I think that what happens when you lose a parent, where you lose – you drop into a different kind of serious.

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

I think every entertainer’s had nights when things go wrong. I mean you can’t remember everything all the time, and especially if you’re having hard times personally, things going on that you – you know, and then people make it worse. And that makes you feel worse.

The only certain freedom’s in departure.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana’s loss, and gratitude for her all-too-short life. It is a chance to show to the whole world the British nation united in grief and respect.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.

Contemplation of life after retirement and life after death can help you deal with contemporary challenges.

My mum passing away wasn’t funny, but that funeral and what I went through, the things that happened, looking back at it, there were funny moments. You have to be strong enough to look back at it, to sit and assess the situation.

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

Cry if you have a compound fracture, by all means. Or if your grandpa died. But otherwise, save it for your pillow.

Even the securest financial plan and the finest health coverage aren’t enough to hold us steady when the challenges come… We need something more, something deeper and unshakeable, something that will see us through life’s hard times.

Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

It is amazing how a new child can refocus one’s direction seconds after its birth.

The loss of a child is my greatest nightmare.

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

Generally, the younger the victim, the greater the grief. Yet even when the elderly or infirm have been afforded merciful relief, their loved ones are rarely ready to let go.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I’m not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

I made a decision when my father passed away that I was going to be who God made me to be and not try to preach like my father.

I can honestly say, after talking about my mom passing away, I got the biggest weight off of my chest. Comedy is my therapy. That’s how I deal with my problems, my personal battles. I talk about it. I give it to my fans. When they laugh at it, it’s a release, for lack of a better word.

The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head – chemo-brain they call it. It’s awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.

Grief is the price we pay for love.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.

I’m always relieved when someone is delivering a eulogy and I realize I’m listening to it.

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.

The moment you have a child, in an instant your life is not for you, and your life is completely, 100 percent dedicated to another human being, and they will always come first. It changes you forever. It changes your perspective, and it gives you a nice purpose and focus.

When the people you love are gone, you’re alone.

Fame hit me like a ton of bricks.

Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.

Irrespective of age, we mourn for those loved and lost. Mourning is one of the deepest expressions of pure love.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there’s a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they’re not the same, ever again.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

Every time I see documentaries or infomercials about little kids with cancer, I just freak out. It affects me on the highest emotional level… Anytime I think about it, it makes me sadder than anything I can think of.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

My wife is already in Heaven.

Over the years I’ve seen people lose a spouse and then withdraw and lose interest in life, and I believe we need to resist that.

No matter how prepared you think you are for the death of a loved one, it still comes as a shock, and it still hurts very deeply.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

The death of my father is probably the biggest thing that I ever faced. Daddy and I were best friends.

I’m on record that it didn’t really traumatize me to do away with some people.

I had a friend who was a clown. When he died, all his friends went to the funeral in one car.

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.