Quotes about Grief

Nately's death, in fact, almost killed Yossarian too, for when he broke the news to Nately's whore in Rome she uttered a piercing heartbroken shriek and tried to stab him to death with a potato peeler.

The fact that Jesus weeps and that he is moved in spirit and troubled contrasts remarkably with the dominant culture. That is not the way of power, and it is scarcely the way among those who intend to maintain firm social control. But in [John 11:33-35] Jesus is engaged not in social control but in dismantling the power of death, and he does so by submitting himself to the pain and grief present in the situation, the very pain and grief that the dominant society must deny.

Jeremiah is frequently misunderstood as a doomsday spokesman or a pitiful man who had a grudge and sat around crying; but his public and personal grief was for another reason and served another purpose. Jeremiah embodies the alternative consciousness of Moses in the face of the denying king.9 He grieves the grief of Judah because he knows what the king refuses to know.

Grief is an element of aliveness and the answer to the denial the market demands of us. It is an index of our humanity. It is proof of the presence of our relatedness to each other. It is a communal practice that recognizes that choosing the wilderness of vulnerability, mystery, and anxiety was a good and life-affirming choice.

The judge remembers to be a parent: a father in wistfulness, a mother in yearning, a God of grief flowing with tears beside the deathbed. The angry God remembers to be a God who cares about the beloved partner. God has noticed. God has noticed the mocking and the dying, the denial and the irrepressible pain. To

The cross is the assurance that effective prophetic criticism is done not by an outsider but always by one who must embrace the grief, enter into the death, and know the pain of the criticized one.

Quite clearly, the one thing the dominant culture cannot tolerate or co-opt is compassion, the ability to stand in solidarity with the victims of the present order. It can manage charity and good intentions, but it has no way to resist solidarity with pain or grief. So

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.

The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind.

There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love.

There is a sacredness in tears....They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.

I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.