This collection of grief quotes will help you to sail through your pain and come out stronger. Always remember, grief is inevitable and inalienable. It is a part of our very existence.
Everyone in this world irrespective of gender, color, education suffers and experiences grief. There is no running away from it. However, no matter how difficult it is, grief comes to an end eventually.
So, if there is something for which you are grieving, remember that the time will pass and happier days will come. These uplifting grief quotes might help you in your journey.
“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien
“Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: You bleed and bleed and bleed.”
― David Mitchell
“Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.”
― Jodi Picoult
“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
“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
“What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”
— Helen Keller
“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri
“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
“In days that follow, I discover that anger is easier to handle than grief.”
— Emily Giffin
“At the blueness of the skies and in the warmth of summer, we remember them.”
– Sylvan Kamens & Rabbi Jack Reimer
“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 and David Kessler
“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”
– Pablo Neruda
“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”
– Pierre Auguste Renoir
“Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.”
– Jose N. Harris
“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
“God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
– J.M. Barrie
“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
“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
“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
― John Green
“In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life”
― Nicholas Sparks
“My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That’s just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.”
― Jandy Nelson
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”
― William Shakespeare
“People speak to me about my son — ‘I’m so sorry for you’ — but no one says, ‘I loved him so much.’ I was busy in grief, which I don’t expect to stop. Suddenly realizing that the last thing my son would want was for me to be very self-involved and narcissistic and self-stroking. It stopped me from writing. Which doesn’t mean you stop feeling the absence. It was being willing to think about it in a way that was not self-serving.”
— Toni Morrison
A great soul serves everyone all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.”
— Maya Angelou
”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
”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
”While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.”
– Samuel Johnson
”Grief is so human, and it hits everyone at one point or another, at least, in their lives. If you love, you will grieve, and that’s just given.”
– Kay Redfield Jamison
”Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature’s delight.”
– Marcus Aurelius
”We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.”
– Kenji Miyazawa
”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
”If I can see pain in your eyes then share with me your tears. If I can see joy in your eyes then share with me your smile.”
– Santosh Kalwar
”I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone-you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence.”
– Alyson Noel
”Grief I’ve learned is just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
– Anonymous
”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
”It’s OK to feel sad sometimes. Little by little, you’ll feel better again.”
– Anonymous
”To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.”
— J.K. Rowling
”Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”
– Megan Devine
”Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”
– Rumi
”Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.”
– Sarah Dessen
”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
”You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.”
– Neil Gaiman
”Grief reunites you with what you’ve lost. It’s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away. You follow it a far as you can go. But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.”
– Philip K. Dick
”I miss her all the time. 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
”See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look down and see how much pain has eroded.”
– Jodi Picoult
”All the times I have suddenly realized that my parents are dead, even now, it still surprises me, to exist in the world while that which made me has ceased to exist.”
– Nicole Krauss
”The only way to end grief was to go through it.”
– Holly Black
”Grief is never something you get over. You don’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I’ve conquered that; now I’m moving on.’ It’s something that walks beside you every day. And if you can learn how to manage it and honour the person that you miss, you can take something that is incredibly sad and have some form of positivity.”
– Terri Irwin
”Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.”
– Anne Roiphe
”Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
– Marcel Proust
That marks the end of our list of grief quotes. If these have helped you, consider sharing as they may help someone else. In case you want to contribute to this list, feel free to drop a comment or shoot an email at [email protected]