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Notes on Grief QUOTES

Notes on Grief QUOTES

1 " 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 "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

2 " Le chagrin est un enseignement cruel. On apprend combien le processus du deuil peut être brutal, combien il peut être lourd de colère. On apprend combien les condoléances peuvent paraître creuses. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

3 " Ce n'est pas une simple affliction de l'esprit, mais aussi du corps; ce sont des maux et des forces qui lâchent. La chair, les muscles, les organes, tous sont compromis. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

4 " Je vais parfaitement bien.
Et c'était vrai. Jusqu'à ce que cela cesse de l'être. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

5 " Un rire dont je ne rirai plus jamais.
« Jamais » est entré dans ma vie pour y rester. « Jamais » semble si injustement punitif. Pour le restant de mes jours, je vivrai en tendant les mains vers des choses qui ne sont plus là. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

6 " Une érosion, un ignoble déferlement de déluges qui laissent notre famille déformée pour toujours. Les épaisseurs de perte donnent le sentiment que la vie est mince comme du papier. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

7 " I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

8 " I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. "Find peace in your memories," I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, "This is what you will never again have. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

9 " Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

10 " How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering? "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

11 " It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

12 " For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

13 " Never' has come to say. 'Never' feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

14 " A friend sends me a line from my novel: 'Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.' How odd to find it so exquisitely painful to read my own words. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

15 " Another revelation: how much laughter is a part of grief. Laughter is tightly braided into our family argot, and now we laugh remembering my father, but somewhere in the background there is a haze of disbelief. The laughter trails off. The laughter becomes tears and becomes sadness and becomes rage. I am unprepared for my wretched, roaring rage. In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

16 " Does love bring, even if unconsciously, the delusional arrogance of expecting never to be touched by grief? "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

17 " Grief is not gauzy; it is substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque. The weight is heaviest in the mornings, post-sleep: a leaden heart, a stubborn reality that refuses to budge. I will never see my father again. Never again. It feels as if I wake up only to sink and sink. In those moments, I am sure that I do not ever want to face the world again. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

18 " I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is: my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth; on my chest, a heavy, awful weight; and inside my body, a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart – my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here – is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

19 " A thing like this, dreaded for so long, finally arrives and among the avalanche of emotions there is a bitter and unbearable relief. It comes as a form of aggression, this relief, bringing with it strangely pugnacious thoughts. Enemies beware: the worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief

20 " I liked to call him 'a gentle man and a gentleman'. "

― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , Notes on Grief