3,968 Quotes About Grief

I have cried over myself a hundred times this summer, she thought, I have wept over my big feet and my skinny legs and my nose, I have even cried over my stupid shoes, and now when I have true sadness there are no tears left.

In the end I didn't know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.

Hot heart-blood leaked from my face. From my eyes and my nose and my mouth. Not tears, because those would never stop. This was just liquid heartbreak seeping from my pores.

I looked at her small, sunken face and wanted to scream out loud and cry. I wanted everyone in the entire world to know how much I loved my mum and to know how much my heart was breaking for her right now.

At 10:37pm she took her last breath. Her last breath of life was a very long exhale and then she never took another breath again.

The thought of leaving her alone haunted me. The sadness was suffocating me and twisting my chest and my heart and I couldn't breathe properly. I wanted to escape my own body as the sadness drowned me. I felt like I could barely keep my head above water. This was a new depth of sadness.

Perhaps Hurston saw in her mother, Lucy, a version of Persephone, who is so missed when she's gone that the world literally starts to die. This type of grief, as Toni Morrison writes in Sula, has no top and no bottom, "just circles and circles of sorrow.

But while I fill up my mouth with prayers, they bring no comfort. My words rattle against each other like the last beech leaves on a winter branch, and though a hard wind scours the forest, it cannot free them from the bough; it will not lift them upward into the wide white sky.

...beneath torrents of spring rain, buds come to life - and we do too, beneath torments of tears...