quotations on grief and loss.

When one person is missing the whole world seems empty. 
- Pat Schweibert

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. 
- Samuel Johnson

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed.  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.
- C.S. Lewis

I just looked at her, feeling utterly empty. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to her. My life is in that bed. Please let me stay.
- Maggie Stiefvater

Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.
- Elizabeth Gilbert

When you part from your friend,
you grieve not;

For that which you love most in him
may be clearer in his absence,
as the mountain to the climber
is clearer from the plain. 
- Kahlil Gibran

Love is an engraved invitation to grief.

- Sunshine O'Donnell

There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all.  Love is not the whole of a man's life.  I was happy before I ever met H.  I've plenty of what are called 'resources'.  People get over these things.  Come, I shan't do so badly.  One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case.  Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.

- C.S. Lewis

Hearing him talk about his mother, about his intact family, makes my chest hurt for a second, like someone pierced it with a needle.
- Veronica Roth

Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.
- John Green

He is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen and it's not about his face, but the life force I can see in him. It's the smile and the pure promise of everything he has to offer. Like he's saying, 'Here I am world, are you ready for so much passion and beauty and goodness and love and every other word that should be in the dictionary under the word life?' Except this boy is dead, and the unnaturalness of it makes me want to pull my hair out with Tate and Narnie and Fitz and Jude's grief all combined. It makes me want to yell at the God that I wish I didn't believe in. For hogging him all to himself. I want to say, "You greedy God. Give him back. I needed him here.” 
- Melina Marchetta

At first I was very afraid of going places where H. and I had been happy - our favourite pub, our favourite wood.  But I decided to do it at once - like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he's had a crash.  Unexpectedly, it makes no difference.  Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else.  It's not local at all.  I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food than in another.  Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal.  It is like that.  The act of living is different all through.  Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

- C.S. Lewis.