James Baldwin quotes about grief

No matter how it seems now, I must confess: I loved him. I do not think that I will ever love anyone like that again.

Much has been written of love turning to hatred, of the heart growing cold with the death of love. It is a remarkable process. It is far more terrible than anything I have ever read about it, more terrible than anything I will ever be able to say.

With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

I thought only, One day I’ll weep for this. One of these days I’ll start to cry.

I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

It became, in a way, every room I had ever been in and every room I find myself in hereafter will remind me of Giovanni’s room.

To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it.

And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder.

But it was not the same, something was gone; the astonishment, the power, and the joy were gone, the peace was gone.

Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues.

For this was not a matter of habit or circumstances or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.

This was not the garbage of Paris, which would have been anonymous: this was Giovanni’s regurgitated life.

Perhaps she had lost her love because she had not, in the end, believed in it enough.

The menfolk, they die, and it’s over for them, but we women, we have to keep on living and try to forget what they done to us.

Yet, in Florence’s heart to-night hatred and bitterness weighed like granite, pride refused to abdicate from the throne it had held so long. Neither love nor humility had led her to the altar, but only fear.

At length, she lay beside him like a burden laid down at evening which must be picked up once more in the morning.

Men spoke of how the heart broke up, but never spoke of how the soul hung speechless in the pause, the void, the terror between the living and the dead; how, all garments rent and cast aside, the naked soul passed over the very mouth of Hell.

I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain’t going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can’t ever suffer again: and that’s worse.

I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.

Despair can make one monstrous, but it can also make one noble: and here these children are, in the arena, up for grabs.

Daughter. In this world, terrible things happen to you, and we can all do some terrible things.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.

He had lived and died in an intolerable bitterness of spirit and it frightened me, as we drove him to the graveyard through those unquiet, ruined streets, to see how powerful and overflowing this bitterness could be and to realize that this bitterness now was mine.