An Inspirational Quotes Collection
Search, filter, & browse quotes that inspire creativity, self-reflection, & growth—with just a dash of humor & cynicism thrown to balance it all out.
1166 Quotes Collected
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The Lost Husband
People were the worst of gods and the worst of animals combined. Perhaps this kind of violence was the only message they would ever really understand. Something so terrible they would never want to see it happen again. Maybe they would be less warlike now, because they had finally become frightened of themselves. It would be so human of them, wouldn’t it? To be thrust into goodness by something vast and evil.
Up Jumps the Devil
Other horses would follow, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime animal. There would be no replacing him once he was gone.
Dances With Wolves
star_rateFiled under: love
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
star_rateFiled under: grief
“You're better off believing in God they'd warn you, just in case. Because you'd hate to arrive at the gates of heaven a nonbeliever and find out the Christians had been right all along. It was a pretty ingenious line of thinking. It almost made me want to go to church. Not enough to actually go, but still.”
The Postmortal
Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
Judith looked all wrong. Her hair was pulled back tightly; she was wearing some cheap polka-dotted dress she'd bought at a thrift shop. Our meeting was all full of false starts. What's going on at school? How is your painting? What did you do over spring break? What music are you listening to? Then it got into harder stuff. I took her hands. I grabbed at them greedily and held them in my lap. Why wasn't I good enough? I asked. Why couldn't I be closer to her than I was? What was I doing wrong? Why was I so bad at human commerce when it was the thing I wanted more than anything?
The Brightest Ring of Angels Around Heaven
star_rateFiled under: heartbreak
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.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Pictures of Me
Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather love the questions, do not run away from sadness or depression for these might be the very conditions necessary to your work. Seek solitude, above all seek solitude.
I want for what I love to go on living
and as for you I loved you and sang you above everything,
for that, go on flowering, flowery one,
so that you reach all that my love orders for you,
so that my shadow passes through your hair,
so that they know by this the reason for my song.
When I Die I Want Your Hands On My Eyes
“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.”
Comanche Moon
It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.
star_rateFiled under: grief
star_rateFiled under: heartbreak
I never thought my life would turn out like this. Suddenly, I was forty-five. Suburban and manic. As beige and lumpy as oatmeal. Was this it? Were my best years all gone? And if so, who would ever take me seriously—or love me—or even look at me again? In the past, I’d kept such wretched thoughts at bay by drinking.
Donna Has Left the Building
The Princess Bride
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
star_rateFiled under: grief
Some people like what you do, some people hate what you do, but most people simply don't give a damn.
star_rateFiled under: life
Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.
Notes on Grief
star_rateFiled under: grief
The Song of Achilles
star_rateFiled under: beauty
'You know what? Forget what I just said. You’re already a part of this. You will eat, you will laugh at stupid things, you will stay up all night just to see what it feels like, you will fall painfully in love, you will have babies of your own, you will doubt and regret and yearn and keep a secret. You will get old and decrepit, and you will die, exhausted from all that living. That is when you get to die. Not now.'
The First Bad Man
From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.
Chilling winds swept beneath the doorsills and rattled the loose windowpanes with a monotonous tinkling sound. The last of the leaves fell from the bare trees and only the pines stood clothed, black and cold against pale skies. The rutted red roads were frozen to flintiness and hunger rode the winds through Georgia.
The Liars Club
Because nothing crushes the heart faster than touching something bright and rare and wonderful and then having it snatched away before you can grasp it.
star_rateFiled under: heartbreak
Our loved ones will leave us, the memory of them will dissolve in the tumult; nothing will remain. Just a few clothes in the wardrobe and someone in a photograph, no longer recognized. The most precious memories will dissipate. Everything will sink into darkness and vanish.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
I had no interests. I had no interests in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn't understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn't let me.
How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.
star_rateFiled under: grief
Peter Pan
your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn't help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over the river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you.
An Almost Made Up Poem
Hurry Up Please It's Time
I thought the moment had come yesterday, when you left your breakfast untouched. I broke off a piece of my own breakfast bread, which you ate from my hand. (Like reading mass together.) By evening, though, your appetite had returned. So let’s think no more about it. Let’s look to this day, and only this day. This gift of a perfect summer morning.
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.
The Woman Destroyed
'All wars are sacred,” he said. “To those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it.'
When Americans were working, thought the Devil, adjusting his sunglasses, they built cars and roads. On vacation, though, they came to silly places like this, where they paid too much for everything and stood in long lines. In four hundred years, he still hadn’t figured Americans out.
star_rateFiled under: america
The Song of Achilles
star_rateFiled under: beauty
I'm a neurotic in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
star_rateFiled under: personality
The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
star_rateFiled under: experience, future, grief, heartbreak, highlight, hindsight, life, loss, past, perspective
star_rateFiled under: cynicism
Her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.
star_rateFiled under: love
The Fault in Our Stars
star_rateFiled under: grief
Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.
But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.
And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.
And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
star_rateFiled under: grief
Wedding Song
Painter
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
star_rateFiled under: humor
Factotum
In his grief he might forget to begin work: but when he began, it was difficult to get him to stop. He had pulled out of that grief, eventually—out from under the suffocating weight of it. Suffering had formed him: made him silent and deliberate, thoughtful: deep. Generous and kind and attentive, although he had been that before.
The Orchardist
star_rateFiled under: grief
She is good to me
and there's nothing she doesn't see
She knows where i'd like to be
but it doesn't matter
I Want You
star_rateFiled under: love
“Listen to me. Honestly people, listen to me. There is nothing after this, ok? So don’t live like you have an Act III. There is no surprise footage after the credits roll. Same goes for everyone you love. I can’t reveal how I know this, I had to sign an NDA, you just have to trust me. These are your only minutes. What are you going to do with them?”
The Rabbit Hutch
Annabel Lee
She felt that the once-familiar woods were full of ghosts. Thousands had died in the fighting near Jonesboro. They were here in these haunted woods where the slanting afternoon sun gleamed eerily through unmoving leaves, friends and foes, peering at her in her rickety wagon, through eyes blinded with blood and red dust—glazed, horrible eyes.
The Dead Woman
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Oh, my name it means nothing and my age it means less.
The country I come from is called the midwest...
With God on Our Side
star_rateFiled under: america
It was a magnificent sight, this great moon, bright as an egg yolk, filling the night sky as if it were a whole new world come to call just on him.
Dances With Wolves
star_rateFiled under: experience
Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.
star_rateFiled under: grief
How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.
Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.
star_rateFiled under: adversity, failure, highlight, Inspiration, life, perspective, strength, success
Donna Has Left the Building
The Bell Jar
You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.
star_rateFiled under: grief
I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
A Writer's Diary
star_rateFiled under: personality
Spitting Venom
star_rateFiled under: doom
In that moment, I suddenly loved us all the more for our flaws, for being broken and human, for being embarrassed and lonely, for being hopeful or tired or disappointed or sick or brave or angry. For being who we were, for making the world interesting. It was a good reminder that the human condition is imperfection. And that's how it's supposed to be.
Everyone is Beautiful
'Grief is a swallow,' he said. 'One day you wake up and you think it's gone, but it's only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.'
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
star_rateFiled under: grief
As long as I can I will look at this world for both of us. As long as I can I will laugh with the birds, I will sing with the flowers, I will pray to the stars, for both of us.
star_rateFiled under: grief
For a moment, her heart stood still and then a queer fear, stronger than anxiety, stronger than grief, began to beat in her breast. It can’t be true, she thought vehemently, trying to push back the fear. Doctors make mistakes. I won’t think it’s true. I can’t let myself think it’s true. I’ll scream if I do. I must think of something else.
star_rateFiled under: grief
It occurred to me that it was a type of control; Cara could be generous when it suited her, or not, when it didn’t.
Bitter Orange
star_rateFiled under: personality
Night Boat to Tangier
star_rateFiled under: character
Whenever I see my mom watching her food cook in the oven, I sit next to her and look in. You can't kill yourself in modern ovens. Well, I'm sure you could. You could kill yourself with anything if you tried hard enough. When we sit there, though, I feel like we are moths drawn to the memory of what an oven can do to sad women.
Interesting Facts about Space
Parerga and Paralipomena
This is what it will be, every day, without him. I felt a wild-eyed tightness in my chest, like a scream. Every day, without him.
The Song of Achilles
star_rateFiled under: grief
There is a place in the heart that will never be filled; a space. And even during the best moments, and the greatest times, we will know it.
star_rateFiled under: heart
But when she felt around for her heart, she could tell by the stabbing that it was broken. It would have to be healed if she was to continue in this life, and that could be best accomplished with a reasoned and thorough mourning. She must mourn for her husband.
Dances With Wolves
star_rateFiled under: grief
Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.
Lisey's Story
star_rateFiled under: grief
“Tipsy?” She laughed an ugly laugh. “Tipsy? I hope it makes me drunk. I would like to be drunk and forget all of this.” She drank again, a slow train of warmth lighting in her veins and stealing through her body until even her finger tips tingled. What a blessed feeling, this kindly fire. It seemed to penetrate even her ice-locked heart and strength came coursing back into her body.
Notebooks 1935-1942
Catcher in the Rye
Meet Me In The Morning
I knew most adults were up to no good. I didn’t trust a single one. But this one was different from the others.
The Lamb
star_rateFiled under: kindness
Strays is what a writer I recently read calls those who, for one reason or another, and despite whatever they might have wanted earlier in life, never really become a part of life, not in the way most people do. They may have serious relationships, they may have friends, even a sizable circle, they may spend large portions of their time in the company of others. But they never marry and they never have children. On holidays, they join some family or other group. This goes on year after year, until they finally find it in themselves to admit that they’d really rather just stay home.
And this becomes your new life, your strange new life: an ordinary, undesirable person with a common, forgettable face.
What Are You Going Through
star_rateFiled under: life
The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal, and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.
I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.
star_rateFiled under: love
When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.
A Prayer for Owen Meany
star_rateFiled under: grief
I can imagine myself saying at the time that life itself was like a book borrowed from the library—something that did not belong to me and was due to expire. How silly.
Eileen
star_rateFiled under: life
Tender Is the Flesh
Half Broke Horses
Bag of Bones
star_rateFiled under: grief
Where the Lost Wander
When I see you, the World stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The World just stops, and it is a beautiful place, and there is only you.
star_rateFiled under: love
There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps...
H is for Hawk
“When people try to destroy art or thought... it makes all forms of art and thought valuable. It's a slippery slope once we start saying what people should or shouldn't see.”
star_rateFiled under: art
star_rateFiled under: life
The Last Night of the Earth Poems
star_rateFiled under: self esteem
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.
star_rateFiled under: personality
Outer Wilds
star_rateFiled under: grief
Winnie the Pooh
Your Voice in My Head
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
star_rateFiled under: grief
star_rateFiled under: experience
Going Nowhere
Tender Is the Flesh
I had seen loneliness before that and had felt it, too. But I had never seen or felt it so raw. Thirty years later, I still remember it. Only now I am not bewildered. Now I understand that a person can be wild with loneliness. I understand that she wanted so badly to talk to me exactly because she sensed I was the only person in the house who was indifferent to her appearance. But it didn’t work because she didn’t know how. She had put on the suit of “model” many years before and now she couldn’t take it off, and it hurt and confined her.
Veronica
star_rateFiled under: loneliness
Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.
Memoirs of a Geisha
star_rateFiled under: grief
An Almost Made Up Poem
In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life.
The Notebook
star_rateFiled under: grief
Betting on the Muse
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.
May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being.
Animal
star_rateFiled under: relationships
I am lovesick with this much sorrow.
Teach me to speak this new mother tongue.
Show me how to memorize
who I can never forget
what they gave and what is gone,
and what we were owed
by a world robbed of their presence.
Hold me by the edges
for I am coming apart.
The Lives We Actually Have
star_rateFiled under: grief
Diary
It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited and that eventually, all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.
A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Reptile Room
The Truth About Forever
star_rateFiled under: grief
Outlawed
star_rateFiled under: hatred
star_rateFiled under: grief
The Friend
star_rateFiled under: writing
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book, or you take a trip, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.
A Little Uncomplicated Hymn
star_rateFiled under: love
Post Office
star_rateFiled under: personality
You can not die of grief, though it feels as if you can. A heart does not actually break, though sometimes your chest aches as if it is breaking. Grief dims with time. It is the way of things. There comes a day when you smile again, and you feel like a traitor. How dare I feel happy. How dare I be glad in a world where my father is no more. And then you cry fresh tears, because you do not miss him as much as you once did, and giving up your grief is another kind of death.
star_rateFiled under: grief
"People always think that happiness is a faraway thing," thought Francie, "something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you're blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you're alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness."
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Digging In
'Do you like me?'
No answer.
Silence bounced, fell off his tongue
and sat between us
and clogged my throat.
It slaughtered my trust.
It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.
We exchanged blind words,
and I did not cry,
I did not beg,
but blackness filled my ears,
blackness lunged in my heart,
and something that had been good,
a sort of kindly oxygen,
turned into a gas oven.
Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here's what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it's still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it's been too long since you missed them last.
The 13th Sign
star_rateFiled under: grief
The streets you walk, the food you eat, the job you work, the method of transportation you choose, the beauty products you purchase, the shows you watch, the links you click, the way you sit on a train, the way you speak to waiters, the way you take your coffee- everything affects everyone. Find a way to believe this, even when sober.
Accepting death doesn't mean you won't be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, "Why do people die?" and "Why is this happening to me?" Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
star_rateFiled under: grief
I should say something, but I can’t. It’s not that the words won’t come, it’s that there aren’t any. My little world has been blown apart, and the debris is raining down all around me.
Closer Home
star_rateFiled under: grief
“It’s what makes us happy or sad or mad about things. Because it’s all so damn wonderful and so terrible, and it’s going to be taken away. And, of course, there’s the fact that it’s so scary. How does it not drive us mad with panic, every moment, knowing that we are going to end? How strangely nonchalant, how divinely resilient we are! Being mortal means being bedmates with horror.”
I thought of home, of spaghetti swimming in rich tomato sauce, smothered in Parmesan cheese, of Mamma’s lemon pies, of lamb roasts and hot bread, and I was so miserable that I deliberately sank my fingernails into the flesh of my arm until a spot of blood appeared. It gave me great satisfaction. I was God’s most miserable creature, forced even to torturing myself. Surely upon this earth no grief was greater than mine.
Ask the Dust
Winnie the Pooh
There was nothing about him that was violent or mean. Even stray insects inside the house were more likely to find themselves scooped up and tossed out the back door than squished.
Everyone is Beautiful
star_rateFiled under: kindness
That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.
Now I know that grief is a whetstone that sharpens all your love, all your happiest memories, into blades that tear you apart from within.
A Thousand Pieces of You
star_rateFiled under: grief
Your memory feels like home to me.
So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.
star_rateFiled under: grief
“No, she said, "for the blight of the english will come to this remoteness as well. It will spread into this land and infect this land and devour the people who were here first; it will slaughter them, diminish them. The hunger inside the god of my people can only be sated by domination. They will dominate until there is nothing left, then they will eat themselves.”
“Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong. Like who we are deep inside, that thing we want to name but can’t, it’s like we’re afraid we’ll be punished for it. So we hide. We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it. The thing we most don’t want has a way of landing right on top of us. That badger medicine’s the only thing that stands a chance at helping. You gotta learn how to stay down there. Way deep down inside yourself, unafraid.”
The Secret History
The Life of the Mind
star_rateFiled under: life
I thought of that old joke, y'know, the, this, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" And the guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much how I feel about relationships. Y'know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but, uh, I guess we keep going through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs.
Annie Hall
Dogs. So easy, so loving. She had grown to have a very certain disdain for dogs and their willing, uncritical love. They should demand more, be moodier, have more conditions.
star_rateFiled under: dog
Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who have already been there.
star_rateFiled under: religion
“It doesn't get better," I said. "The pain. The wounds scab over and you don't always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you'll never be the same.”
Pushing the Limits
star_rateFiled under: grief
Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest.
star_rateFiled under: grief
Thinking doesn't seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.
star_rateFiled under: cynicism
I did not understand the people who were my size or even the larger ones. At home, or away from it, people seemed out of reach. Thus I hid in fairy tales and read them daily like prayerbook. Any book was closer than a person. I did not even like my dolls for they resembled people. I stepped on their faces because they resembled me.
But what we are is what our ancestors did. How they survived. We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.
This grief is too much to bear.
If there was a tight order to the world that you made, it’s come unspooled and no one will wind it up again.
God, I feel it coming, that ache for the stories that will never be told. And an anger rising when i remember what never should have been.
The Lives We Actually Have
star_rateFiled under: grief
For a week, almost without speaking,
they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous
reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
star_rateFiled under: grief
There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
star_rateFiled under: woman
Grief fills the room up of my absent child. Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me. Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words. Remembers me of all his gracious parts. Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form. Then, have I reason to be fond of grief.
star_rateFiled under: grief
Cat's Eye
For all the joys Thy child shall bring, The risk of grief we'll run. We'll shelter him with tenderness, We'll love him while we may, And for the happiness we've known, Forever grateful stay. But should the angels call for him, Much sooner than we've planned. We'll brave the bitter grief that comes, And try to understand.
Child of Mine
In the years since I’d given up drinking, I’d worried I’d grown dull. Yeah, sobriety was healthier—it made you more “present,” “alive,” “in touch with your feelings”—blah, blah—we all know the benefits—believe me, I don’t need to be convinced. But sometimes, when I was having one of those 4 a.m. existential crises when your eyes snap open in a panic and you start inventorying all the deficits of your life, I worried that by giving up booze, I’d forfeited the last of whatever had made me really interesting and edgy and effervescent.
Donna Has Left the Building
What did time matter to him now? What did it ever matter? Well, perhaps it was necessary in the movement of things, men and materials, for instance. For cooking things correctly. For schools and weddings and church services and going to work. But what did it matter out here?
Dances With Wolves
star_rateFiled under: time
The First Bad Man
I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
star_rateFiled under: grief
And your long time curse hurts but what's worse
is this pain in here; I can't stay in here
ain't it clear that i just can't fit
yes i believe it's time for us to quit
When we meet again, introduced as friends,
Please don't let on that you knew me when
I was hungry, and it was your world
Just Like A Woman
It was like the two were not strangers. In a way, they were kindred. Like they knew each other from another life and now they were simply reacquainting.
The Lamb
star_rateFiled under: friendship
When a long, long time later, he stares down at the silent blue marble of the earth and thinks of his sister, as he will at every important moment of his life. He doesn't know this yet, but he senses it deep down in his core. So much will happen, he thinks, that I would want to tell you.
Everything I Never Told You
star_rateFiled under: grief
Lit
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
But love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
To say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going
Any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
You feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
It is murder
Are you angry with the bird because he can fly, or angry with the horse for her beauty, or angry with the bear because he has fearsome teeth and claws? Because he’s bigger than you are? Stronger too? Destroying all the things you hate won’t change any of that. You still won’t be a bear or a bird or a horse. Hating men won’t make you a man. Hating your womb or your breasts or your own weakness won’t make those things go away. Hating never fixed anything.
Where the Lost Wander
He thought of himself as a single current in a deep river. He was separate and he was whole, all at the same time. It was a wonderful feeling.
Dances With Wolves
star_rateFiled under: life
star_rateFiled under: grief
Maybe one day, in some future now, someone will read what I have written and learn of our existence. That we were part of a Sacred Sisterhood and lived on a sliver of land that remained pure, resplendent, thanks to the piety of the Enlightened. Or maybe they’ll become dust and return to the earth, fertilizing it, nourishing the roots of a tree, and our story will be understood through the leaves that oxygenate the collapsed world.
The Unworthy
I'm in love with someone good and kind and gentle, and he's seen the darkness too, but somehow we've become each other's light.
Your Voice in My Head
star_rateFiled under: love
Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.
star_rateFiled under: humanity
star_rateFiled under: books
Cat's Eye
star_rateFiled under: love
When I was a child, I would always love it when disaster happened. It meant that I could run into a room and say, “The cat has died.” Or “The gerbils have drowned.” I have a mawkish, voyeuristic relationship with mishap, life’s brutal ability to upend destiny and disrupt the future you have marked out in your head. I like the look on people’s faces when they stop and listen.
This is Not A Pity Memoir
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.
Flaubert's Parrot
star_rateFiled under: grief
She was recovering, and what she had suffered, once it was healed, would make her stronger than ever.
Dances With Wolves
star_rateFiled under: strength
Self Portrait in Letters
He looks at her as though searching for an emotion he misplaced. Fervor, perhaps. Or affection. He has the appearance of a man who has weathered many internal sandstorms and whose convictions—once sharp and exquisite—have lost their definition. Observing James, Blandine is reminded of a swan she saw last February. It has resigned itself to a puddle in the parking lot of a megastore.
Cinnamon Girl
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.
Cat's Eye
Henry & June
star_rateFiled under: strength
Imagine, forty years with the same man and still the thought of him made her blush. If true love ever existed, that was it.
Crazy Little Thing
star_rateFiled under: love
star_rateFiled under: grief
It's a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.
The Secret History
Matrix
The longer she lived in San Viejo, the more she appreciated the kind of things that went with living. Like having a window open when you slept, and grass, and tortillas. Being happy when people came to visit, and being happy when they left. The way certain things felt wonderful when you held them in your hands: a book, an ax, a baby, a beer, a big-ass pile of M&M’s.
Why, she had never had to do a thing for herself in all her life. There had always been someone to do things for her, to look after her, shelter and protect her and spoil her. It was incredible that she could be in such a fix. Not a friend, not a neighbor to help her. There had always been friends, neighbors, the competent hands of willing slaves. And now in this hour of greatest need, there was no one. It was incredible that she could be so completely alone, and frightened, and far from home.
So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten.
Sons are like birds, flying always over the mountain.
Upward Over The Mountain
star_rateFiled under: Inspiration
I love you. How dare he say those words to me? They follow me around the house, from one room to another, step after step.
Closer Home
star_rateFiled under: love
Toll the Hounds
star_rateFiled under: grief
"You aren’t in love with me, are you? Why should I be in love with you?”
“No, my dear, I’m not in love with you, no more than you are with me, and if I were, you would be the last person I’d ever tell. God help the man who ever really loves you. You’d break his heart, my darling, cruel, destructive little cat who is so careless and confident she doesn’t even trouble to sheathe her claws.”
Grief is not a disorder, a disease, or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical, and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure to grief is to grieve.
star_rateFiled under: grief
She had no intention of dying now. What she wanted was to clean out the warehouse of grief inside her. She wanted the most thorough cleansing possible, and so she took her time.
Dances With Wolves
star_rateFiled under: grief
star_rateFiled under: heartbreak
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.”
Veronica
“I know that when I die somebody’s going to sell my flesh on the black market, one of my awful distant relatives. That’s why I smoke and drink, so I taste bitter and no one gets any pleasure out of my death.” She takes a quick drag and says, “Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle.”
Tender Is the Flesh
Maybe I really am weird, like the girl said, or maybe I’m just a terrible, shallow person, but it often feels to me as though I had died, the once beautiful woman said. All those years ago I died, and I’ve been a ghost ever since. I’ve been mourning my lost self ever since, and nothing, not even my love for my children and grandchildren, can make up for it.
What Are You Going Through
I loved him and he obviously loved me. Love like in the James Bond movies, where the beautiful sexy girl loves James but tries to kill him anyway.
Veronica
star_rateFiled under: love
Do not stand
At my grave and weep
I am not there,
I do not sleep.
I am a thousand
Winds that blow,
I am the diamond
Glints on snow.
I am the sunlight
On the ripened grain.
I am the gentle
Autumn’s rain.
When you awaken
In the morning hush,
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet bird in
Circled flight.
I am the soft stars
That shine at night.
Do not stand
At my grave and cry.
I am not there.
I did not die.
Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep
star_rateFiled under: grief
There'll be the breaking of the ancient
Western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There'll be phantoms
There'll be fires on the road
And the white man dancing
You'll see your woman
Hanging upside down
Her features covered by her fallen gown
And all the lousy little poets
Coming round
Tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson
And the white man dancin'
I think perhaps I will always hold a candle for you – even until it burns my hand.
And when the light has long since gone …. I will be there in the darkness holding what remains, quite simply because I cannot let go.
star_rateFiled under: grief
Factotum
star_rateFiled under: hope
The sight of that cemetery still gave Frank nightmares. Hoping to find jewelry buried with the dead, the Yankee soldiers had broken open vaults, dug up graves. They had robbed the bodies, stripped from the coffins gold and silver name plates, silver trimmings and silver handles. The skeletons and corpses, flung helter-skelter among their splintered caskets, lay exposed and so pitiful.
Comanche Moon
The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.
Scarlett wondered bitterly why Melanie could not have died in childbirth in Atlanta. That would have made things perfect. Then she could have married Ashley after a decent interval and made little Beau a good stepmother too. When such thoughts came she did not pray hastily to God, telling Him she did not mean it. God did not frighten her any more.
Plants did not merely grow tall; they grew wide, curious about their surroundings, eager to seek nourishment from anywhere they could get it. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes I had to prune them back or watch a branch snap and wilt. My garden was a patchwork of failures and successes. I loved it.
Digging In
The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.
And once again, packed like frozen food and battery hens
Think of all the starving millions
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones
Your royal highnesses
Well of course I'd like to sit around and chat
Well of course I'd like to stay and chew the fat
Well of course I'd like to sit around and chat
But someone's listening in
The Genius of the Crowd
star_rateFiled under: conformity
star_rateFiled under: laughter
There would never be a way for me to live comfortably with people. Maybe I'd become a monk. I'd pretend to believe in God and live in a cubicle, play an organ and stay drunk on wine. Nobody would fuck with me. I could go into a cell for months of meditation where I wouldn't have to look at anybody and they could just send in the wine.
Death was in the room and she had no strength to confront it, to fight it back and she was frightened. She wanted someone strong to stand by her and hold her hand and fight off death until enough strength came back for her to do her own fighting.
star_rateFiled under: death
Rattlesnakes
We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
star_rateFiled under: dignity
“Maybe...you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want too.”
A Farewell To Arms
star_rateFiled under: love
I watched as the self became what you made. You linked your Facebook and Instagram and Twitter accounts. You were the sum of every vacation photo ever taken, the quantity of birthday wishes you received, the amount of followers you could count across platforms. There was no such thing as IRL. Your body might sleep, but your profile stayed up all night like a lit marquee.
I hold a beast, an angel, and a madman in me, and my inquiry is as to their working, and my problem is their subjugation and victory, downthrow and upheaval, and my effort is their self expression.
star_rateFiled under: personality
The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really try to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really try to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
He moves like he’s being yelled at by invisible people whom he hates but whom he basically agrees with.
Veronica
star_rateFiled under: self esteem
But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
The Goldfinch
star_rateFiled under: grief
The wind passed, even as it is passing now, over all the people who find themselves so dulled by the concerns of their own bodies and their own hungers that they cannot stop for a moment to feel its goodness as it brushes against them. And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.
Interesting Facts about Space
The Unworthy
Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened.
A Haunted House
star_rateFiled under: death
We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread—which isn’t traditional, like reservations aren’t traditional, but nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed.
Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.
Cold Mountain
star_rateFiled under: love
Your own love story? Your paramour may have had lovers before you. But no one has ever loved him the way you do. No one has ever heard music. Not the way you hear it. The songs are beautiful vampires, asleep in your iPod, coming alive at night, aglow. You can have them on your hours, yours to conduct. Music shapes us and we shape it.
From Sand and Ash
Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.
star_rateFiled under: grief
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
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. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
A Grief Observed
star_rateFiled under: grief
Perhaps the song of a bird in a chamber is more precious than the wild bird’s because the chamber itself makes it so. Perhaps the free air that gives the wild bird its better song in fact limits the reach of its prayer. So small, this understanding. So remarkably tiny. Still, it might be enough to live for.
We are all damaged. We have all been hurt. We have all had to learn painful lessons. We are all recovering from some mistake, loss, betrayal, abuse, injustice or misfortune. All of life is a process of recovery that never ends. We each must find ways to accept and move through the pain and to pick ourselves back up. For each pang of grief, depression, doubt or despair there is an inverse toward renewal coming to you in time. Each tragedy is an announcement that some good will indeed come in time. Be patient with yourself.
Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
In actuality they were neither of them old men; their arms were still wiry with muscle, their backs straight and strong, and yet they had surpassed the mean, the center mark of their lives, and were both aware of an overall dimming.
star_rateFiled under: aging
star_rateFiled under: grief
What Are You Going Through
The Tattooed Girl
"Last night I took up a razor, that I might open my own throat with it. How simple this would be: a flick of the wrist and the life would pour from my body, the room would dim, and I would have my rest. I am not afraid to die, and have not been for some time now. And yet I found I couldn’t perform the gesture, knowing you are still drawing breath. If you yourself were passed, it would be nothing, but the knowledge that you remain lulled my hand. I will live until you come back to me, then. If you do not come back, then I will die waiting. This is my pledge to you."
He’d always known an apartness from his fellow citizens, a suspicion that he was not at all where he should be.
star_rateFiled under: conformity
Going home! That was the only thought in the soldiers’ minds. Some were sad and silent, others gay and contemptuous of hardships, but the thought that it was all over and they were going home was the one thing that sustained them. Few of them were bitter. They left bitterness to their women and their old people. They had fought a good fight, had been licked and were willing to settle down peaceably to plowing beneath the flag they had fought.
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.
East of Eden
Winnie the Pooh
star_rateFiled under: grief
But we remembered, you and I. It saddened me. Who would speak of these things when we were gone? So, too, must the makers of those distant fires have asked themselves as they fought the fading of their world. I began to wish that I could pour our memories into the water we carried, so that anyone drinking might see how it had been.
Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.
star_rateFiled under: madness
She was less frightened also because life had taken on the quality of a dream, a dream too terrible to be real. It wasn’t possible that she, Scarlett O’Hara, should be in such a predicament, with the danger of death about her every hour, every minute. It wasn’t possible that the quiet tenor of life could have changed so completely in so short a time.
Like A Hurricane
star_rateFiled under: dream
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
Separation
star_rateFiled under: grief
You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
star_rateFiled under: grief
Fast As You Can
star_rateFiled under: madness
It hurts when they're gone. And it doesn't matter if it's slow or fast, whether it's a long drawn-out disease or an unexpected accident. When they're gone the world turns upside down and you're left holding on, trying not to fall off.
Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore
star_rateFiled under: grief
You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate and what's written in the stars.
star_rateFiled under: love
It’s a cliché, of course: we talk about the dead in order to remember them, in order to keep them, in the only way we can, alive. But I have found that the more people say about you, for example those who spoke at the memorial—people who loved you, people who knew you well, people who are very good with words—the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.
The Friend
I wanted to know how ugly I could get, how ruined and ugly and spoiled, before they stopped trying to fuck me. I didn't think they'd ever notice. Nobody had so far. Because I was still in the shape of a beautiful girl. Although I behaved like an ugly one.
Thin Skin
star_rateFiled under: sadness
Nothing has changed. It’s still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much. But how would it be if that feeling was gone? I would not want that to happen. I told the shrink: It would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore. You can’t hurry love, as the song goes. You can’t hurry grief, either.
The Friend
“There are times I think that none of this matters. Why put myself in danger with this book of the night? But I have to because if I write it, then it was real; if I write it, maybe we won’t just be part of a dream contained in a planet, inside a universe hidden in the imagination of someone who lives in the mouth of God. Each of these words contains my pulse. My blood. My breath.”
The Unworthy