Quotes & Sayings About Loss And Grief

It was like that. Sometimes I'd go for a period - days or weeks - without feeling the full sweep of my loss, and then as unexpected as a thunderclap, the realization would rip the protective coating from my senses. Maybe that's the way it is with trick knees and aging griefs. Totally pain free one moment and absorbingly painful the next. — Bette Greene

There's no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left. — Johnny Cash

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. — Sara Sheridan

Please don't tell me, it was less painful than a broken backbone, a forgotten poem, a lost home. — Khadija Rupa

The risk of love is loss and the price of loss is grief. But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love — Hilary Stanton Zunin

If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild. — C.S. Lewis

Loss has no friend, no allies, no benefit to the human spirit. — Asa Don Brown

A bulging portfolio of spiritual experiences matters little if it does not have the power to sustain us through the inevitable moments of grief, loss, and change. Knowledge and achievements matter little if we do not yet know how to touch the heart of another and be touched. Wisdom is alive only as long as it is lived, understanding is liberating only as long as it is applied. — Jack Kornfield

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. — Sarah Ockler

Grief is part of my human experience. There will always be loss during my lifetime. Loss has come in a variety of forms to me - such as death, divorce, losing a job, and selling a beloved home. Each event brought me new opportunities and experiences that would not have been possible otherwise. — Lisa J. Shultz

Molly, a home is not a place. It's not a country or a town or a building or possession. Home is with the other half of your soul, the person who shares your grief and helps you carry the burden of loss. Home is with the person who throughout it all never gives up on you and brings you eternal happiness. That, Molly dear, is your home sweet home. — Tillie Cole

If you can just trust Him enough to bring it to Him, He will rejoice in your masterpiece. And if you need to scream a little, know that you have a God who can take that too, as long as your face is tilted (even slightly) toward Him — Angie Smith

She felt the depth of her losses before they were realized, and she wondered, Is there still hope? Did she even dare hold on to such a tenuous thing as hope? — Sage Steadman

And in just this way the days after my father's death became weeks became months in the familiar ceaseless cruelty of time, carrying us ever forward even when we sit still. Time does not pass, pain grows. (p.223) — Niall Williams

As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable. — Rosanne Cash

One I love is taken from me, we will never walk together over the fields of earth, never hear the birds in the morning. Oh, how I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone away. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all my days. — Victoria Hanley

Perhaps that's what she caught, not Life Fatigue but just grief over a broken heart--and the bitterness that comes with being cheated too early of something true--like a young husband's love. — Joseph G. Peterson

We have trauma, and we have grief. People die, and we find it baffling. Painful. Inexplicable. Grief is baffling. There are theories on how we react to loss and death, how we cope, how we handle loss. Some believe the range of emotions mourners experience is predictable, that grief can be monitored, as if mourners are following a checklist. But sorrow is less of a checklist, more like water. It's fluid, it has no set shape, never disappears, never ends. It doesn't go away. It just changes. It changes us. — Mira Ptacin

Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice- we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs. — Yann Martel

I used to feel afraid of the future, always assuming the worst. But now I've realized that my worst fears have already happened, and I've survived them! I've walked into the fire and made it out alive. Only the loss of a close loved one could have "woken me up" to reality in the same way. — Elizabeth Berrien

His absence seemed a solid thing, a burden I must carry in addition to my grief ... Yet I knew I would continue to live. Sometimes that knowledge seemed the worst part of my loss. — Robin Hobb

I believe there is no heaven or hell. There are no devils or angels. No afterlife or salvation. My soul won't be incarnated or lost in the oblivion. One day, I will just stop existing ... and that's it! — Bhavya Kaushik

Hope lives. No matter the mistakes we make, no matter our blunders and misunderstandings, no matter the grief and sorrow and loss, no matter how deep the darkness, hope lives. — Margaret Weis

'Cinderella' touches on loss, and there was definitely a strong sense of grief in my life. — Lily James

The train blows through town
delivering reality,
slapping my face and screaming,
"You are alone"
Rose colored memories drown,
taking their last breath. — Kellie Elmore

God is a creation of human brain — Durgesh Satpathy

Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life. — Caitlin Kittredge

And if this disenchanted vision were elevated to the status of being the only legitimate vision of the nature of the cosmos upheld by an entire civilization, what an incalculable loss, an impoverishment, a tragic deformation, a grief, would ultimately be suffered by both knower and known.
— Richard Tarnas

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. — Kenneth L. Patton

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you. — Kellie Elmore

We need to go first because we cannot live without your love and care. If we lived longer than you, we would not and could not survive. It's supposed to be this way. We also need to cross the Rainbow Bridge before you do so that we can be on the other side to greet you when you get there. We wait at home for you here and we wait at Home for you there. It's just the way it is. — Kate McGahan

You have to do what feels right for you. Do not let anyone influence you otherwise. It is your mind, your heart, and your own internal wisdom that will lead you in the direction you need to go. — Elizabeth Berrien

I began to feel that nature itself was nurturing me, reminding me that life still offered beauty and calm, and that I was also made out of these elements. — Elizabeth Berrien

I think, therefore I am. My fingers that caress these rose and frangipani petals are a result of my thoughts. I feel content, tender. I feel entranced, ecstatic and besotted by the fragrance of the flowers and this is because of my thoughts. — Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

My experience has been that grief and loss do not necessarily become more acceptable with time, and commitment to them is of no value to either the living or the dead. — James Lee Burke

What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory. — George Saunders

You will live in me always. Your words, your heart, your soul are all part of me. My heart is full of your memories. Thank you for the gift of your life. I will never forget you. — Amy Eldon

Why do we as humans always tend to remember the worse things about people? We may know someone for many years, know them as vibrant and healthy, yet when they fall ill and pass away, we can only picture them at their sickest, as though they were born and lived their whole lives wearing a death mask. — K. Martin Beckner

Kache did not know how to rewind his life, how to undo the one thing that had undone him. His world was indeed flat, and he'd fallen off the edge and landed stretched out on a sofa, on pause, while the television pictures moved and the voices instructed him on everything he needed to know about everything--except how to bring his mom and his dad and Denny back from the dead. — Sere Prince Halverson

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 ... — Rebecca McNutt

I would still rather feel things and live life to the fullest rather than hide in a cave and attempt to protect myself from the uncertainties of the world. — Elizabeth Berrien

Oh, I'm not worried about him,' returned Bill. 'He's gone. It's not any more complicated than that. Honestly, if I admit it, it's me that I feel bad for.' He walked away from me and looked out toward the south. 'There's nothing like having a parent die to make you realize how alone you are in the world,' he added. — Hope Jahren

It was only one man who had gone, but it felt like forever, something so permanent and unstoppable that it blasted her. If she were a tree, she would drop all her leaves. — Jenny Downham

When everything looks the same on the outside, yet everything has changed on the inside, we break. We break in half.
This is the duality of loss. — Christina Rasmussen

If there were no life beyond this earth-life, some people I have known would gain immortality by the nobility of our memory of them. With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution of happiness, strength, and understanding to my being remains to sustain me in an altered world. — Helen Keller

In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn't. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say "I'm sorry" to, "I didn't mean it" to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.
It was only remembering the good times that kept you from taking the knife from the kitchen drawer and, holding it so, tightly in your fist, on the bed, naked to no purpose except that that was how you came into the world and how your best moments in the world had been spent
holding it so, roll onto the blade, slowly so that it slid like love between your ribs and into that stupidly pumping muscle in your chest that kept you regretting. — Joseph Hansen

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

Help me to understand, what my grief has prevented me from seeing - within. — Eleesha

I missed my one true friend, my mother. She and I were close in a way I don't think many other mothers and daughters were. I slept beside her every night of my childhood: so near to her back, I could probably sketch the constellation of moles and freckles on her skin there. When I was a very little girl, every morning I would wake before her and arrange myself so that when she woke, we were eye-to-eye. I miss her, with a never-ending ache that I did not think was possible, that crowds out any other feeling and certainly all reason, and any good sense. — Kaitlyn Greenidge

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. — Mary Karr

I have been through the stages of disbelief and shock, to anger and ultimately grief over the loss of the family I so badly wanted for my children. — Elin Nordegren

Grief is not a one-time thing for people with chronic health problems. Just like people grieving the loss of a loved one find the sadness washes over them at holidays or family events or even unexpected everyday moments, we who are grieving the loss of ourselves, or our former lives, will find the feelings come at random - when someone mentions an activity we used to love, or even something as simple as spilling a glass of milk, or not being able to find our keys. It doesn't mean you're a failure. It means you're human. And it's okay. Then — Kimberly Rae

Grief is real because loss is real. Each grief has its own imprint, as distinctive and as unique as the person we lost. The pain of loss is so intense, so heartbreaking, because in loving we deeply connect with another human being, and grief is the reflection of the connection that has been lost. We think we want to avoid the grief, but really it is the pain of the loss we want to avoid. Grief is the healing process that ultimately brings us comfort in our pain. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

I look. There it is. I feel it. The insistent pull to the heart that the hawk brings, that very old longing of mine to possess the hawk's eye. To live the safe and solitary life; to look down on the world from a height and keep it there. To be the watcher; invulnerable, detached, complete. My eyes fill with water. Here I am, I think. And I do not think I am safe. — Helen Macdonald

During that time, The Mouth came by to pray with us, and my dad began to spend his evenings sitting in the yellow lawn chair and staring at the highway, or down in the basement with his isotope material, finding comfort in the stability that's created from decay. — Miriam Toews

And then came a time when I could no longer say 'We,' and I found myself in a lonesome land where no one remembered that I had ever been young, or called me by my given name. — Candace Wheeler

Ethel and Frances found a means for consolation together: travel. — Nancy Carpentier Brown

That evening I sat across from Jeremy Bulloch and Jacob at the dinner table. I watched as Jeremy, who seemed to speak Jacob's silent language fluently, drummed his fingers up and down on the edge of the table, as if playing a piano. A delighted Jacob mimicked the actor's actions. My throat filled with tears. I met Ben's eyes across the table, where he sat straight with pride next to his son. He was enjoying the show just as much as I was. Jacob was in his element, interacting with an actor from his favorite movie. The other men at the table were part of the set: Mike, the owner of the comic book store, who had made the entire thing possible, and the Mandalorin Mercs, new friends of the little boy who had
become one of their own, a comrade in distress. — Mary Potter Kenyon

I felt my aloneness like a coat. You think you get used to death in the dying. But after the dying is done, you see how the end is the beginning. — Elizabeth Berg

For a moment they still lived and I experienced their deaths as a fresh loss with each waking, so that I was unsure whether I was a man waking from a dream of death or a dreamer entering a world of loss, a man dreaming of unhappiness or a man waking to grief. — John Connolly

When the years have all passed, there will gape the uncomfortable and unpredictable dark void of death, and into this I shall at last fall headlong, down and down and down, and the prospect of that fall, that uprooting, that rending apart of body and spirit, that taking off into so blank an unknown, drowns me in mortal fear and mortal grief. After all, life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and of love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again. — Rose Macaulay

The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The intensity of my grief hits the mountains across Eclipse Sound, and then echoes throughout Arctic. There's nobody around. I can barely see the town below the hill, nestled within the valley of barren tundra, across from the tiny airport, my only access to the south. I'm alone amidst this desolate landscape and there's nowhere to hide. No trees or buildings or distractions. It's just me in the depths of my suffering and all my faults and mistakes of the past are exposed underneath the spotlight of the midnight sun. — Shannon Mullen

But in a home where grief is fresh and patience has long worn thin, making it through another day is often heroic in itself. — Melanie Bennett

He went through the old motions of his life, taking care of what needed caring for, keeping mostly quiet about what was on his mind. But his hard waiting changed him; you could see it in his face. — Wendell Berry

Sarah, though, was still sometimes ruled by stark pain, lost to everything else. Grief slipped away, only to attack from behind. It changed shape endlessly. It lacerated her, numbed her, stalked her, startled her, caught her by the throat. It deceived her eye with glimpses of Charles, her ear with the sound of his voice. She would turn and turn, expecting him, and find him gone. Again. Each time Sarah escaped her sorrow, forgetful amid other things, she lost him anew the instant she remembered he was gone. — Kate Maloy

I guess I always thought it would be bigger, when a terrible thing happened. Didn't you think so? Doesn't it seem like houses ought to be caving in, and lightning and thunder, and people tearing their hair in the street? I never - I never thought it would be this small, did you? — Dan Chaon

Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength. — Oivd

When tragedy comes like this, at first it is complete. You do not need to think it over, or decide what it means. For it is far ahead of you, and the very act of acknowledging it means letting it go. But then it comes round again - and it goes through you and is worse than before. — Benjamin Lytal

It feels weird, being out in the real world again. Around people just living their lives like normal. Their presence is oppressive. The very fact that the world is going on as usual, like nothing ever happened, makes me want to scream. I know it's irrational to expect everything to grind to a halt because of June, but still. A wave of anxiety builds in my chest, my head pounding so loud it drowns out the noise of people talking and tapping away on their laptops. — Hannah Harrington

Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to the other drivers, to the unwidowed. — Julian Barnes

I've been moving a little to the music while I worked ... and then I realize I am actually dancing. It feels wonderful, though I can feel how stiff my muscles are, how rigidly I've been holding myself ... Mostly I've been moving cautiously, numbly, steeled because I know, at any moment, I may be ambushed by overwhelming grief. You never know when it's coming, the word or gesture or bit of memory that dissolved you entirely ... It happens every day at first, then not for a day or two, then there's a week when grief washes in every morning, every afternoon. — Mark Doty

The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious. — Francine Prose

writing is a sanity-saving companion for people in times of grief, loss, illness, and other accidents of fate. — William Zinsser

Her mother's quiet disapproval and withdrawal was a death in itself, and Franckline's despair at it was transmitted, she was sure of it, to the child. She transgressed twice, first by making the child, then by giving it her despair, the despair that left it unable to live. — Pamela Erens

The loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools ... It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction. — Meghan O'Rourke

Whoever wrote Shakespeare is a working class hero be he an aristocrat or a peasant. Shakespeare is a great leveler. We're presented with kings, queens, emperors and giants who feel the same things as everyone else: jealousy, love, anger, bitterness, grief, loss. — Rhys Ifans

But that's just it; I can either focus on what I have lost, or what I have gained, and I choose the latter. — Angie Smith

Maybe the thing that we're losing is the very thing that has caused us to lose everything else in the first place. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

There's a secret to get through loss, pain and grief. If we're alone we can't see who we are. When we join the club, other people become the mirror. Through them, we see ourselves and gain an understanding of what we're going through. Then slowly, real slowly, we learn to accept who we see in the mirror. Then you become the mirror for them; by being honest about who you are, you'll help them learn to love and accept themselves. — Melody Beattie

Wracking sobs rip from the innermost chamber of my heart, and I give into them, allowing them to fully take over. Pain lances me on all sides, and I bury my head in my knees, giving in to the heartache.
I cry for my parents.
For my lost life.
For the threat that Addison poses, scaring me in ways it shouldn't.
For a boy I can't have and shouldn't want.
For the never-ending gut-wrenching hollow ache in my chest and the soul-crushing loneliness I feel. — Siobhan Davis

I'm convinced that the world, more than ever, needs the music only you can make. And if it takes extra courage to keep playing in spite of your loss, many will applaud the effort. And who knows? Others may be inspired to pick up their broken instruments, their broken lives, and begin again. — Steve Goodier

She did it, she told herself, not just for the riches her exploits brought her, not just to satisfy that itch lurking at the heart of her. Some of her visitors were good souls driven half-ma with grief for deceased wives. She helped to ease their loss. The rest of her clients were driven by darker compulsions, and the decor in some of the rooms she passed reflected their tastes. In those cases, she helped the women - far lass qualified then she - who would quench those desires, willingly or unwillingly, should she choose not to make this her task. — Stephen Lloyd Jones

I must exist in shadows, while you live under exquisitely blue skies, and yet I don't hate you for the freedom that you take for granted-although I do envy you.
I don't hate you because, after all, you are human, too, and therefore have limitations of your own. Perhaps you are homely, slow-witted or too smart for your own good, deaf or mute or blind, by nature given to despair or to self-hatred, or perhaps you are unusually fearful of Death himself. We all have burdens. On the other hand, if you are better-looking and smarter than I am, blessed with five sharp senses, even more optimistic than I am, with plenty of self-esteem, and if you also share my refusal to be humbled by the Reaper ... well, then I could almost hate you if I didn't know that, like all of us in this imperfect world, you also have a haunted heart and a mind troubled by grief, by loss, by longing. — Dean Koontz

She put her head in her hands and began to cry softly. He felt confused and bitterly unhappy. A part of him wanted to go to her, to hold and comfort her, but he wasn't prepared to be pushed away in cold anger all over again. He waited in his chair and felt the room expand until there was an emptiness the size of the desert between them. — Michelle Frost

He wanted to scream at his parents, to hit them, to elicit from them something - some melting into grief, some loss of composure, some recognition that something large had happened, that in Hemming's death they had lost something vital and necessary to their lives. He didn't care if they really felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn't see them without aching for them. — Hanya Yanagihara

For my part I have no joy in tears after dinnertime. There will always be a new dawn tomorrow. Yet I can have no objection to tears for any mortal who dies and goes to his destiny. And this is the only consolation we wretched mortals can give, to cut our hair and let the tears roll down our faces. — Homer

Grief is ever proud. — L.M. Montgomery

Somehow, grief had seemed easier to bear when the skies were dark and a cold wind kept cats and prey inside their nests. — Erin Hunter

He lives vividly in her recollections, however, and his memory is etched on her soul. — Dean Koontz

Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often - will it be for always? - how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, 'I never realized my loss till this moment'? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again. They — C.S. Lewis

However much grief I carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It's only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once. — Mark Doty

Time is pulling us apart. With every second that passes, the space between us widens. Today, I saw him yesterday. In a few days, it will have been last week. Then, last month. And there is nothing I can do to keep time from wedging more of itself between us. It is inevitable. - Miles — Will Kostakis

A master of origami said he tried to express with paper the joy of life, and the last thought before a man dies. — Tor Udall

Remember to view yourself and your humanness with a kind heart. — Elizabeth Berrien

I loved her. I did not know what state of mind I would be in when I got where I was going and I was most worried that in the process I might forget her. I did not ever want to forget her! I held the image of her in my mind so strongly and the eternal love for her so deep within my heart that it could never ever be erased, no matter what. My love for her was stronger than anything that could happen to me. — Kate McGahan

Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn't have to pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I'd lived and seen and known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real. — Sue Monk Kidd

My grief journey is my own. Others may walk it with me, but no one can walk it for me. — Danny L. Deaube

I was so incredibly nostalgic for a life I knew I'd never, ever have again. — Paige Harbison

I know it is difficult to believe in your own courage or fortitude when everything inside of you feels weak and shattered. But do not believe what you feel. You will not be easily broken. — Rachel L. Schade