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

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

Tears are the silent language of grief.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Even with my divorce and with everything, I don’t need money.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s.

My wife is already in Heaven.

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

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

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

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.

Fame hit me like a ton of bricks.

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

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.

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

The loss of a child is my greatest nightmare.

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.

Remember that life’s big changes rarely give advance warning.

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

Great grief does not of itself put an end to itself.

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.

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.

We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.

To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

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.

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‘?

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.

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.

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.

The loss of life will be irreplaceable.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

God knows what we are going through when we grieve, and He wants to assure us of His love and concern. He also wants us to turn to Him and bring our heartaches and burdens to Him.

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.

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

As you get older, you have more responsibilities; you have more commitments, more events, kids, you’re married now. You still have all the things that you’ve had, plus you just keep adding.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

If there is even one woman out there who went and got checked and found that she had cancer or she was positive and she caught something in time, and if in any small way I was a part of that, it makes me very emotional.

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.

My son has died of AIDS.