Grief is one of the toughest things in life.
It can keep going and going for longer than you thought. Reappear again and again after you think you got to be through the worst of it.
If you’re going through grief right now for a loved one, a pet or a situation in your life that didn’t work out then you’ll hopefully find today’s post helpful.
In it I want to share 120 of the most powerful, comforting and relatable grief quotes.
I hope you’ll find something here that can ease some of your pain and help you to heal.
Quotes on Grief and Loss
“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
– Jamie Anderson
“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.”
– Terry Pratchett
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”
– Joan Didion
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”
– C.S. Lewis
“Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.”
– Arthur Golden
“What is grief, if not love persevering?”
– Vision (from the TV-show WandaVision)
“Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.”
– Alphonse de Lamartine
“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
– C.S. Lewis
“Grief is the price we pay for love.”
– Queen Elizabeth II
“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
“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
– John Green
“Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.”
– Jodi Picoult
“Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.”
– Orson Scott Card
“The death of a beloved is an amputation.”
– C.S. Lewis
“People just disappear sometimes. You have to love and appreciate them while they’re near you.”
– Haruki Murakami
“Grief is tremendous, but love is bigger. You are grieving because you loved truly.”
– Cheryl Strayed
“You don’t know who is important to you until you actually lose them.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“Grief and love are conjoined – you don’t get one without the other.”
– Jandy Nelson
“There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.”
– Kristina McMorris
Grief Quotes for Comfort
“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
– Anne Lamott
“Don’t be ashamed to weep; ’tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones are sealed inside to comfort us.”
– Brian Jacques
“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
– A.A. Milne
“There are three needs of the griever: To find the words for the loss, to say the words aloud and to know that the words have been heard.”
– Victoria Alexander
“What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”
– Helen Keller
“There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.”
– José N. Harris
“If there ever comes a day where we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.”
– A.A. Milne
“Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms.”
– Paulo Coelho
“The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.”
– Charles Dickens
“Ain’t no shame in holding on to grief, as long as you make room for other things too.”
– Reginald ‘Bubbles’ Cousins
“We need never be ashamed of our tears.”
– Charles Dickens
“Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.”
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
“In the garden of memory, in the palace of dreams… that is where you and I shall meet.”
– Lewis Carroll
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
– Matthew 5:4
“To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.”
– Thomas Campbell
“God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
– J.M. Barrie
“She was no longer wrestling with grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thought.”
– George Eliot
“Those we love and lose are always connected by heartstrings into infinity.”
– Terri Guillemets
“A great soul serves everyone all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.”
– Maya Angelou
Short Grief Quotes
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
– Rumi
“Grief changes shape, but it never ends.”
– Keanu Reeves
“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”
– C.S. Lewis
“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”
– Pierre Auguste Renoir
“It’s ok to grieve, it’s a form of love.”
– Naval Ravikant
“To weep is to make less the depth of grief.”
– William Shakespeare
“Grief is itself a medicine.”
– William Cowper
“Death is a reminder to live fully.”
– Ram Dass
“The only cure for grief is action.”
– George Henry Lewes
“Life is a blink.”
– Hoda Kotb
“Those who do not weep, do not see.”
– Victor Hugo
“The things which hurt, instruct.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“Make peace with the present moment.”
– Eckhart Tolle
“Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.”
– Christian Nevell Bovee
“Loss is not as bad as wanting more.”
– Lao Tzu
“The greater the love, the greater the grief.”
– C.S. Lewis
“Life and death are a package deal. You cannot pull them apart.”
– Frank Ostaseski
“Bear without murmuring what cannot be changed.”
– Publilius Syrus
“The more violent the storm, the quicker it passes.”
– Paulo Coelho
“Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell.”
– Joni Mitchell
Sad and Relatable Quotes About Grief
“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill.”
– Jojo Moyes
“The worst type of crying wasn’t the kind everyone could see – the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it.”
– Katie McGarry
“You believe you could not live with the pain. Such pain is not lived with. It is only endured. I am sorry.”
– Erin Morgenstern
“How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them.”
– Marcus Aurelius
“It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
– John Steinbeck
“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
“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
– Franz Kafka
“Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face – I know it’s an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.”
– Nicholas Sparks
“It’s hard to explain so much pain.”
– John Lennon
“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.”
– J.K. Rowling
“No one feels another’s grief, no one understands another’s joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.”
– Franz Schubert
“There are times when explanations, no matter how reasonable, just don’t seem to help.”
– Fred Rogers
“All things grow with time, except grief.”
– Jewish Proverb
“Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.”
– Veronica Roth
“Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.”
– William Shakespeare
“Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.”
– Mark Twain
“Here’s what I know: death abducts the dying, but grief steals from those left behind.”
– Katherine Owen
“Grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.”
– George R.R. Martin
Grief Quotes to Uplift
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
– Ludwig Jacobowski
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
– Kahlil Gibran
“Your wounded heart is a very beautiful heart.”
– Fred Rogers
“Life is a balance: grief for what’s lost, gratitude for what remains, and excitement for what’s next.”
– Mark Manson
“‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
– Alfred Lord Tennyson
“This is not the life you pictured but here you are. You can still make something beautiful. Grieve. Breathe. Begin again.”
– Thema Bryant-Davis
“I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.”
– Anne Frank
“When it is darkest, we can see the stars.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”
– Rumi
“Relax. One bad chapter does not mean it’s the end of the book.”
– Paulo Coelho
“The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.”
– Gloria Steinem
“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
– Leo Tolstoy
“It’s an honor to be in grief. It’s an honor to feel that much, to have loved that much.”
– Elizabeth Gilbert
“Death ends a life, not a relationship. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on – in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”
– Mitch Albom
“And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.”
– Maya Angelou
“Given a choice between grief and nothing, I’d choose grief.”
– William Faulkner
“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
“You will survive, and you will find purpose in the chaos. Moving on doesn’t mean letting go.”
– Mary VanHaute
“The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
“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
Grief Quotes to Help You Heal
“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you’ll learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.”
– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
“Be gentle with yourself: You are doing the best you can.”
– Paulo Coelho
“Give yourself space and permission to feel, to grieve, to speak truth, to be speechless, to let go, to hold tightly, to mobilize, to be still, to be where you are. Your process doesn’t have to match anyone else’s in content or in time.”
– Thema Bryant-Davis
“Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.”
– Rumi
“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.”
– Dean Koontz
“We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend.”
– Brené Brown
“Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.”
– Earl Grollman
“Healing comes from letting there be room for everything: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
– Pema Chödrön
“You can’t truly heal from a loss until you allow yourself to really feel the loss.”
– Mandy Hale
“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
– Albert Camus
“To heal a wound, you must stop scratching it.”
– Paulo Coelho
“Our sorrows provide us with the lesson we most need to learn.”
– Lama Surya Das
“We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.”
– Confucius
“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er-wrought heart and bids it break.”
– William Shakespeare
“Whenever sorrow comes, be kind to it. For God has placed a pearl in sorrow’s hand.”
– Rumi
“Your grief path is yours alone, and no one else can walk it, and no one else can understand it.”
– Terri Irwin
“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.”
– Marcel Proust
“The antidote to misery is to stay present.”
– Pema Chödrön
“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment, until it becomes a memory.”
– Dr. Seuss
“His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
Want more helpful and relatable words of wisdom? Then have a look at these quotes about death that will make you think, the inspirational family quotes here and also this one with plenty of positive quotes about life.