Fay Weldon Quotes

I have friends who have lost husbands and have gone off and tried different things. Nothing wrong with that.

After my husband, Dave, died, I called my friend Adam, a psychologist who studies how people find meaning in our lives, and I asked him what, if anything, I could do to help myself and my kids get through this. We started talking about resilience, then reading about it, then talking to other people who had gotten through grief and other huge challenges. In time, those conversations and that research helped me heal.

You don't think you'll live past it and you don't really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that's still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.

After my husband died more than a decade ago, my mother prayed that I would remarry so that I could have a "normal" life again. Many people assumed that it would be too difficult for me to carry on as a single mother and raise a child without a man at my side. As the years went by, I found that it was indeed possible and that, in fact, I had no desire to remarry.

When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.

The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss—you have gone and lost something else. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, "—three," and years later, "Three," she will say, "—four.

Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.

Some widowers are bereaved -- others, relieved.

The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is tha life actually goes on.

There was a moth in there, and it still had its wings crumpled up, and it was just starting to pump its wings up. Life continues in lots of places, and life is a magical thing.

Mom was 50 when my Dad died. She got on a bus every weekday for years, and rode 40 miles each morning to Madison. She earned a new degree and learned new skills to start her small business. It wasn't just a new livelihood. It was a new life.

It takes strength to make your way through grief, to grab hold of life and let it pull you forward.

In the last few years, losing my father, going through a divorce and not getting some jobs I really wanted, is making me a much more interesting person, I think. This all really does feel like a rebirth, a new chapter.

I think it's about not just the crisis you're in, but how do you get to the other side? How do we heal? How do we survive this experience while remaining hopeful instead of filled with despair? That's what interests me.

As a man, if you lose your wife, it's a horrible experience, especially with kids. But when one person passes away and you're still alive, people still depend on you - that's what you have to lean on.

Because my husband, Peter, died young, I've already faced the scariest thing in my life. Now I live out the dreams for both of us.

When we lost Steve, it was a real crossroads of deciding if you're just going to curl up in the corner or try to do something even bigger and better.

You see ... a man like me, a cautious man, has his life all figured out according to a pattern, and then the pattern flies apart. You run around for quite a while trying to repair it, until one day you straighten up again with an armful of broken pieces, and you see that the world has gone on without you and you can never catch up with your old life, and you must begin all over again.

Everything on this earth can be made into something better. Every defeat may be made the foundation of a future victory. Every lost war may be the cause of a later resurgence. Every visitation of distress can give a new impetus to human energy. And out of every oppression those forces can develop which bring about a new rebirth.

Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

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.

It is never too late to begin rebuilding, Though all into ruins your life seems hurled; For see! how the light of the New Year is gilding The wan, worn face of the bruised old world.

But we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.

Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.

You can grow flowers from where dirt use to be.