“Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation.None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve.To face death is to stand alone.”

“For my omniscience paid I tollIn infinite remorse of soul.All sin was of my sinning, allAtoning mine, and mine the gallOf all regret. Mine was the weightOf every brooded wrong, the hateThat stood behind each envious thrust,Mine every greed, mine every lust.And all the while for every grief,Each suffering, I craved reliefWith individual desire, –Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fireAbout a thousand people crawl;Perished with each, — then mourned for all!”

“I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes when the grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe.”

“I wake up in that state of grief when you can tell you've been mourning even in your sleep.”

“When a group of people are forced to navigate a minefield together, everyone feels a grudging sense of comfort when someone else gets blown up. Though there may be other unseen landmines left in the ground, each death creates a safe spot. A landmine cannot explode twice in the same place. Sure, the explosion robs the survivors of a comrade. Still, each death makes everyone’s next step marginally safer. So everyone keeps walking with grief on their faces, and relief in their hearts. Their own deaths are further postponed by the end of another life.”

“Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. […] It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.”