Grief Quotes Quotes

“I think we're all monsters deep down, if we're pushed to that extent. Maybe if I felt like he was my father I could hate him. How could I hate a man that was just a stranger to me?”
― Amina Khan, Loathing You

“Breakups and divorces, disappointments
and failures, all summoned the old hurt, and I
began to wonder if every heartache wasn’t just
practice for the eternal separation between the
living and the dead. As with any loss, it is not the
dead who suffer, but the steady flaming fools left
behind.”
― LJ Pemberton, Still Alive

“I needed my mother, or I needed a mother, even though I was well past an age to justify that need. (224)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Grief is like a deep, dark hole. It calls like a siren: Come to me, lose yourself here. And you fight it and you fight it and you fight it, but when you finally do succumb and jump down into it, you can't quite believe how deep it is. It feels as if this is how you will live for the rest of your life, falling. Terrified and devastated until you die.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Carrie Soto Is Back

“Just so you know, love is possible for us too.
We've witnessed the pain life left at our doors.
It entered unwelcome, decided never to leave.
Hope held us together , even when everything fell apart. You knew it was out there waiting to be found.

I just want you to know, that love is possible for us too.

You will find love in time.”
― Leonie A. Anderson

“The translator in me--always at work, even in English-wants to understand the intent of his words. This is where the meaning must lie, right? With the filters turned off, the translator's mind is unfettered by others' words, actions, or opinions, or even by their mere presence. (15)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Tell me who I am, I’d asked my parents in so many ways. (16)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“By this time, we had all slung so many words at each other. (62)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“My goal consisted of trying not to anger her—or anyone… (73)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I feel powerless to make decisions about what should or shouldn’t be thrown out down here. (88)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“In my case, I felt like I'd been drowning in a sea of words, words that, more often than not, bore no resemblance to their dictionary definitions. What was the point of communicating if, inevitably, a subtext bubbled up, one I had trouble making sense of in my naïveté, in my confusion? What was the point if a word's meaning had been distorted to fit secret agendas, flip-flopped for unknown ulterior motives, withheld for other reasons? Translating what anyone said had become impossible for me, my work with languages, my love of words failing me when it came to my own family. All my dictionaries proved useless in trying to decipher a lifetime of communication fraught with subtexts buried beneath more subtexts. (134)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I don’t think I realized back then that I wanted to rewrite the past, though, perform a do-over. It’s only in hindsight I’ve come to this conclusion.”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Why did she keep these random items? How did they make the cut? Maybe she felt it had to be her decision what to keep, what to discard, just as it's my turn now, my decision as I go room to room, playing God with my parents' possessions. (148)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“When you're translating a document or a speech, if you don't have all the words, you don't have all the meaning. I'd only had my words thus far, my thoughts, not hers. That had given me an incomplete picture, one with pockets of omissions… (154)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“In my own way, maybe that's what I'm doing here, searching this home for anything that is evidence of my parents' love for me, for clues to the puzzle, translations of their behavior toward me. (156)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“For my part, I never knew who she’d be on any given day. Now that she’s gone, the mystery remains unsolved, part of my untranslatable life (161).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Once our reasons to be together—our parents, our childhood years—had been removed, not much linkage between us remained (181).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Unconditional love in my family was rare; you had to earn love, but it proved to be an elusive goal, the artist's vanishing point, unreachable in the distance. The more I tried to earn my parents' respect, the more it backfired, having the opposite effect (191).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Translating. It’s exhausting (166).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I realize it has taken the death of both my parents for me to finally begin to see who I am, but not through their eyes. I’ll never forget them; my parents I have been in lockstep ever since I was young child, but their words drowned out my own voice. I’m starting to come into my own. (240)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“I'd been given a foreign text to decipher, but I couldn't even identify the language, much less the meaning behind the words; she was speaking in some code (229)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Words had a purpose. Language had a purpose; I’d wrongly assumed that my mother wouldn’t misuse it (229)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Translation involves more than the deciphering of words, words strung together in sentences, in paragraphs, in dialogue, in the years of a life. After all, a machine can do that if you feed all the data into it. Translation also involves making sense of what’s left unspoken, those ellipses, blank spaces, the dot-dot-dots when you have to guess what’s happening in the person’s mind, what the silent messages mean. It calls for the translation of surrounding events, the cultural context, as well as the translation of nonverbal communication. What was being said through that certain look, that ever-so-tiny smile, that flash of a grimace? That spark of anger? Those sarcastic comments? Those prolonged silences? What did it all mean? (249)”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“The most difficult thing for me to translate to date, though, has been my own life (250).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“We no longer had a lingua franca after we moved there. We consisted of six people, our own little Tower of Babel… Six people speaking many different languages, none of them mutually intelligible. Six people bumping into each other in the dark, no longer able to understand each other, wounding one other in the process (257).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“Admittedly, a number of the translations of my life, of what went on in Ivy Lodge, are loose at best, warranting multiple-choice answers, never ideal in the scientifically based world of translation. You're supposed to go from the source language (the language being translated) to the target language (the language being translated into). A translation is only good when the translator knows--or can surmise--the intention of the person being translated, understands with a fair amount of confidence the exact meaning of that source language. Maybe that's one problem with my attempts to translate my family. Maybe my parents remained unclear in their own minds what they wanted to say, what their words and behavior meant, what their underlying motivation was. In that case, it makes translation doubly difficult if the source of the words and events to be translated is lost in a sea of linguistic confusion. Translators need patterns to make sense out of foreign words, or it all becomes a hodgepodge of meaningless sounds and symbols. Chaos (256).”
― Linda Murphy Marshall, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

“When we lose someone we love and we also lose a part of ourselves, it's something more. When who we have lost is so deeply connected to who we are, when we are inextricably linked not only to a person but to our connection to them, the loss of our relationship is often a loss of our own self. That is why such loss stretches beyond being heartbroken to being soulbroken.”
― Stephanie Sarazin, Soulbroken: A Guidebook for Your Journey Through Ambiguous Grief

“To witness your child's death is a hell too heavy for the fabrics of language. Words simply collapse.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“Grief is an animal you can never quite tame: after a long silence in the shadows, it may stir again and scratch open the wounds that soul-sickness feeds on.”
― Emmi Itäranta, The Moonday Letters

“It’s strange to think how under the same sky and in a short distance, someone is mourning and someone is having the time of their life.”
― Asif Hossain, Veronica