“… Time does not heal,
It makes a half-stitched scar
That can be broken and again you feel
Grief as total as in its first hour.
-Elizabeth Jennings”

“Only time can heal your broken heart. Just as only time can heal his broken arms and legs.”

“Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.”

“You may continue to stay together after betrayal, and the scar may heal and condense, but will never totally disappear.”

“All of us heal in time. The strongest are born again. We only keep the scars we choose to keep.”

“There is a level of grief so deep that it stops resembling grief at all. The pain becomes so severe that the body can no longer feel it. The grief cauterizes itself, scars over, prevents inflated feeling. Such numbness is a kind of mercy.”

“Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.”

“But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you've worked towards, the life you've carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you're left with a wound you can't heal on your own and can't believe you'll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that - a lot of time - and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory. You tough it out moment by moment, hour by hour, and after some weeks or months you begin to see signs of recovery. Slowly the wound heals into a scar.”

“You cannot die of grief, though it feels as if you can. A heart does not actually break, though sometimes your chest aches as if it is breaking. Grief dims with time. It is the way of things. There comes a day when you smile again, and you feel like a traitor. How dare I feel happy. How dare I be glad in a world where my father is no more. And then you cry fresh tears, because you do not miss him as much as you once did, and giving up your grief is another kind of death.”

“Alas! vows are his after sign!—
We prop the tree in its decline—
The ghosts that haunt a parting hour,
With all of grief, and nought of power;
A chain half sunder'd in the making,—
The plighted vow's already breaking.”