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

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.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

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.

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

Understanding does not cure evil, but it is a definite help, inasmuch as one can cope with a comprehensible darkness.

The loss of a child is my greatest nightmare.

I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.

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

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

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.

It is better to die than to preserve this life by incurring disgrace. The loss of life causes but a moment’s grief, but disgrace brings grief every day of one’s life.

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce.

When Clark Gable died, I cried for 2 days straight. I couldn’t eat or sleep.

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.

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.

Where grief is fresh, any attempt to divert it only irritates.

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.

Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.

You never get over losses. I’ve never gotten over one loss I’ve had in my career. They always stick with me.

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!

Tears are the silent language of grief.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

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

Every loss of life is terrible.

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.

My focus is to forget the pain of life. Forget the pain, mock the pain, reduce it. And laugh.

The Bible says that as Christians we don’t grieve the same way people do who have no hope of eternity and of Heaven – but we still grieve.

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

My son has died of AIDS.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

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

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.

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection – you cannot cope with the future.

Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don’t have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.

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.

This is a ruthless world and one must be ruthless to cope with it.

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

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

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.

My wife is already in Heaven.

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

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

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

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

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

The only certain freedom’s in departure.

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.

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?

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.

When you lose a person you love so much, surviving the loss is difficult.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

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

Grief is the price we pay for love.

I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.