Grief Quotes

In the grief that comes with recognizing what happened to us, we often feel there is nowhere to turn for solace…We do things to keep it away, such as becoming overly busy or using drugs or alcohol to numb our feelings. When we are caught up in resistance, we do not feel hope, but when we surrender to our sadness fully, hope trickles in.

~ Maureen Brady

We are the voices in the shadows,Between the light and shade,Betwixt life and restful death,In the dark periphery of the unseen.We’re here, At the edges. We are the villainous punished,The innocent murdered or abandoned,Our lives ended by foul means, or unspeakable deeds.We are your lovers long gone; your siblings forsaken.Can you hear us?At the edgesFrom the Foreword of Cautionary Tales - by Emmanuelle de Maupassant

~ Emmanuelle De Maupassant

Now in the thriving season of lovewhen the bud relents into flower,your love turned absence has turned once more,and if my comforts fall soft as rainon her flutters, it is becauselove grows by what it remembers of love

~ Lisel Mueller

Maybe there is no one way to deal with grief, but knowing that we're not totally alone is the best we can do.

~ Ann Benjamin

He could offer only withness, but nothing else was asked.

~ Sara Pennypacker

There werethings, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only hehad lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot--he forgot. The lighthad destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distantshadows.

~ Joseph Conrad

I woke up to an ache in my chest, the smell of chocolate, and the sound of the ghost making a racket in the kitchen. Now, I'm not the sort to dwell on doom and sorrow. Life is too short for that. But I should at least try to describe the ache briefly: It is not the kind that comes from eating tacos too late at night. It's the kind that comes from being left behind. I think my heart is smart enough to know there's a place I should be filling with new memories, new jokes, and wondrous adventures with the one person I loved most of all. But that person is gone now. And so, my heart has a giant hole. I call it The Big Empty.

~ Natalie Lloyd

I recognized exactly where she was—that state where you’re able to hold it together as long as absolutely no one talks to you or touches you with any amount of sympathy.

~ Jen Nadol

I harken to the call of my heart, embracing the depth that flows liquid ambered and animal soft within my cells.The dark abyss of denial has always been a poor mans trade for the guiding light of emotional wisdom.This crust of mortal skin is baptised with tear streaked holy waters. I rise to my heart with an uncommon courage and wade soul deep.Tissue thin ripples of redemption drift across the pain towards my future self, bathing me in hope. I rise and step closer to all that I AM.Kristin Granger

~ Kristin Granger

I harken to the call of my heart, embracing the depth that flows liquid ambered and animal soft within my cells.The dark abyss of denial has always been a poor mans trade for the guiding light of emotional wisdom.This crust of mortal skin is baptised with tear streaked holy waters. I rise to my heart with an uncommon courage and wade soul deep.Tissue thin ripples of redemption drift across the pain towards my future self, bathing me in hope. I rise and step closer to all that I AM.

~ Kristin Granger

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?

~ Joan Didion

I will die kissing your mad cold mouth,embracing the lost bouquet of your body,and searching for the light of your closed eyes

~ Pablo Neruda

Should could no longer feel grief. She was now like a Geiger counter that had been subjected to too much radiation, no longer capable of giving any reaction, noiselessly displaying a reading of zero.

~ Liu Cixin

The mightiest power of death is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people left behind want to stop living, she thinks, without remembering where she heard that.

~ Fredrik Backman

Grief and rage--you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.

~ Anne Carson

The harsh light above them caught her face, and Sean could see what she'd look like when she was much older - a handsome woman, scarred by wisdom she never asked for.

~ Dennis Lehane

The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

~ Jenny Offill

I am not wise enough to know if there is ever purpose in tragedy, if there is ever virtue in resisting it. If it cannot be overcome, then grief has beaten you, and you are right to say so.

~ Dan Groat

If there is something we need more than anything else during grief, it is a friend who stands with us, who doesn’t leave us. Jesus is that friend.

~ Billy Graham

Often it takes that “knife in our heart” to drive us to Him. Our faith, our very lives, depend on God, and when we enter the valley of grief, we need His help or we will never climb another mountain.

~ Billy Graham

When we grieve over someone who has died in Christ, we are sorrowing not for them but for ourselves. Our grief isn’t a sign of weak faith, but of great love.

~ Billy Graham

Grief turns us inward, but compassion turns us outward, and that’s what we need when grief threatens to crush us. The Bible says, “Carry each other’s burdens” [Galatians 6:2 NIV].

~ Billy Graham

Grief which is not dealt with properly can cause us to lose our perspective on life.

~ Billy Graham

Grief comes with many losses. Whatever its cause, grief will come to all of us.

~ Billy Graham

But grief changes. It softens, adapts its shape to become a part of you. That kind of sorrow never gets any lighter, but you grow accustomed to the weight as you carry it on.

~ Claudia Gray

To all the motherless daughters out there; may your heartache serve you in the best of ways. May your grief give you a better understanding of yourself, may your sentiment allow you to express and create, and may your love expand beyond what you ever thought possible.

~ Kayko Tamaki

True sorrows do not pass like clouds or inclement weather...Sorrows are absorbed over time, and you reshape yourself around them. How you absorb them makes you what you are for good or ill. I think the only true and right way is to take our sorrows into us bravely and wholly, knowing they will hurt, and accepting that sometimes pain is unavoidable. It is when grief is suppressed or hidden that it does harm

~ Isobelle Carmody

Mama, I love you and miss you so very much. The absence of of your physical presence propels me further into understanding the spirit. I am inspired to be aware and mindful of everything around me because there-- you exist, always speaking to me and always with me.

~ Kayko Tamaki

Those who do not care, escape the anguish of mourning but never know the delights of love. The meaning of life forever eludes them.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

The old Old winds that blew When chaos was, what do They tell the clattered trees that I Should weep?

~ Adelaide Crapsey

The truth of it was he didn't want her. He wanted Mary Kate with every cell of his body. He missed everything about her. The feel of her sleeping at his side. Her gentle snores. Her soft brown curls tickling his nose enough to wake him from a sound sleep even on nights when he needed it most. Her smile. The smell of her. At odd moments he thought he had heard her laughter, or he'd catch a glimpse of her in the corner of an eye, but all of it was a lie, and every time it happened it was as if someone had ripped a deep wound in his chest. The pain was raw enough to make him want to take a razor to his wrist, but each time he considered acting upon the idea something stopped him, and so, he stumbled on barely alive and wishing for an end. At times he couldn't breathe, couldn't move without wanting to scream.

~ Stina Leicht

I discover, too, that grief is different to different people. Comes in many guises. In shocked silences and closed doors around our village, as people try to shut it out. That a blank face or fleeting smile can hide the worst, most private kind of agony.

~ Debbie Howells

And yet I was filled with grief. In the beginning of all love there is grief, because at that moment you’re closest to the ghost of parting. You know how easily it could all slip away, how easily it could evaporate into eternal, never-to-be-consummated longing.

~ Edeet Ravel

I think that's what people do with the holidays. They wrap it up all neatly with a turkey and clever gifts and lots of eggnog and laugh and laugh, but at the end of the day there are always people missing from the table. And you have to either sit with those empty chairs and laugh, or you can choose not to come to the table at all. I would rather come to the table.

~ Julie Buxbaum

The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death.

~ Téa Obreht

No one has ever held me so tightly. It's a shock to matter this much. It isn't like arms are around me, it's more like a house, as if he has made a house around me. As he did around Tommy.

~ Kelle Groom

My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn't yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly

~ John Darnielle

We don’t have to be on the battlefields of the world to experience strife and conflict. We need only to open our eyes each morning and read the headlines, we need only to turn a keen ear when our phones ring with bad news, we need only to open our hearts to those next door—and maybe even in our own homes—to notice those with grieving hearts.

~ Billy Graham

The facade of grief may be indifference, preoccupation, anger, cheerfulness, or any variety of emotions. But if we try to understand it, we may learn how to cope with it.

~ Billy Graham

I can't recall the sound of your voiceStill, I bring flowers and meet the skyask it to hold me, too.

~ Drew Myron