I tell you hopeless grief is passionless.

The line distinguishes between grief that still contains energy—anger, protest, yearning—and grief that has crossed into resignation. “Hopeless” grief, in this view, no longer burns with the heat of passion because it has surrendered the expectation of change or relief. The sentence implies that passion depends on some remaining belief in possibility: the possibility of being heard, of being answered, of the beloved returning, or of the self recovering. When hope dies, emotion can flatten into numbness, silence, or a kind of exhausted calm. The remark also carries a moral-psychological insight: what looks like composure may be the deadened surface of despair rather than strength.