Grief Quotes

A.J. Darkholme

Time doesn't always heal all wounds.

Roland Barthes

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.

Raymond Carver

They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

Haruki Murakami

For darkness terrifies. It swallows you, warps you, nullifies you. Who alive can possibly profess confidence in darkness? In the dark, you can't see.

José N. Harris

Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.

Nicholas Sparks

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.

Colette

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.

E.A. Bucchianeri

So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.

Veronica Roth

But when I do feel all the strength go out of me, and I fall to my knees beside the table and I think I cry, then, or at least I want to, and everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.

Melina Marchetta

But grief makes a monster out of us sometimes . . . and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can't forgive yourself for.

Omar Khayyam

This world
that was our home
for a brief spell
never brought us anything
but pain and grief;
its a shame that not one of our problems
was ever solved.
We depart
with a thousand regrets
in our hearts.

Patti Smith

Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

Federico García Lorca

My head is full of fire
and grief and my tongue
runs wild, pierced
with shards of glass.

Jenim Dibie

And on the days I couldn't breathe, I learned to paint air.

Rebecca McNutt

People say that a time machine can’t be invented, but they’ve already invented a device that can stop time, cameras are the world’s first time machines.

Christy A. Campbell

He wishes he could remember everything. Anything. He doesn’t sense a bone in his body that can feel compassion or worthiness. Self-pity hides away as well, the lowest form of emotion not even capable of resting in his wrecked mind.

Vivian Amis

Everything you experience is a blessing and pushes you toward realizing your true self.

Virginia Woolf

Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.

William Shakespeare

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.

Jodi Picoult

words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.

Sarah Dessen

That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

Horace

There are words and accents by which this grief can be assuaged, and the disease in a great measure removed.

Stephanie Roberts

Why not laugh again, and let your joy be my monument?

C.S. Lewis

And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.

Flavia Weedn

Someday, beyond the clouds and all the world's wrongs, there will be love, compassion and justice, and we shall all understand.

Emily Thorne

They say grief occurs in five stages. First there's denial followed by anger. Then comes bargaining, depression and acceptance. But grief is a merciless master. Just when you think you're free you realize you never stood a chance.

Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

Beware! Balance rules the cosmos. It is not concerned with good or bad. You can be struck by misfortune and be buried in grief if that is what it takes to restore the imbalance you have wrought unto the world.

Belinda Jeffrey

When I was young I wanted so much to be like her. What a blessing are those moments when there is nothing to worry about, no thought of trouble or grief in the world.

Katy Perry

You said move on, where do I go?

Faraaz Kazi

No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn't stop for your grief.

Katherine Owen

There are all kinds of ways for a relationship to be tested, even broken, some, irrevocably; it’s the endings we’re unprepared for.

Maggie Stiefvater

I just looked at her, feeling utterly empty. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to her. My life is in that bed. Please let me stay.

Sarah Ockler

Every morning, I wake up and forget just for a second that it happened. But once my eyes open, it buries me like a landslide of sharp, sad rocks. Once my eyes open, I'm heavy, like there's to much gravity on my heart.

Sunshine O'Donnell

Love is an engraved invitation to grief.

Nicholas Sparks

Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief.

Jodi Picoult

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.

Lisa Kleypas

Shock is a merciful condition. It allows you to get through disaster with a necessary distance between you and your feelings.

Jodi Picoult

Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.

Leo Tolstoy

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.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

Christina Rossetti

What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.
What are brief? today and tomorrow.
What are frail? spring blossoms and youth.
What are deep? the ocean and truth.

Denise Jaden

What's even more messed up than funerals, is the way people treat you after the funeral. Like you're diseased or something.

V.C. Andrews

Grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away.

Rebecca McNutt

You don't understand," Alecto replied vacantly. "It isn't that I want to die... I just don't want to exist.

Nicole Krauss

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.

Homer

Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.

J.D. Salinger

And I can't be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.

Jodi Picoult

If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can't someone be healed by happiness?

Sanhita Baruah

Let it rain on some days,
Let yourself shiver on some cold nights,
So when it's Spring you'll know why it was all worth going through.

Archana Chaurasia Kapoor

listen thoughtfully
sounds of laughter
gaiety and melancholy galore

Becky Chambers

No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief.

Deshwal Sachin

Life has only three states-Happiness,Grief and Emptiness.
The extreme state of life is emptiness.

Bahauddin

Grief is better than happiness, because in grief a person draws close to God. Your wings open. A tent is set up in the desert where God can visit you. Wealth that arrives in grief is what we spend in joy. The soul is greater than anything you ever lost.

Karen Kingsbury

Three years? That's a thousand tomorrows, ma'am.

Katherine Owen

Here’s what I know: death abducts the dying, but grief steals from those left behind.

Sara Sheridan

Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn’t true.


Rebecca McNutt

photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself…

Lemony Snicket

It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine it.

Maria V. Snyder

Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears. An ember still smolders inside me. Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.

Richard Adams

My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.

Veronica Roth

I keep finding myself stifled by the company of others and then crippled by loneliness when I leave them. I am terrified and I don't even know of what, because I have lost everything already.

Neil Gaiman

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.

Meghan O'Rourke

Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

Gwenn Wright

How many times can a heart be shattered and still be pieced back together? How many times before the damage is irreparable?

Francine Prose

I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was reproof. Shouldn't I feel better than I had in the dead of night.

C.S. Lewis

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.

Roland Barthes

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

Robert Goolrick

I know that it's easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.

Lang Leav

Saving You

The darkness takes him over,
the sickness pulls him in;
his eyes - a blown out candle,
I wish to go with him.

Sometimes I see a flicker -
a light that shone from them;
I hold him to me tightly,
before he's gone again.

Sherman Alexie

When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.

Rosamund Lupton

Grief is love turned into an eternal missing

Elizabeth Wein

Oh Julie, wouldn’t I know if you were dead? Wouldn’t I feel it happening, like a jolt of electricity to my heart?

Victoria Hanley

I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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.

John Corey Whaley

Not only had my brother disappeared, but-and bear with me here-a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.

Philip K. Dick

The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?

Kristina McMorris

It’s odd, isn’t it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it’s a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you’re not alone.

Nina LaCour

He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me
He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much.

Mary Karr

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

Kellie Elmore

...what happens when you return
and find nothing
but a hollowed shell,
shingles and floor,
walls and echoes
and the light that lead you here
has now burned out
and the ones who built it
have traveled afar
and you cant go to them,
no matter what shoes you wear.

Franz Wright

I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)

C.S. Lewis

They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?

William Shakespeare

This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so, it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

And thus we all are nighing
The truth we fear to know:
Death will end our crying
For friends that come and go.

Joan Abelove

Everyone was eating, talking softly, glancing at me, hugging me, eating. It was as if someone had turned the volume down. Everything looked normal, but the sound was muted. Death did this, set all this weirdness in motion, made people appear out of nowhere carrying casseroles, saying 'I'm sorry' over and over, death muffled their voices.

Ann Patchett

Hope is a horrible thing, you know. It's a plague. It's like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and someone just keep pulling it and pulling it."
STATE OF WONDER

William Shakespeare

Cordelia! stay a little. Ha! What is't thou say'st? Her voice was ever soft.

Kenneth L. Patton

If I could find one word
that would shudder the air
like that frightened sob,
that wordless prayer
of my newly-born,
who drew one breath,
and with unopened eyes
sank back into death;
If I could break the world's cold heart
with that cry,
then this grief would lift
and I could die.

Melina Marchetta

I wish everyone would stop crying, Tom. Uncle Joe would be so angry about it." But she's crying herself now. "He'd be so angry at us, Tom, for crying so much when all he did was laugh.

Lauren Oliver

Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this-the absorption of another, the carrying of it-was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.

Neil Gaiman

Nobody died. how can you kill an idea? How can you kill the personification of an action?"
"Then what died? who are you mourning?"
"A point of view.

Norman Doidge

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. As we work them through, they go from haunting us to becoming simply part of our history. (243)

Carrie Jones

What I have learned lately is that people deal with death in all sorts of ways. Some of us fight against it, doing everything we can to make it not true. Some of us lose our selves to grief. Some of us lose ourselves to anger.

C.S. Lewis

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.

Meghan O'Rourke

Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.

Neil Gaiman

Just remember, what the French say. No, probably not the French, they've got a president or something. The Brits, maybe, or the Swedes. You know what I mean?"

"No, Matthew. What do they say?"

"The king is dead, that's what they say. The king is dead. Long live the king.

Rosie Thomas

I've grieved enough for his life cut short and for mine for running on for so long with so little in it. It's weakness now, but I suppose I am crying out of a general sense of loss. Maybe I am mourning for the human condition.

Patricia Briggs

I don't say goodbye very easily, Anna. Not gracefully or prettily.Goodbye tears your heart out and leaves it a feast for carrion birds who happen by.

Kathleen Jeffrie Johnson

Conner hadn’t liked leaving the gravesite with his father still not buried. But he’d learned from his grandmother’s funeral that you have to go. It’s expected. Nobody hangs around the cemetary. Grief - a little or a lot - is tucked into your pocket and carried away.

Vicki Harrison

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.

Kristina McBride

What if it's as simple as one moment? One tiny thing, like that kiss on the rocks? What if I'd kissed him a little longer? Would he be alive right now? Or what if I'd stayed with him Friday night, what if I'd been with him… wherever he was?

C.S. Lewis

Once very near the end I said, 'If you can - if it is allowed - come to me when I too am on my death bed.' 'Allowed!' she said. 'Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I'd break it into bits.

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