David Levithan Quotes

I don't know what it is about death that makes it so hard. I suppose it's the one-sided communication; the fact that we never get to ask our loved one if she suffered, if she is happy wherever she is now...if she is somewhere. It's the question mark that comes with death that we can't face, not the period.

Losing a wife can be very hard. In my case, it was almost impossible.

I was horrified. Absolutely heart sick. All I could think of was that after 23 years together, I'd lost my faithful ally. I couldn't sleep, couldn't get the loss out of my mind. It was like discovering that someone in my family had died.

I hoped that grief was similar to the other emotions. That it would end, the way happiness did. Or laughter.

When you lose someone you love, you die too, and you wait around for your body to catch up.

Grief, of course, is not something that operates according to a specific time frame, and it seems cold to suggest otherwise. Yet when we do not grasp that God is present in pain, we eventually insist on victory or, worse, blame the sufferer for not "getting over it" fast enough. This is more than a failure to extend compassion; it's an exercise in cruelty.

I think losing a loved one must be a little like losing a leg. First there is the shock, then the anesthetic, and the painkillers; the attention of doctors and nurses, flowers and cards and visits from friends. But sooner or later you have to learn to walk without it.

[after the death of a loved one] It is when there is nothing more to be done that the reality of the loss often hits with full force.

There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

This is what you should know about losing someone you love. They do not travel alone. You go with them.

With Keith's [my fiance] murder, I was changed. I thought I would be a prosecutor forever, but there were so many days when I would leave the courtroom during a trial, and go down the hall to the ladies' room, and go into a little stall, and cry.

The only cure for grief is action.

When you lose someone, a whole lot of perfectly normal circumstances suddenly take on different meaning. You see it in a different light. You wonder if they knew. I wondered. Doctors have told me that people do have a sense of their own approaching death.

We’re built to move on. Someone dies, no matter how close you are to them, you move on. That helps in a lot of ways.

Yes, my mother's death is a terrible sorrow to me. I feel - do you know what I mean - the silence of it so. She was more alive than anyone I have ever known.

There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.

Grief is itself a medicine.

Loss is essential. Loss is part and parcel of that necessary calamity called life.

I’ve lost someone, too. And there were no rules for how to deal with the death of someone you loved. You had to accept that the loss would always stay with you, like a reminder note pinned to the inside of your jacket. But there were still opportunities for happiness. Even joy.

Grief is a matter of the heart and soul. Grieve your loss, allow it in, and spend time with it. Suffering is the optional part. Remember that you come into this world in the middle of the movie, and you leave in the middle; and so do the people you love. Love never dies, and spirit knows no loss.

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

When you suffer a loss, there is before the death and after the death - those become your two existences and your two realities.

I have to say that since my mother died, I am not the same person anymore. My life has changed a great deal because it's really unbearable to think you can't see her anymore or talk to her anymore.

(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.