Grief Is The Thing With Feathers Quotes

Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.

Again. I beg everything again.

Ghosts do not haunt, they regress. Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.

I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the tin as it swells and bakes.

[Grief] is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.

Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project.

And the boys were behind me, a tide-wall of laughter and yelling, hugging my legs, tripping and grabbing, leaping, spinning, stumbling, roaring, shrieking and the boys shouted I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU and their voice was the life and song of their mother. Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything.

For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning.

I missed her so much that I wanted to build a hundred-foot memorial to her with my bare hands. I wanted to see her sitting in a vast stone chair in Hyde Park, enjoying her view. Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her. How physical my missing is. I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her. Eugh,

I plucked one feather from my hood and left it on his forehead, for, his, head. For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning. For a little break in the mourning.

She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone. She

She was beaten to death, I once told some boys at a party. Oh shit mate, they said. I lie about how you died, I whispered to Mum. I would do the same, she whispered back.

Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar. I was cold.

And then our Mum and Dad were in love and they were truly dry-stone strong and durable and people speak of ease and joy and spontaneity and the fact that their two smells became one smell, our smell. Us.

MAN I would be done grieving? BIRD    No, not at all. You were done being hopeless. Grieving is something you’re still doing, and something you don’t need a crow for.

Once upon a time there were two boys who purposefully misremembered things about their father. It made them feel better if ever they forgot things about their mother.

Perfect devices: doctors, ghosts and crows. We can do things other characters can't, like eat sorrow, un-birth secrets and have theatrical battles with language and God.

This is the rotten core, the Grünewald, the nails in the hands, the needle in the arm, the trauma, the bomb, the thing after which we cannot ever write poems, the slammed door, the in-principio-erat-verbum. Very What-the-fuck. Very blood-sport. Very university historical. But don’t stop looking.

We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers. The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying ‘OH NO YOU DON’T COCK-CHEEK’. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone. She won’t ever use (make-up, turmeric, hairbrush, thesaurus). She will never finish (Patricia Highsmith novel, peanut butter, lip balm). And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday. I will stop finding her hairs. I will stop hearing her breathing.

I remember a story about an Irish warrior who killed his son by mistake but when he realised he didn’t mind that much because it served the son right.

They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me. CROW

A howling sorry which is yes which is thank you which is onwards.

What good is a crow to a pack of grieving humans? A huddle. A throb.              A sore.                          A plug.                                       A gape.                                                    A load. A gap. So, yes. I do eat baby rabbits, plunder nests, swallow filth, cheat death, mock the starving homeless, misdirect, misinform. Oi, stab it! A bloody load of time wasted. But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief.

...we were different boys, we were brave new boys without a Mum. So when he told us what happened I don't know what my brother was thinking but I was thinking this: Where are the fire engines? Where is the noise and clamour of an event like this? Where are the strangers going out of their way to help, screaming, flinging bits of emergency glow-in-the-dark equipment at us to try and settle us and save us? There should be men in helmets speaking a new and dramatic language of crisis. There should be horrible levels of noise, completely foreign and inappropriate for our cosy London flat.

Perhaps if Crow taught him anything it was a constant balancing. For want of a less dirty word: faith.

The sound of her voice was stinging, like a moon-dragged starvation surging into every hopeless raw vacant pore, undoing, exquisite undoing.

The whole city is my missing her.

But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief. There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity, splendour or normality that interest me (interest ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest. DAD

I felt it would be years before the knotted-string dream of other people’s performances of woe for my dead wife would thin enough for me to see any black space again,

Long live imagined animals, the need, the capacity.

I flung the duvet off and flailed and swung and spat at you but you were elsewhere and I had to fall asleep crushed between what you'd said and what I thought.

the boys shouted I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU and their voice was the life and song of their mother.

It is everything. It is the fabric of selfhood, and beautifully chaotic. It shares mathematical characteristics with many natural forms.

I am your Ted's song-legend, Crow of the death-chill, please. The God-eating, trash-licking, word-murdering, carcass-desecrating math-bomb motherfucker, and all that.

We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments. Our delicate cross-stitch of bickers.

Just as when you need to go to sleep you think of trees or lawns, you are taking instant symbolic refuge in a ready-made iconography of early safety and satisfaction. That exact place is where ghosts go.’ I

After the advent of laser surgery but before puberty, before self-consciousness, before secondary school, before money, time or gender got their teeth in. Before language was a trap, when it was a maze. Before

For a souvenir, for a warning, for a lick of night in the morning. For a little break in the mourning. I will give you something to think about, I whispered. He woke up and didn't see me against the blackness of his trauma.

Nothing truly ends. It changes. Change is eternal. In being changed, you too are eternal. You are here in this moving moment and in being here, you are also forever. A fire becomes ash, which becomes earth. Sadness becomes joy, sometimes within the same cry. Birds molt feathers, then grow new ones for winter. Love becomes grief. Grief become memory. Wounds become scars. Doing becomes being. Pain becomes strength. Noon becomes night. Rain becomes vapor and then rain again. Hope becomes despair then hope again. A pear ripens, falls, transforms as it is tasted. A caterpillar disappears into its silk wrapped cocoon and things go dark, and then…

You don’t know your origin tales, your biological truth (accident), your deaths (mosquito bites, mostly), your lives (denial, cheerfully).

We seem to take it in ten-year turns to be defined by it, sizeable chunks of cracking on, then great sink-holes of melancholy.

She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.

she is gone and I can think what I like. She would approve, because we were always over-analytical, cynical, probably disloyal, puzzled. Dinner party post-mortem bitches with kind intentions. Hypocrites. Friends.

There is a fascinating constant exchange between Crow’s natural self and his civilised self, between the scavenger and the philosopher, the goddess of complete being and the black stain, between Crow and his birdness. It seems to me to be the self-same exchange between mourning and living, then and now. I could learn a lot from him.

I missed her so much that I wanted to build a hundred-foot memorial to her with my bare hands. I wanted to see her sitting in a vast stone chair in Hyde Park, enjoying her view. Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her. How physical my missing is. I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her.

She told us that men were rarely truly kind, but they were often funny, which is better. 'You do well top prepare yourselves for disappointment' she said, 'in your dealings with men. Women are on the whole much stronger, usually cleverer' she said, 'but less funny, which is a shame. Have babies, if you can' she said 'because you'll be good at it.

Before language was a trap, when it was a maze.

LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU and their voice was the life and song of their mother. Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything.

Just be kind and look out for your brother.

I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me.

I refused to lose a wife and gain chores, so I accepted help.

We were smack bang in the middle, years from the finish, taking nothing for granted. I

Caught baffled by the perplexing slow-release of sadness for ever and ever and ever. Which

I’ve drawn her unpicked, ribs splayed stretched like a xylophone with the dead birds playing tunes on her bones.

There’s a feather on my pillow.

Oh, I said, we move. WE FUCKING HURTLE THROUGH SPACE LIKE THREE MAGNIFICENT BRAKE-FAILED BANGERS, thank you, Geoffrey, and send my love to Jean.

Moving on, as a concept, was mooted, a year or two after, by friendly men on behalf of their wellintentioned wives. Women who loved us. Women who knew me as a child.

But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief.

He could learn a lot from me. That’s why I’m here.

The friends and family who had been hanging around being kind had gone home to their own lives. When the children went to bed the flat had no meaning, nothing moved.

One boy lost the treasured lunchbox note from his mother saying 'good luck'. He cried, alone in his room, then threw a toy car at his father's framed Coltrane poster. It smashed. He felt better. The father dutifully swept up all the glass and understood.

I remember her pretending to like watching award winning ceremonies more than she actually did because it surprised me, but then I let her know that such-and-such ceremony was on and we would have to sit through it. Le's go to bed, she said. We don't really know who any of these people are. Winners, I said. Every stinking ugly vacuous cunt-faced last one of them. And off we went to bed.

Itches and Burs There once was a mother-and-daughterly pair Who both had an itch just beneath their long hair. Each had a bur with the prickles attached Under a belt at the mid of her back. “Oh, daughter, please scratch at my itch, will you not? And pluck out the bur—I would thank you a lot!” “I can’t,” said the daughter, “My own bur does sting. And try as I may I can’t reach the darn thing!” “Oh pain!” groaned the daughter. The mom cried, “Oh drat!” As each strained to reach her own bur at her back. “It prickles like needles! It tickles like feathers!” But easing the scratch was a fruitless endeavor. The daughter about gave a sigh of despair When all of a sudden her prick was not there. The itch too was gone with some scritches and scrapes Applied by old fingers in arthritic shape. The daughter, so grateful to feel such relief, Turned ’round to her mother and plucked out her grief. She scratched her mom’s itch just as she had done hers. Now neither has itches and neither has burs.

When I woke up a man in a green beret with a big feather poking out of it was leaning over me. I must be hallucinating, I thought. I blinked again but he didn’t go away. Then this immaculate, clipped British accent addressed me. “How are you feeling, soldier?” It was the colonel in charge of British Military Advisory Team (BMAT) in southern Africa. He was here to check on my progress. “We’ll be flying you back to the UK soon,” he said, smiling. “Hang on in there, trooper.” The colonel was exceptionally kind, and I have never forgotten that. He went beyond the call of duty to look out for me and get me repatriated as soon as possible--after all, we were in a country not known for its hospital niceties. The flight to the UK was a bit of a blur, spent sprawled across three seats in the back of a plane. I had been stretchered across the tarmac in the heat of the African sun, feeling desperate and alone. I couldn’t stop crying whenever no one was looking. Look at yourself, Bear. Look at yourself. Yep, you are screwed. And then I zonked out. An ambulance met me at Heathrow, and eventually, at my parents’ insistence, I was driven home. I had nowhere else to go. Both my mum and dad looked exhausted from worry; and on top of my physical pain I also felt gut-wrenchingly guilty for causing such grief to them. None of this was in the game plan for my life. I had been hit hard, broadside and from left field, in a way I could never have imagined. Things like this just didn’t happen to me. I was always the lucky kid. But rogue balls from left field can often be the making of us.

So I walked into their room in the navy blue middle of the night in summertime and listened to them breathing.

This is what we know of Dad. He was a quiet boy. He drifted off on family walks, he doodled and drew and his feelings were easily hurt by rough kids at school.

A kis családban sok volt az egyenlítés és az alku.

I remember my first date, aged fifteen, with a girl called Hilary Gidding. A coin fell down the back of the cinema seats and we both slipped our hands into the tight fuzzy gap of the chairs past popcorn kernels and sticky ticket stubs and our hands met, stroking the carpet feeling for the coin, and it was electric. The wrist being clamped by upholstery, the darkness, the accident, the lovely dirt of public spaces.

But I care, deeply. I find humans dull except in grief. There are very few in health, disaster, famine, atrocity, splendour or normality that interest me (interest ME!) but the motherless children do. Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest.

Once we had ventured from one side of the New World to another, and the white breathing population migrated across, too—we were the first explorers—a large group of us met to divide things up, for better governing of our own population.” “Were there any Native American vampires here when you came? Hey, were you on the Leif Ericson expedition?” “No, not my generation. Oddly enough, there were very few Native American vampires. And the ones that were here were different in several ways.” Now, that was pretty interesting, but I could tell Eric wasn’t going to stop and fill in the blanks. “At that first national meeting, about three hundred years ago, there were many disagreements.” Eric looked very, very serious. “No, really?” Vampires arguing? I could yawn. And he didn’t appreciate my sarcasm, either. He raised blond eyebrows, as if to say, “Can I go on and get to the point? Or are you going to give me grief?” I spread my hands: “Keep on going.” “Instead of dividing the country the way humans would, we included some of the north and some of the south in every division. We thought it would keep the cross-representation going. So the easternmost division, which is mostly the coastal states, is called Moshup Clan, for the Native American mythical figure, and its symbol is a whale.” Okay, maybe I looked a little glazed at that point. “Look it up on the Internet,” Eric said impatiently. “Our clan—the states that met in Rhodes compose this one—is Amun, a god from the Egyptian system, and our symbol is a feather, because Amun wore a feathered headdress. Do you remember that we all wore little feather pins there?” Ah. No. I shook my head. “Well, it was a busy summit,” Eric conceded.

Grief felt fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar.

Ik weet nog dat ik bang was dat er haast wel iets mis móést gaan als we zo gelukkig waren, zij en ik, in de begintijd, toen onze liefde zich naar de vorm van onze levens voegde zoals cakebeslag in de hoeken van het bakblik kruipt terwijl het rijst en bakt.

MAN "Dan zou mijn verdriet over zijn?" VOGEL "Nee, zeker niet. Maar je wanhoop was over. Verdriet heb je nog steeds, maar daar heb je geen kraai bij nodig.

Daar wil ik weer zijn. En nog eens, en nog eens. Ik wil in armen gehouden worden. Ik wil in mijn armen houden.

You were done being hopeless

I had a difficult few years, now I'm fine, but I'm quiet and I'm unsentimental.

I felt it would be years before the knotted-string dream of other people’s performances of woes for my dead wife would thin enough for me to see my black space again, and of course- needless to say - thoughts of this kind made me feel guilty.

I missed her so much that I wanted to build a hundred foot memorial to her with my bare hands. I wanted to see her sitting in a vast stone chair in Hyde Park, enjoying her view.

Motherless children are pure crow. For a sentimental bird it is ripe, rich and delicious to raid such a nest.

Sometimes he wished he experienced the world as simply as she did. It wasn't that Sparrow herself was simple, but rather, she lived and spoke and acted in the most uncomplicated of ways. She understood things about anger and grief and forgiveness that Elliot had not - at least, not until she'd helped him see it - but she didn't let the dark complexities of the world overwhelm or shake her convictions.

I won’t leave until you don’t need me any more.

and their voice was the life and song of their mother. Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything.

Fuj, rekao je Vrana, zvučiš kao magnet za hladnjak.

Nema na čemu. Ali, molim te, ne zaboravi da sam ja legenda/ pjesma tvojega Teda, Vrana mrtvačke studeni, molim te. Da sam šupčina koja ždere Boga, liže smeće, kolje riječi, oskvrnjuje trupla, matematička bomba i slično.

Jesi li dobar? Ne zamaraj se ničime što činiš ili ne činiš, to ionako nije važno.

Kretanje dalje u život je, kao koncept, za glupane, jer svaka razumna osoba zna da je žalovanje dugotrajan proces. Odbijam žuriti. Nametnuta bol ne dopušta nikome da uspori, ubrza ili popravlja.

Bol je sve. Ona je tvar sebstva i prelijepo je kaotična. Dijeli matematičke karakteristike s mnogim prirodnim oblicima.

They offer me a space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me.

Death is such a tragic and scary thing. The grim reaper kidnapping our loved ones like a murderer and the living are left in a grief stricken panic. The griever now lives life like a wounded soldier with a hole in his heart and a hundred pound bag of sorrow strapped to his back. The dead transcend into heaven, light as a feather, on spirit wings.

I bent down over him and smelt his breath. Notes of rotten hedge, blue bottles. I prised open his mouth and counted bones, snacked a bit on his un-brushed teeth, flossed him, crowly tossed his tongue hither, thither, I lifted the duvet.

We used to think she would turn up one day and say it had all been a test. We used to think we would both die at the same age she had. We used to think she could see us through mirrors. We used to think she was an undercover agent, sending Dad money, asking for updates. We were careful to age her, never trap her. Careful to name her Granny, when Dad became Grandpa. We hope she likes us.