24 Insightful Grief Quotes To Help You Come To Terms With Your Loss
Living with grief can be a lonely experience. In addition to missing the person you’ve lost, you might believe that few people around you understand what you’re going through or want to hear about it. Reading thoughts from others who have lived with similar feelings may provide a sense of connectedness, comfort, and inspiration in these difficult moments. The grief quotes below examine several aspects of the process of loss and mourning.
Some of the quotes below come from acclaimed authors, entertainers, and thinkers, while others are from not-so-famous people who have still written eloquently about being touched by grief. They explore subjects like the feeling of bereavement, the strange persistence of grief, and what it may feel like when you begin to heal.
Quotes about the experience of grief
Below are moving quotes describing what it may feel like to grieve someone or something you love:
- “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
- “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.” — C.S. Lewis
- “How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- “Tears are the silent language of grief.” — Voltaire
- “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, A Prayer For Owen Meany
- “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, The Fault In Our Stars
- “Grief can’t be shared. Everyone carries it alone; his own burden in his own way.” — Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Quotes about the value of grief
The following quotes offer thoughts on the purpose grief may serve in life.
- “I will not say: Do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
- “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.” — Rabbi Earl A. Grollman
- “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” — A.A. Milne
- “Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them…When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guardrails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. Grieving is an act of surrender.” — Valarie Kaur
- “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
Quotes about the persistence of grief
Though individuals may eventually find that their pangs of grief become less urgent and frequent over time, the pain of a significant loss may never fully go away, and it can strike at unexpected times years or even decades later. The following quotes discuss how grief can continue long after the events that sparked it:
- “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 has been said, 'Time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.” — Rose Kennedy
- “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 Kübler-Ross
- “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
Quotes about grief, hope, and recovery
When the wrenching pain of a loss seems like it may last forever, it may be helpful to receive a reminder that the feeling can recede over time. Below are quotes to spark optimism as you work through your difficult feelings.
- “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
- “Grieving is a necessary passage and a difficult transition to finally letting go of sorrow – it is not a permanent rest stop.” — Dodinsky
- “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
- “I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss.” — Rita Mae Brown
Quotes about remembering and honoring those you’ve lost
Grief can be a way to pay tribute to the people whose absence you’re mourning and the ways they touched your life. These quotes speak to how sorrow can make people reflect on memories of joy.
- “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All 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.” — Jamie Anderson
- “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
- “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.” — Jandy Nelson
- “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
The psychology of healthy vs. pathological grief
To some extent, everyone grieves in their own way, and even intense feelings of pain and sadness after a profound loss can serve a valuable purpose in mourning. However, some people may find it difficult to process their sorrow in adaptive ways, resulting in prolonged grief disorder, a condition involving prolonged feelings of excessive grief that can disrupt healthy functioning. Prolonged grief disorder is characterized by features like:
- Strong feelings of anger, bitterness, or guilt
- Difficulty experiencing enjoyment or happiness
- Thoughts or memories of the person you’ve lost that occupy your thoughts most of the time or get in the way of other activities
- Loss of your sense of identity
- Difficulty engaging with relationships or activities you formerly found meaningful
- Thoughts that life no longer has meaning
- Emotional numbness
Support options
If you think you might be experiencing symptoms of complicated grief disorder, consulting a mental health professional might help you work through your feelings. However, locating a therapist and attending regular sessions might sound overwhelming while you’re dealing with the many other tasks that accompany bereavement. In this case, online therapy through a platform like BetterHelp may be more accessible.
Through an online platform, individuals can meet with a provider via phone, video, or live chat sessions, offering more care options. In addition, they can schedule sessions at a time that works for them, including outside of standard business hours in some cases. Online therapy has also shown promise in protecting the mental health of people affected by intense grief. A 2021 research paper analyzing existing studies showed evidence that Internet-based psychological treatment effectively reduced symptoms of depression, PTSD, and other pathological conditions linked to grief and loss.
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