10 Quotes as Grief Anchors
Creating anchors in grief is vital. Here are some of my favorite quotes about grief.
“Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses”
“Grief has a sound, a sound that embarrasses the repressed and offends the oppressive; grief is the sound of being alive.”
“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.”
“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force.”
“The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.”
“My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief.”
“We cannot figure our way out of grief. We cannot use information or concepts to somehow reduce our experience of pain…….We must turn toward our experience and touch it with the softest hands possible.”
“Tears are a river that take you somewhere. Weeping carries a river around the boat that carries your soul-life. Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace new, someplace better.”
“Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.”
“Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”
