Grief Quotes: In spite of the fact that death is an inevitable component of the human experience, the passing of a loved one, in particular, can leave us feeling utterly crushed. Anyone who has suffered a significant loss knows the feeling of having a piece of themselves severed.
Best quotes about grief – The following is a collection of grief quotes, grief sayings, and grief proverbs that we have compiled throughout the years from a variety of sources. We hope that these quotations, sayings, and proverbs will assist you to memorialize and remember the deceased. Check out our compilation of reassuring statements about miscarriage if you are a woman who has had to go through the agonizing experience of having a miscarriage.
Grief Quotes – Best Quotes About Grief
1. “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” — John Green
2. “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
3. “Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face—I know it’s an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.” — Nicholas Sparks
4. “Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: You bleed and bleed and bleed.” ― David Mitchell
5. “There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.” ― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
6. “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.” — Leo Tolstoy
7. “Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
8. “Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.” —Arthur Golden
9. “Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.” — Alphonse de Lamartine
10. “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” — Winnie the Pooh
11. “Grief is just love with no place to go.” — Jamie Anderson
12. “I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.” — Anne Frank
13. “What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” — Helen Keller
14. “Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.” — Rumi
15. “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you’ll learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.” — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
16. “When someone you love dies and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time—the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes—when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever—there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.” ― John Irving
17. “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.” ― Leo Tolstoy
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20. “Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.” ― Pablo Neruda
21. “Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.” ― Vicki Harrison
22. “Grieving doesn’t make you imperfect. It makes you human.” ― Sarah Dessen
23. “Our joys will be greater, our love will be deeper, our life will be fuller because we shared your moment.” — Unknown
24. “You don’t go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be.” — Nigella Lawson
25. “I am because you were.” — Unknown
26. “Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time. It tell us to tell each other right now that we love each other.” — Leo Buscaglia
27. “Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms.” — Paulo Coelho
28. “When someone you love becomes a memory, that memory becomes a treasure.” — Unknown
29. “Grief is the price we pay for love.” — Queen Elizabeth II
30. “In days that follow, I discover that anger is easier to handle than grief.” — Emily Giffin
31. “I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It’s like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it’s there and keep falling in. After a while, it’s still there, but you learn to walk round it.” — Rachel Joyce
32. “And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.” — Maya Angelou
33. “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” — Pierre Auguste Renoir
34. “My mom has experienced a lot of loss in her life and she told me at one point, there is an empowerment that comes with grief—at some point you find it. It’s very hard but you will find it, and I think at a certain point you can choose to sort of fall from this or you can choose to rise.” — Lea Michele
35. “It’s hard to forget someone who gave you so much to remember.” —Unknown
36. “Death ends a life, not a relationship. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on- in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”— Mitch Albom
37. “Grief is love turned into an eternal missing” ― Rosamund Lupton
38. “Those we love don’t go away, they walk beside us every day… unseen, unheard, but always near, still loved, still missed, and very dear.” — Unknown
39. “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” — John Steinbeck
40. “Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here’s what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it’s still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it’s been too long since you missed them last.” ― Kristin O’Donnell Tubb
41. “You can not 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.” ― Laurell K. Hamilton
42. “Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That’s the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what’s left, that’s the part you have to make up as you go.” ― Katharine Weber
43. “When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.” ― Pat Schweibert
44. “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.” — Washington Irving
45. “Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.” — Jose N. Harris
46. “Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.” — Haruki Murakami
47. “You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” ― Anne Lamott
48. “There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart.” — Mahatma Gandhi
49. “Tis’ better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” — Alfred Lord Tennyson
50. “There are three needs of the griever: To find the words for the loss, to say the words aloud and to know that the words have been heard.” — Victoria Alexander
51. “It doesn’t get better,” I said. “The pain. The wounds scab over and you don’t always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you’ll never be the same.” ― Katie McGarry
52. “She was no longer wrestling with grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thought.” — George Eliot
53. “The song is ended but the melody lingers on.” — Irving Berlin
54. “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” — A.A. Milne
55. “Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can’t even cry.” ― Charles Bukowski
56. “It’s like I have this large black hole in my brain and it’s sucking the life out of me. The answers are in there so I sit for hours and stare. No matter how hard and long I look, I only see darkness.” ― Katie McGarry
57. “There’s a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality–there’s mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.” ― Christopher Moore
58. “You can’t truly heal from a loss until you allow yourself to really feel the loss.” — Mandy Hale
59. “Absence and death are the same. Only that in death there is no suffering.” — Theodore Roosevelt
60. “All things grow with time, except grief.” — Jewish Proverb
61. “When the heart grieves over what is has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left.” — Sufi
62. “Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.” ― Mark Twain
63. “You believe you could not live with the pain. Such pain is not lived with. It is only endured. I am sorry.” ― Erin Morgenstern
64. “Losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill.” ― Jojo Moyes
65. “Here’s what I know: death abducts the dying, but grief steals from those left behind.” ― Katherine Owen
66. “Don’t be ashamed to weep; ’tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones are sealed inside to comfort us.” — Brian Jacques
67. “No matter how prepared you think you are for death of loved one, it still comes as a shock, and it still hurts very deeply.” — Billy Graham
68. “Tenderly, may time heal your sorrow. Gently, may your friends ease your pain. Softly, may peace replace heartaches. And my warmest memories remain.” — Unknown
69. “If it were possible to heal sorrow by weeping and to raise the dead with tears, gold were less prized than grief.” — Sophocles
70. “Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It’s like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done… life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before. ” ― Anne Morrow Lindbergh
71. “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” — Thomas Campbell
72. “As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.” — Leonardo Da Vinci
73. The more sympathy you give, the less you need.” — Malcom Forbes
74. “Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.” — William Shakespeare
75. “The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief, but the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love.” — Hilary Stanton Zunin
76. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” — C.S. Lewis
77. “We need to grieve the ones we have loved and lost in this lifetime — not to sustain our connection to suffering, but to sustain our connection to love.” – J. W.
78. “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” – Thomas Campbell
79. “Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.” – Vicki Harrison
80. “What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” – Helen Keller
Which of these quotes about grief did you find to be the most meaningful to you? Grieving after a loss is both good and absolutely important, despite the fact that it can be especially challenging if the person who passed away was a member of the family or a close friend.
Death and suffering are inevitable so long as we live in a mortal world. And even though it’s a difficult experience, going through the process of grieving is a natural method for us to become more resilient and robust.
The above quotations about grieving should, with any luck, help you not only commemorate the memory of your loved one, but also mend your broken heart and fortify your resolve. Do you know of any additional encouraging quotes about grief that I might add? Please share your thoughts with us in the comment area below.
Those who are left behind must pick up the pieces of their lives and go on after the death of a loved one. But in order for us to move forward with our life, we have to let go of the people we loved who are no longer here with us. They are no longer a part of it. Grief is a process that assists us in progressively accepting the loss and allowing the deceased person to be absent from our life while yet remembering them fondly.
Because remembering and honoring the life of a departed loved one is one of the best ways to carry on their legacy and keep their memory alive. You can show respect for the person who has passed away and their life by doing a variety of things, such as keeping a piece of theirs with you, volunteering for an organization that was dear to the departed person, making a donation in their name to a charitable organization, holding an event in their honor, telling their stories and showing their photos, and living your best life.
