Quote of the Day

In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing."  A certain forward movement will prevail.  The worst days will be the earliest days ... We have no way of knowing ... ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 188-189

Quote of the Day

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 188

Quote of the Day

Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn.  Grief was passive.  Grief happened.  Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 143

Quote of the Day

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces.  I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others.  The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.  It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off.

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 74-75

Quote of the Day

Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.  Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves."

-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, p. 27

Quote of the Day

Heavy is the enchantment of places you know you will never see again.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 116

Quote of the Day

My grief for you will always remain unruly, even as I know it contains the logic of everyone who has ever felt it.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 191

Quote of the Day

But for now, I must poke holes in all this curiosity so that I might breathe, so that I might get on with the second half of my life.  If I desire the kind of life you wanted me to live, one of expansion over retraction, I must learn to be on the side of the living.  I must learn to accept that we are not the same. 

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 191

Quote of the Day

Sometimes I was lonely, sometimes I was just alone.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 168

Quote of the Day

The anxiety may have been a blanket but the sadness was a knife.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 168

Quote of the Day

We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.  We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.  We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

-- Joan Didion, The White Album

Quote of the Day

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.  The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

-- Thomas Merton

Quote of the Day

Time only pushes wounds aside.  Regular life becomes insistent and crowds out the loss.  Usually, this is a good thing.  So much of healing is the recognition that not all your tissue got damaged in the accident.  But every so often, there is no such thing as regular life.  Every so often, life crowds out loss with more loss.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 154

Quote of the Day

Those living with grief know the particular sleeplessness it engenders -- so nonnegotiable, so immune to warm milk and narcotics.  Typical insomnia has an apologetic feel, like it doesn't want to be here any more than you do.  Like it knows you have a big day tomorrow but can't help itself.  Grief insomnia has a mouth on it: Time does not heal all wounds.  Time does not heal any wounds.  Who promised you that?  Get your money back.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 154

Quote of the Day

Anger is a cousin of intelligence.  If you are not revolted by certain things, you have no boundaries.  If you have no boundaries, you have no self-knowledge.  If you have no self-knowledge, you have no taste, and if you have no taste, why are you here?

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 133

Quote of the Day

... real literature, like love, comes from a desire to be known.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 122

Quote of the Day

It's unpredictable, this stage of grief.  Just when you think you have a handle on it, a crack opens up where the crazy gets in.  The pain is a weather system that builds and expands, occasionally touching down, like lightning.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 93

Quote of the Day

The person who has not at some point accepted with ultimate resolve and even rejoiced in the absolute horror of life will never take possession of the unspeakable powers vested in our existence.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Quote of the Day

No one is obliged to learn something from loss.  This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times while they're still in the fetal position.  Like feeding steak to a baby.

-- Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People, p. 5-6

Quote of the Day

Either you jump out the window or you live.

-- Brooke Hayward, Haywire