Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life
without obliterating (getting over) a single
instant of it.

~ Albert Huffstickler

when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?

~ Ellen Bass

What happens when, just for a moment, we stay with our pain, our fear, our doubt, our discomfort, our grief, our broken heart, even our numbness, without trying to change it, or fix it, or numb ourselves to it, or get rid of it in any way? What happens when, even when we feel like leaving, abandoning the moment for the promise of a future salvation, we stay, sitting with the raw, unfiltered, boundlessly alive life-energy that is simply trying to express right now?

~ Jeff Foster

"So much of what we live goes on inside–"

"Bad things are going to happen."

Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!

~ Stanley Kunitz

"Because I write poetry, I can sit down and write things that I don’t have proof of, or even know the end of the sentence. I can feel around and nobody gets hurt, right? It’s a poem. And so I wrote this poem out of grief and an attempt to make it very plain to myself, the argument that I’d come up with." 
 

~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

“There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives): the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided.” ~ Adam Phillips

"When I go, I hope someone grabs hold of me. But I have to promise I’m grabbing hold of who's gone before." ~ Dario Robleto

"What happens when, just for a moment, we stay with our pain, our fear, our doubt, our discomfort, our grief, our broken heart, even our numbness, without trying to change it, or fix it, or numb ourselves to it, or get rid of it in any way? What happens when, even when we feel like leaving, abandoning the moment for the promise of a future salvation, we stay, sitting with the raw, unfiltered, boundlessly alive life-energy that is simply trying to express right now?" ~ Jeff Foster

"The day my grandfather passed away there was the strongest wind, 
I could feel his gentle hands blowing away from me. 
I knew then they were off to find someone
who needed them more than I did.
On average 1.8 people on earth die every second.
There is always a gust of wind somewhere."

~ Michael Lee

"There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready." 

~ Maurice Sendak