“With permission to grieve, we stop yelling at ourselves to be stronger or different or better in our pain and shift to witnessing ourselves instead.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“If complete victory is what you desire wholeheartedly, do not settle for mediocrity.”
Source: A Manual for Victory
“There's nothing to do. You've been in the business long enough to understand grief. That's the awful thing: there is nothing to do but go on. You don't want to, you don't want to leave the loved one behind, but you do. Death's taught you that much at least.”
Source: A Prayer for the Dying
“Grief does not make us weak,' Cristina said firmly. 'It makes us human. How could you comfort Dru, or Ty, or Jules, if you didn't know what they missed about her? Sympathy is common. Knowing the exact shape of the hole someone's loss leaves in your heart is rare.”
Source: Queen of Air and Darkness
“If he failed, it was with honor.
In his name we all dwell
in Camelot
Long after the towers fall,
and merlins nest
in the ruined stones.”
“For what is grief but love in disguise?”
“Permission is the key that unlocks the door that’s been holding us trapped, muzzled, and stifled in our grief. Permission is the opposite of rejection. Permission is the opposite of abandonment. Permission lifts the weight, eases the pressure, and loosens the reins.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“I felt like I was failing at widowhood. I missed my husband, but no one knew that when they looked at me. They just saw a mom with blonde highlights going to yoga, picking up her daughter from school, buying groceries at Trader Joe’s. And now I was at a party with a date when I should have been home, grieving, all alone.
I didn’t look like a widow. I wasn’t acting like a widow. But I felt like a widow.
I guess I was just widowish.”
Source: Widowish: A Memoir
“I was grieving the way the earth seems to grieve for spring in the dead of winter, but I wasn't afraid, because nothing, I told myself, can take our halcyon days away.”
Source: "Dear Genius...": A Memoir of My Life with Truman Capote
“They said, 'Come to tea and let us comfort you.' But it is no good. One must be crucified on one's own private cross. It is a strange fact that a terrible pain in the heart can be interrupted by a little pain in the fourth toe of the right foot. I know that V. will not come across the garden from the lodge, & yet I look in that direction for her. I know that she is drowned & yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page & yet I turn it over. There is no limit to one's stupidity and selfishness.”