Grief Quotes

111 Grief Quotes

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[On losing his sweetheart of 60 years and wife of 53. But went on to live another 25 years.] I almost died from grief.
John Wooden

The solutions he [Dr Martin Luther King Jr] offered can still save our society from self-destruction. I hope that it will be seen as a testament, and that the grief that followed his death will be transmuted to a universal determination to realize the economic and social justice for which he so willingly gave his life.
Coretta Scott King

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
George Eliot

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
Kahlil Gibran

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.
Lemony Snicket

And remember, it's also very funny, because side by side with grief lies joy.
Fran Drescher

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.
From a headstone in Ireland

Tears are the silent language of grief.
Voltaire

You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.
Jan Glidwell

While we are mourning the loss of our friend, others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil.
John Taylor



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.
Colette

One joy shatters a hundred griefs.
Chinese Proverb

As long as I can I will look at this world for both of us. As long as I can I will laugh with the birds, I will sing with the flowers, I will pray to the stars, for both of us.
Sascha

During my grief, I realised there was nothing I could do for my mother, but I did have a child.
Namie Amuro

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Kahlil Gibran

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.
Christian Nevell Bovee

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
Kenji Miyazawa

There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.
Jodi Picoult

Every night when I go to bed, I hope that I may never wake again, and every morning renews my grief.
Franz Schubert

Sorrow you can hold, however desolating, if nobody speaks to you. If they speak, you break down.
Bede Jarrett



The pain passes, but the beauty remains.
Pierre Auguste Renoir

There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.
Henry Wadsworth

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.
John Green

Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.
Xenophon

Grief makes one hour ten.
William Shakespeare

Grieving is a necessary passage and a difficult transition to finally letting go of sorrow - it is not a permanent rest stop.
Dodinsky

You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.
Old Chinese Proverb

Tears have a wisdom all their own. They come when a person has relaxed enough to let go and to work through his sorrow. They are the natural bleeding of an emotional wound, carrying the poison out of the system. Here lies the road to recovery.
F Alexander Magoun

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

For pleasures past I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear.
Lord Byron



Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.
William Shakespeare

The caterpillar dies so the butterfly could be born. And, yet, the caterpillar lives in the butterfly and they are but one. So, when I die, it will be that I have been transformed from the caterpillar of earth to the butterfly of the universe.
John Harricharan

To weep is to make less the depth of grief.
William Shakespeare

Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief.
William Faulkner

Man, when he does not grieve, hardly exists.
Antonio Porchia

I'm Gone now, but I'm still very near. Death can never separate us. Each time you feel a gentle breeze, It's my hand caressing your face. Each time the wind blows, It carries my voice whispering your name. When the wind blows your hair ever so slightly, Think of it as me pushing a few stray hairs back in place. When you feel a few raindrops fall on your face, It's me placing soft kisses. At night look up in the sky and see the stars shining so brightly. I'm one of those stars and I'm winking at you and smiling with delight. For never forget you're the apple of my eye.
Mary M Green

Mourning is one of the most profound human experiences that it is possible to have... The deep capacity to weep for the loss of a loved one and to continue to treasure the memory of that loss is one of our noblest human traits.
Shneidman

Grief can destroy you --or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn't allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it's over and you're alone, you begin to see that it wasn't just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can't get off your knees for a long time, you're driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.
Dean Koontz

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Even hundredfold grief is divisible by love.
Terri Guillemets



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