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Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. […] It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.
— Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don't try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power. Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They're sacred. they are part of each person's journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am all alone. That's the one fear you can alleviate.
And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
I snap open the umbrella and remember the last time I visited Veronica. She served me brownies in pink wrapping paper, fancy cheese, and sliced fruit she was too sick to eat. I remember the time I said, “I don’t think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.” Veronica was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “I think love is overrated. My parents loved me. And it didn’t do any good.”
— Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made.
— Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
“I never liked you much till now, Scarlett. You were always hard as a hickory nut, even as a child, and I don’t like hard females, barring myself. But I do like the way you meet things. You don’t make a fuss about things that can’t be helped, even if they are disagreeable. You take your fences cleanly like a good hunter.”
“I’m glad you ain’t dead, Captain,” Pea Eye said. “I’m real glad you ain’t dead.” Augustus was a little startled by the force of the young man’s emotion. The trip must have been even more of a trial to him than he had imagined. “No, I ain’t dead,” Augustus told him. “I just rode off to think for a few days, and one of the things I wanted to think about was the fact that I ain’t dead.”
— Larry McMurtry, Comanche Moon
My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
This is the strangeness of memory: in recalling a moment, I am instantly reminded of all the details that elude me, and feel myself making them up even as I say “this is certainly true; and this, and this.” But my first sighting of you has never been vulnerable to such corruption. I remember everything.
Mostly, though, she scared him because of what he couldn’t see, or feel. As if the woman he saw before him, with the dreaming eyes and disappointed mouth, were just the tip of the iceberg, as if the rest of her might be lurking around a corner or caged in a basement somewhere, dangerous and waiting.