coping quotes

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.

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

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.

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’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. 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.

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.

Grief changes shape, but it never ends.

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

My son has died of AIDS.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Little things console us because little things afflict us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

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

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

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

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

A person’s fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.