Amidst grief’s overwhelming darkness, we often find unexpected sources of strength and resilience. This article explores the power of grief quotes—words that illuminate the path through sorrow and offer solace to those who walk it.
Grief is a universal human experience that can profoundly shape our lives. It’s a journey that no one wishes to embark upon, yet it’s one we all must navigate at some point.
Whether you are grieving the loss of a parent, loved one, or spouse, these quotes about grief might help you find comfort.
When my mother died in a tragic car accident, I wish someone had shared some of these quotes with me. Then, when my niece passed away at five days old, I wish I had known of some of these to share with my sister.
No one ever really knows what to say, even though they might have had their own personal journey with grief.
If you know someone is going through the grieving process right now, maybe offer one of these along with the standard “I am sorry for your loss” response.
Join us on a journey through poignant grief quotes that have touched the hearts of many and discover how these words have been instrumental in the resilience of those who have endured profound loss.
The eloquence of these quotes gives us the power to heal, remember, and honor the enduring spirit of love and loss.
Coping with grief can help build resilience by teaching us how to navigate profound emotional pain. This allows us to grow stronger and adapt to future challenges with greater emotional strength and understanding.
Grief Quotes for When Your Whole World Ends
Grief quotes have a unique ability to capture the complex emotions that accompany loss, providing comfort and understanding to individuals in their darkest moments.
- “Tears are the silent language of grief.” — Voltaire
- “Death ends a life, not a relationship.” — Mitch Albom
- “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” — Pierre Auguste Renoir
- “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
- “There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.” — Larry Stansbury
- “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” — Winnie The Pooh
- “Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.” — José N. Harris
- “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” — William Shakespeare
- “Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.” — From an Irish headstone
- “We can’t help searching for their faces. 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
- “It’s so curious; One can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses.” — Colette
Quotes About Grief From Mental Health Experts
These grief quotes acknowledge the struggles we face in our own life, offering a glimmer of hope.
- “Grief is the price we pay for love.” — Queen Elizabeth II
- “Every person’s grief is completely unique because so are their relationships.” — Claire Bidwell Smith
- “The road of sorrow is not easy. It is ominous, jarring, and narrow.” — Joanne Cacciatore, PhD
- “Sorrow is an inseparable dimension of our human experience. We suffer after a loss because we are human. And in our suffering, we are transformed.” — Alan D. Wolfelt
- “Grief can’t be shared. Everyone carries it alone; his own burden in his own way.” — Dr. Anne Morrow Lindbergh
- “Grief is not a disorder, a disease, or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical, and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.” — Dr. Earl A. Grollman
- “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal, and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered.” — Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
- “My point is this: Continuing to use the term ‘closure’ perpetuates the myth that losses and grief have a prescribed time for ending—or never starting—and that it’s emotionally healthier to close the door on suffering than to face it and learn to live with it.” — Pauline Boss, Ph.D.
- “Grief really is that feeling that you have, the sort of intensity that just overwhelms you, and that sort of momentary experience. Grieving, on the other hand, is the way that grief changes over time without ever actually going away.” — Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor
Grief Quotes for When Your Heart is Shattered
Expressing grief is not a sign of weakness.
- “Tears water our growth.” — William Shakespeare
- “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.” — Mary Oliver
- “To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.” — J K Rowling
- “We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world—the company of those who have known suffering.” — Helen Keller
- “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
- “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
- “One of the most important things I’ve learned is how deeply you can keep loving someone after they die. You may not be able to hold them or talk to them, and you may even date or love someone else, but you can still love them every bit as much.” — Sheryl Sandberg
- “When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.” — Oliver Sacks
- “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.” — Anne Lamott
Grief Quotes About Love and Loss
These quotes will help you keep going even though your heart is broken.
- “Grief is the silence that throbs.” — Stuart Evan Lewis
- “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” — Thomas Campbell
- “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.” — Joan Didion
- “Grief is the price we pay for attachment and love. Without attachment, there would be no grief.” — Dr. John Bowlby
- “Grief is the rope burns left behind when what we have held to most dearly is pulled out of reach, beyond our grasp.” — Stephen Levine
- “When my dad died, I didn’t know where to put my grief. The first time I had a miscarriage was the same. I didn’t know how to fit what I was feeling with normal, everyday life. For me to go and write was like a way of shaping something so big that I would otherwise be overwhelmed.” — Rachel Joyce
- “And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it though, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm is all about.” — Haruki Murakami
- “To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops. There are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularities of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?” — Jeanette Winterson
To Greet Great Sorrow With Hope is Powerful
- “Grief and resilience live together.” — Michelle Obama
- “Grief is just love with no place to go.” — Jamie Anderson
- “The song is ended but the melody lingers on.” — Irving Berlin
- “Wishing you strength for today and hope for tomorrow.” — Renee O’Neill
- “We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” — Kenji Miyazawa
- “Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.” — Megan Devine
- “When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left.” — Sufi Epigram
- “Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.” — Sarah Dessen
- “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
- “To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on.” — Marcus Aurelius
- “We do not have to rely on memories to recapture the spirit of those we have loved and lost—they live within our souls in some perfect sanctuary which even death cannot destroy.” — Nan Witcomb
Thought-Provoking Grief Quotes About How it Feels
Grieving is so much more than having a broken heart. It can feel like your heart is being ripped out of your chest.
- “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” — A Greif Observed, C.S. Lewis
- “There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, so just give me a happy middle and a very happy start.” — Shel Silverstein
- “Nothing that grieves us can be called little; by the external 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
- “The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.” — Cheryl Strayed
- “Grief can destroy you—or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it.” — Dean Koonz
- “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
What to Say When Someone is Grieving
- “What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us.” — Helen Keller
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “When we love deeply, we mourn deeply; extraordinary grief is an expression of extraordinary love. Grief and love mirror each other; one is not possible without the other.” — Joanne Cacciatore, Ph.D.
- “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
Grief Quotes: Understand Pain and Loss
These grief quotes offer a lens through which to view and understand the complexities of loss and mourning.
By articulating the depth of pain and the nuances of enduring love, they provide solace and a shared understanding that can be crucial during the grieving process.
- “Grief is love turned into an eternal missing.” — Rosamund Lupton
- “You gave me a forever within the numbered days…” — John Green
- “You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.” — J.K. Rowling
- “They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite.” — Cassandra Clare
- “The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God!” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “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
- “Back and forth it goes, but with each retreating drift of despair, we are left a little stronger, more resilient, more essential, and better at our new life.” — Nick Cave
- “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” — Edgar Allan Poe
- “The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you’re faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.” — James Patterson
- “The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.” — John Green
Live Life but Keep Space for Your Grief
When dealing with grief, find solace in what works for you. This might look like seeking the support of loved ones, engaging in self-care, reading quotes and scripture on grief, or seeking professional help.
Remember, everyone moves through grief differently. There is no right or wrong way, but there are healthy and unhealthy ways. If you feel you are growing in grief, there is no shame in asking for help.
Time may not heal the wound, but over time, the pain of loss changes.
In the comments section, please share your favorite grief quote. You might just have the words someone needs to hear.
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You might also want to check out this grief journal that is, unlike many others, Hardcore Grief Recovery Workbook: An Honest Journal for Getting through Grief Without the Condolences, Sympathy, and Other BS (F*ck Death) (paid link).