When you’ve been touched by sadness and grief, it makes you vulnerable. And because I am vulnerable, I try to be positive. And when I say ‘try,’ I really do mean try, because it’s an effort.
Good horror is about so much more than slashing: it’s a way of examining grief and loss of self.
In Maori culture there’s a lot of humor and just as quickly we are able to express grief.
I think what I was unconsciously expressing in ‘Black Rainbow’ was a very abstract and metaphorical grief, in the way I had suppressed my grief about my mother dying. In retrospect I realise I started writing ‘Mandy’ as a sort of antidote to that, to sort of express those emotions, to purge that grief.
Grief jumps out at you when you’re least expecting it.
It’s important that people understand that ‘Strong Island’ is just as much about this claim of reasonable fear and our need to interrogate reasonable fear as it is about my family’s grief.
Grief is a room without doors – but somehow, with its tinsel and cliches, Christmas finds a way in.
There’s been no end to the grief Mitch McConnell’s taken for his declaration early in Barack Obama’s first term that his party’s top goal was to make Obama a one-term president.
As much sorrow and grief as came from 9/11, there have also come positives.
There is a drunkenness to grief, which is good.
No one could save me from the grief of losing my child or losing my first marriage. I had to do that on my own.
Time takes away the grief of men.
I don’t move away from grief, rather through it.
Perhaps grief is not about empty, but full. The full breath of life that includes death. The completeness, the cycles, the depth, the richness, the process, the continuity and the treasure of the moment that is gone the second you are aware of it.
When we assume that ‘normal’ people need ‘time to heal,’ or discourage individuals from making any decisions until a year or more after a loss, as some grief counselors do, we may be giving inappropriate advice. Such advice can cause people who feel ready to move on to wonder if they are hardhearted.
Grief is the great equalizer.
When I talk to people about going sugar-free, they almost go into a state of grief! But there are still options out there – like the sugar-free brownies in my book.
Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief… For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.
Grief is like mending a knee. You can mend the knee and make it function, but the knee never actually heals.
Humans have a sense of spontaneity and emotion. We have a dichotomy between grief and happiness.
Grief and memory go together. After someone dies, that’s what you’re left with. And the memories are so slippery yet so rich.
Grief reveals itself in the most mundane activities, like eating. It’s never when you’re looking at old pictures.
Our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away.
Grief, like Covid-19, mutates and escapes the inoculation of both time and the reassurance of loving friends. It is less sledgehammer and more screwdriver, drilling little holes in your head and heart, leaving you haunted by the ifs and buts of your decisions.
Since grief only aggravates your loss, grieve not for what is past.
I think it’s too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
Despite the fact that every sport this side of badminton worries about concussions that result in brain damage, CTE, the National Hockey League refuses to accept the overwhelming medical science. Good grief – the NHL still permits fights.
I know from experience that one of the first things to drop off during great transitions, such as dealing with grief or loss, is taking care of our bodies.
Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it’s a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.
I only really fake it anymore with sommeliers who are being really snotty to me and I don’t want to take their grief and so I try to do something to kind of throw them off or put them on the defensive, even if I don’t know what I’m talking about.
It’s a Cyprus of misery and soup kitchens and a state which cannot meet basic obligations. It can only cause me grief.
It takes strength to make your way through grief, to grab hold of life and let it pull you forward.
It would be impossible to estimate how much time and energy we invest in trying to fix, change and deny our emotions – especially the ones that shake us at our very core, like hurt, jealousy, loneliness, shame, rage and grief.
To me, death is dark, pain, grief.
Grief is a terrible, painful place. You can’t grind away on grief in a solid way and say, ‘I’m going to work on this until it’s over’ because it will be with you for the rest of your life, whatever you do. So, you deal with it and move on.
Great grief does not of itself put an end to itself.
For years I have engaged with this ecological crisis on an intellectual level, the mounting evidence, the science… but now I have engaged with the potential destruction of this world on an emotional level and there is a fundamental difference. There is huge feeling of grief, of loss.
I just try to write what I think would really happen, and with grief and tragedy, there are these naturally occurring moments of levity and humor and absurdity. I think that’s what life is really like. Sadness gets interrupted, and happiness gets interrupted.
It’s a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there’s a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there’s a private TV show viewing our lives.
Sadness, irritability, fatigue, and distractedness are among the most common side effects of grief while parenting.
Self-pity, a dominant characteristic of sociopaths, is also the characteristic that differentiates heroic storytelling from psychological rumination. When you talk about your experiences to shed light, you may feel wrenching pain, grief, anger, or shame. Your audience may pity you, but not because you want them to.
For many people who face anxieties, depression, trauma or grief that dominate their lives, a vital source of support may be a counsellor or psychotherapist.
Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.
I think people from Northern Ireland have some kind of unspoken general feeling of what it is to be around segregation. You have an awareness of it because you know how much grief it’s caused.
‘The Babadook,’ written and directed by a woman, is a gorgeously told female-focused story of grief, longing, loneliness, and what mourning can become.
One thing I’ve heard that makes sense to me about grief is that there’s this conception that it’s a thing that you process, and then you’re done processing it. But really it’s not a thing that has an end, it’s just what life is like now. You are living with this now, probably forever.
For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.
I’m human, we all are – all doctors are – and grieving is a natural part of medicine. As a doctor, grieving is a natural part of medicine. If you deny that, again, you’d get into this trap of curing and victory. I think grief is very important.
Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.
Grief is so human, and it hits everyone at one point or another, at least, in their lives. If you love, you will grieve, and that’s just given.
The weird thing about grief, for me at least, was when each of my parents died, for a year or two afterwards I was pretty wildly brave – just willing to take life on.
I learned that, with grief, you have to take it one day at a time and learn how to find the happiness amid the heartbreak.
It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.
That’s the great test: if you’re going to be a great comic writer, not a humorist, you’ve got to take it into the throat of grief. Can you make laughter and seriousness so close that they are the same thing?
Grief doesn’t have a plot. It isn’t smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.
Our best selves tell us that ‘there but for the grace of God… ‘ and that, in the end, there is no distance, really, between us and them. It is just us. Our best and noble hope is to imitate the God we believe in. The God who has abundant room in God’s grief and heart for us all.
I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
