away but only goes before. --St. Bernard of Clairvaux

After the death of a child, it becomes crystal clear. We humans are capable of enduring much more than we can ever imagine. Knowing that doesn't make grief one bit easier. The painful truth is that we simply do what we must do. We do the unthinkable--day after day. --Carol Clum

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change. --Colette

Flowers are the spirits of children whose footsteps have passed from the earth, but reappear each year to gladden the pathway of those now living. --Cowlitz legend

No one would be foolish enough to choose war over peace--in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons. --Croesus of Lydia

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

I used to always think that I’d look back on us crying and laugh, but, I never thought I’d look back on us laughing and cry. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perhaps they are not stars in the sky, but rather openings where our loved ones shine down to let us know they are happy. --Eskimo legend

Start by doing what's necessary, then what's possible and suddenly you are doing the impossible. --Saint Frances

Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. --Pierce Harris

If anyone desires a wish to come true they must capture a butterfly and whisper that wish to it. Since they make no sound, they can’t tell the wish to anyone but the Great Spirit. So by making the wish and releasing the butterfly it will be taken to the heavens and be granted. --Indian Butterfly Legend

Love isn’t what makes the world go ‘round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile. --Franklin P. Jones

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being. --Carl Gustav Jung

Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this is a dream? There must be. We cannot be created for this sort of suffering. --John Keats

Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn’t permanent. --Jean Kerr

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. --Martin Luther King, Jr.

A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go from day to day as if it hadn't happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know. --Barbara Kingsolver

God inspires people to help other people who have been hurt by life, and by helping them, they protect them from the danger of feeling alone, abandoned, or judged. --Harold Kushner

I was shocked that I did not die from grief. And I know now that I will not die from grief because I choose not to. I may run--or shake wildly--or lie paralyzed on the ground for a while, but I will not ultimately succumb. Whatever gives us an increase sense of control--whether it be love or faith or cognitive coping--seems to mobilize our self healing system. --C.S. Lewis

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk or confused. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. And no one told me about the laziness of grief...I loathe the slightest effort... --C.S. Lewis

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars. --Og Mandino

Love cures people--both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it. --Dr. Karl Menninger

Your absence has gone through me / Like a thread through a needle / Everything I do is stitched with its color --W.S. Merwin

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved. --Iris Murdoch

...there is no more ridiculous custom than the one that makes you express sympathy once and for all on a given day to a person whose sorrow will endure as long as his life. Such grief, felt in such a way, is always "present"; it is never too late to talk about it, never repetitious to mention it again. --Marcel Proust

Grief remains one of the few things that has the power to silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within. More than sex, more than faith, even more than its usher death, grief is unspoken, publicly ignored except for those moments at the funeral that are over too quickly, or the conversations among the cognoscenti, those of us who recognize in one another a kindred chasm deep in the center of who we are. --Anna Quindlen

It is a curious thing in human experience, but to live through a period of stress and sorrow with another person creates a bond which nothing seems able to break. --Eleanor Roosevelt

The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made. And the activity of making them changes both the maker and their destination. --John Schaar

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain --William Shakespeare

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. --Baruch Spinoza

Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark. --Sir Rabindranath Tagore

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. --The Talmud

Grief and joy are a revolving wheel. --Tamil proverb

A smile is the light in your window that tells others that there is a caring, sharing person inside. --Denis Waitley

Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable. --The Wizard of Oz