Grief Quotes

You can't tell that the coffin holds the body of a boy.He wasn't even sixteen but his coffin's the same size as a man's would be.It's not just that he was young, but because it was so sudden. No one should die the way he did; that's what the faces here say.I think about him, in there, with all that space, and I want to stop them. I want to open the box and climb in with him. To wrap him up in a duvet. I can't bear the thought of him being cold.And all the time the same question flails around my head, like a hawkmoth round a light-bulb: Is it possible to keep loving somebody when they kill someone you love?

~ C.j. Flood

Most kids grow sullen and angry when they’re working through issues, but Thanet mustered up another kind of bull-headed strength. The kind that sees beyond circumstances to what really matters. How could anyone hurt a soul that lovely?

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Every moment of our lives we make choices. Most we don’t even know we’re making, they’re so dull or routine or automatic. Some are beyond explanation—like my mom choosing Wyatt’s memory over Dad and me.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Pruned my subconscious. Discovered new shoots.

~ Sally Jo Martine

He felt split in two, one crazy man eating hair and one rational man watching a crazy man eat hair. He chewed and swallowed the last pieces of his father's life. He felt like he was building a museum of pain, a freak show, where he was the only visitor viewing the only mutant screaming the only prayer he knew: Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back Daddy...

~ Sherman Alexie

Wyatt told me once that if tenderness were a disease, I’d be terminal.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Hearing my brother’s words coming out of Henry, this stranger in a strange town, made me feel wild with all the loss—wild and wired with no place to put those feelings.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

I had had my night of weeping...I had purged myself of useless emotions that terrible night, now every nerve every sinew, every thought was bent on a single purpose

~ Elizabeth Peters

The ice cold fear I’d felt, not knowing if Wyatt was alive, pressed into the wall with other girls and surrounded by guys who were unspeakably brave, hit my body again in a wave. This was trauma—the gift that keeps on giving.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Book-club night stopped abruptly when Caleb died. For almost a year and a half, as if by some type of tacit agreement, they all knew they couldn’t be in the same room at the same time. It was as if their collective grief would multiply, rebounding endlessly within any closed space like an image in a house of mirrors, until the pain would overcome them all.

~ Francis Guenette

We bumped into other silent lines of kids going in the same direction. We looked like we were much younger and our lines were headed to the cafeteria or recess or the carpool line. Or it could’ve been a fire drill. Except for the stone-faced police officers weaving between us with rifles.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

It was the first time I discovered that some girls actually sneak out of the house during slumber parties and meet up with boys. I would’ve never known if I hadn’t gone to the bathroom at midnight and caught Macy and Adrienne climbing through the bathroom window. They had on eyeliner, perfume, and cut-off shorts. Their only goodbye a glare that promised retribution if I didn’t keep my mouth shut.

~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Experience teaches that the fire of mental grief is intensified by being confined to its own hearth.

~ Fr James Groenings

It was the first time in years I didn’t wonder if my father was out there, looking at it too.

~ Ally Carter

You know, through pain, you learn a lot about yourself--things you thought you never knew you wanted to learn. And it's kind of like those animals that regrow a part of their body--like a starfish. You might not feel it. You might not even want to grow, but you will. You'll grow that part that broke off, and that growing, that blooming--cannot happen without the pain.

~ Kelle Hampton

(...) and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death was Augustus Water.

~ John Green

There is a point when the anguished soul finally despairs. A moment in life when the heart, the will, even the spirit crumbles. Some say that after much grief and drowning in tears, it is possible to pick up the pieces and carefully repair what was shatt

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Will my eyes adjust to this darkness? Will I find you in the dark – not in the streaks of light which remain, but in the darkness? Has anyone ever found you there? Did they love what they saw? Did they see love? And are there songs for singing when the light has gone dim? Or in the dark, is it best to wait in silence?Noon has darkened. As fast as they could say, ‘He’s dead,’ the light dimmed. And where are you in the darkness? I learned to spy you in the light. Here in this darkness, I cannot find you. If I had never looked for you, or looked but never found, I would not feel this pain of your absence. Or is not your absence in which I dwell, but your elusive troubling presence?It’s the neverness that is so painful. Never again to be here with us – never to sit with us at the table…. All the rest of our lives we must live without him. Only our death can stop the pain of his death.

~ Nicholas Wolterstorff

...there's the suffering from love and the suffering from grief - either pain permanently scars the soul...

~ John Geddes

I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

~ Lauren Oliver

...you must never partly love or stop half way - because then, you become superficial and cannot be deeply hurt or loved...

~ John Geddes

The death of loved ones often awakens the death inside of us.

~ Sandra Chami Kassis

Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this double light, has seen nothing, and knows noting of the truth.

~ Victor Hugo

Why are the photographs of him as a little boy so incredibly hard to look at? Something is over. Now instead of those shiny moments being things we can share together in delighted memories, I, the survivor, have to bear them alone. So it is with all the memories of him. They all lead into blackness. All I can do is remember him, I cannot experience him. Nothing new can happen between us.

~ Nicholas Wolterstorff

...beneath torrents of spring rain, buds come to life - and we do too, beneath torments of tears...

~ John Geddes

May the beauty of the flowers remind us of the beauty of our loved one's spirit

~ Steve Butler

...all winter the acorns and red Maple leaf moldered in silence - in the same way grief is gnawing at me - slowly, imperceptibly... consuming...

~ John Geddes

...it is love, imperfect and unordered, that keeps them apart, even as it holds them somehow together...

~ Judith Guest

Shhh, Eena, it’s going to be okay. I promise, you’ll get through this.” She didn’t fight him, but grabbed onto his shirt, weeping softly into it as before. He began to hum faintly, a familiar Earth tune. Soon he was singing the words in that deep, consoling voice of his. The song itself was meant to be comforting, and his tender manner made it that much more effectual. Eena recognized the song. She fell asleep to the soothing l

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

For the human memory is short, and even when we write it in stone we quickly forget and the stones crumble and even those stones then forget.

~ Stant Litore

Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

~ C.s. Lewis

Whatever he goes through, I feel. Whatever I go through, he feels. It’s what happens when two people become one: they no longer only share love. They also share all of the pain, heartache, sorrow, and grief.

~ Colleen Hoover

Don't lick your wounds unless you care to taste the sting a second time.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

My life has become a dismal sigh fettered by pangs of grief and anguished weeping.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I wish I believed him. He's looking at me like he can see where I begin.

~ Amy Mcnamara

I have discovered that sitting still leaves little spaces for the grief to get in, so I stay busy.

~ Veronica Roth

My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.

~ Cheryl Strayed

My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was pain no words can render.

~ Charlotte Brontë

An explosion in space makes no sound at all.

~ Rosamund Lupton

When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is 'acquainted with Grief', we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.

~ Emily Dickinson