Grief Quotes

In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.

~ Mary Renault

Yesterday, she shed tears, keeping her head on my shoulders. And I think she's not going to be fine because I know she won't. Because a couple of years back, I wasn't.And when you know that you've fallen hard on a cold ground and are still lying there, what do you tell others who are taking the fall?You close your eyes. You accept to lie there a little longer. But I lie on my bed now, and it's a little too warm today.

~ Sanhita Baruah

My mom told me once that Wyatt loved her the way a boy will love his mother, but I loved her the way an artist loves another. Jo taught me what that meant.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

I worried I would miss it, and I knew, from losing Wyatt, that things happen the moment the soul is released. Wyatt had been there in the school, watching me, making sure I survived. Souls linger…they do. They linger a bit before they turn toward eternity. It could be that no matter how perfect their future will be, the past still tugs for a moment.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Don't grieve over the past, It's all gone!Don't worry about the future, It may never come! Live in the present, And enjoy every moment.

~ Mouloud Benzadi

The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is. To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need.

~ Dean Koontz

Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can’t change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and the stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future what the past was not.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I knelt in front of life, folded my hands and prayed for some more time; there couldn't be any. My heart bled and so did my tearful eyes.Time, they say, flies, but I saw it slowly passing by taking each of my tardy breaths with it as it walked out of my life...

~ Sanhita Baruah

He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day when God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, - ‘Wait and hope.’ – Your friend, Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo. The eyes of both were fixed on the spot indicated by the sailor, and on the blue-line separating the sky from the Mediterranean Sea, they perceived a large white sail.

~ Alexandre Dumas

Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.

~ C.s. Lewis

[S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)

~ Anne Lamott

I hope that I get to see you love what you are. To know yourself as gift and worth and truth. That you see what a huge thing it is to have the courage to break your own heart. That you have chosen wholeness — even when it has shattered you. And that you will one day see that you can be whole and broken in the exact same spaces, that they nestle side by side — and that this is the way of things. Not your punishment for wrongdoing, or for not trying hard enough — but just the way of things. That you can stand and look at yourself in a mirror and see your goodness right there, see the worth of what you bring on the surface of your skin, just like I do. That you trust there is brilliance to come. That you own what is yours to own, both the bad and the good. That you do not insist on owning it all. It was never all yours to hold

~ Jeanette Leblanc

For a moment we sit in silence. Eventually, I turn to him and say, Do you believe in God? His eyes narrow for a moment and he stares at me at me for a while. Stares in a rather intense way, like a doctor looking at a troubling X-ray. Then he looks out the and says in a voice like shattered glass, Only in storms.

~ Rebecca Sparrow

This heart is a hurricane, turbulent with ache screaming winds of grief waiting to make the skyfall, to pluck the cloudsfrom their beds with itswhipping winds

~ Jack Southfield

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

~ William Shakespeare

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.

~ Sarah Dessen

When grief impounds our thinking and eats our brains, it seeps through all the cracks of our daily living. Only the soothing wind of comforting words may counter the withering twilight and the frostiness of darkness. (All the words he always wanted to tell her.)

~ Erik Pevernagie

The only thing I can recall is that it rained all day and all night, and that when I asked my father whether heaven was crying, he couldn't bring himself to reply. Six years later my mother's absence remained in the air around us, a deafening silence that I had not yet learned to stifle with words.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

In politics no permanent friends, no permanent enemies but permanent interest.

~ Patience Johnson

I am not sad anymore. I am not weak or tender or quiet like you remember because the second you said those words and closed that door, I sold my soul to the part of myself I had buried in order to love you, to let you touch every inch of my rotten body, for I wanted to be touchable and not so strange. Not so sad and tender, like I’ve always been, they say, so I changed. And then your glances and words throwing knives with no return about my change of habits and ways of living, being, and I nodded and smiled, dying silently a little bit inside.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

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

~ Jenim Dibie

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

~ Horace

It wasn't supposed to. It was just supposed to stop you from hurting yourself.” “It helps—” “No it doesn't. It just pushes it away temporarily. Just like the booze.” “But I need—” “You need to let yourself feel. Feel it, own it. Then move on.” “You make it sound so easy.” Bitterness drips from each syllable. “It’s not. It’s the fucking hardest thing a person can do.” I smooth a damp strand out of her face and away from my mouth. “It’s the hardest fucking thing. It’s why we drink and do drugs and fight. It’s why I play music and build engines.

~ Jasinda Wilder

I saw the world in black and white instead of the vibrant colours and shades I knew existed.

~ Katie Mcgarry

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

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance, depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.

~ Andrew Solomon

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,Which finds no natural outlet or relief,In word, or sigh, or tear.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.

~ Victor Hugo

Even extreme grief may ultimately ventitself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy

~ Joseph Conrad

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.Comforter, where, where is your comforting?Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing —Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fallFrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheapMay who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our smallDurance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: allLife death does end and each day dies with sleep.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

~ Flavia Weedn

People think that food cheers you up, that a doughnut cures all ills, but this only works for trivial complaints. When real disaster strikes, food chokes you.

~ Helena Dela

We are all damaged. We have all been hurt. We have all had to learn painful lessons. We are all recovering from some mistake, loss, betrayal, abuse, injustice or misfortune. All of life is a process of recovery that never ends. We each must find ways to accept and move through the pain and to pick ourselves back up. For each pang of grief, depression, doubt or despair there is an inverse toward renewal coming to you in time. Each tragedy is an announcement that some good will indeed come in time. Be patient with yourself.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Listen, Harper. I realize how hard this is for you.A flash of anger heats up in my chest. She doesn't understand. She can't. If she did, she'd leave me alone instead of trying to force me to talk about this.

~ Hannah Harrington

She was tranquil, but it was with the quietness of exhausted grief, not of resignation; and she looked back upon the past, and awaited the future, with a kind of out-breathed despair.

~ Ann Radcliffe

Revenge is often compared to full course dinner meal best served bitter cold, it is the weakest and poorest excuse for any man or woman to use to hurt another because of there own grief

~ Timothy Norr

Poverty, oppression, grief and depression will increase, if a country does not live according to the rules of God.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies? 'Sister Sonja often asked me, as though to understand the depth and breadth of human suffering would be enough to pull me outside of my own.

~ Jacqueline Woodson

It's what the loss uncovers in you that brings on despair, not the loss itself.

~ Nicci French