Quotes about grief-and-loss
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
Life however is teeming with vitality and is likewise terribly tenacious holding on against impossible odds in impossible situations over impossible lengths of time.
Durgesh Satpathy -
God gifted a Zoo with a paralyzed care taker.
Asa Don Brown -
The process of grief and loss is as unique as your personal DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) no two individuals will have the same experiences or relationship to grief.
Siobhan Davis - Finding Kyler
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.
Benjamin Lytal -
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.
Laurie Buchanan - PhD
Birth is not a beginning; it’s a continuation. That lends tremendous comfort because we then understand that, equally true, death is not an end; it’s merely a continuation.
Meg Donohue - Dog Crazy: A Novel of Love Lost and Found
Love is love," I told her, as I tell all of my patients who are ashamed to find themselves shattered by the death of a dog. "Loss is loss.
Jane Austen - Sense and Sensibility
When shall I cease to regret you! – When learn to feel a home elsewhere! – Oh! Happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more! – And you, ye well-known trees! – but you will continue the same. – No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer! – No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any chang
Purba Chakraborty -
It is ludicrous why we human beings try so hard to conceal our tear. We fail to fathom that the more we camouflage our tears, the more we escalate the burden of grief in our heart. It is simple and wise to let the burden of grief metamorphose into tears and flow from our eyes.
Khadija Rupa - Unexpressed Feelings
Please don’t tell me, it was less painful than a broken backbone, a forgotten poem, a lost home.
Leonard Michaels - 1961-1995
Feb. 1, 1965Storm late at night, heavy rain, a thunderous racket, the windows shaking. I heard my name called. A woman’s voice in hell pleading with me to join her.
Anna Seward - Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace
When Death, or adverse Fortune's ruthless gale,Tears our best hopes away, the wounded HeartExhausted, leans on all that can impartThe charm of Sympathy; her mutual wailHow soothing! never can her warm tears failTo balm our bleeding grief's severest smart;Nor wholly vain feign'd Pity's solemn art,Tho' we should penetrate her sable veil.Concern, e'en known to be assum'd, our painsRespecting, kinder welcome far acquiresThan cold Neglect, or Mirth that Grief profanes.Thus each faint Glow-worm of the
Adelaide Crapsey - Verse by Adelaide Crapsey
Reap, reap the grain and gather The sweet grapes from the vine; Our Lord's mother is weeping, She hath nor bread nor wine; She is weeping. The Queen of Heaven, She hath nor bread nor wine.
J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Don't you understand how Cho's feeling at the moment?" [Hermione] asked."No," said Ron and Harry together.Hermione sighed and laid down her quill."Well, obviously, she's feeling very sad, because of Cedric dying. Then I expect she's feeling confused because she liked Cedric and now she likes Harry, and she can't work out who she likes best. Then she'll be feeling guilty, thinking it's an insult to Cedric's memory to be kissing Harry at all, and she'll be worrying about what everyone else might s
Helen Macdonald - H is for Hawk
I held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms. You have to be patient, he had said. If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic. And now, holding the card in my hands and feelin
Charmaine Smith Ladd - Shake Hands with Yourself: A Peacemaker's Guide to Happiness & Inner Peace
We cannot honor those we have lost if we lose our minds. - Charmainism
Kate DiCamillo - Because of Winn-Dixie
But I'm not ready to let Winn-Dixie go.
Linda Kinnamon RN -
You are never old enough to lose your mother.
Daniel Bashford - Normal Extreme
Death finds you in such strange poses. How long can you cry, until the rivers gone and dry.
Carson McCullers -
It was as though his son cheated him by depriving him of his beloved presence, the sweet and treacherous thief had plundered his heart. If Johnny had died in any other way, cancer or leukaemia… he could have grieved with a clear heart, cried also. But suicide seemed a deliberate act of spite which the Judge resented.
Nancy Carpentier Brown -
Ethel and Frances found a means for consolation together: travel.
Tessa Shaffer - Heaven Has No Regrets
You’ve got to trust yourself. Be gentle with yourself. And listen to yourself. You’re the only person who can get you through this now. You’re the only one who can survive your story, the only one who can write your future.All you’ve got to do, when you’re ready, is stand up, {and begin again.}
David Mitchell - Slade House
In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt's sons'd been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, you've got three sons, by Friday you've got none. Lady Albertina had just, y'know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally.
Christopher Dines - The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
Hitting bottom is an inside job — it's something that happens within our consciousness.
Sarah Rayner - One Morning
Isn't she doing this too? Connecting and disconnecting. Facing grief then turning from it. One minute she is caught up in minutiae. Will her feet get sore standing in heels at the church? Have they made enough food? Will the kitten get scared by dozens of strangers in the house? Should she shut him in a room upstairs? The next moment she is weeping uncontrollably, taken over by pain so profound she can barely move. Then there was the salad bowl incident; her own fury scared her. But maybe these
Angie Smith - Mended: Pieces of a Life Made Whole
When you are doing what I've asked you to do, you don't have to worry about getting to the farm. I'll bring you the farmer instead. And when you think you have lost sight of all your sketches, just know that it's okay. I know where the sketches are, what they need to be, and I will never leave you.Let go of the grief and the sorrow. Release the anger and the plans set in stone. Because I hold your sketch in My hand the way Mr. Gentry did in his. I watch and I draw - even when you don't know. I a
Alicia G. Ruggieri - The Fragrance of Geraniums
She thought of the Good Shepherd with His sheep. Of the Man hanging upon the cross. And the understanding bubbled up within her soul: He makes all things new.
Linda Alfiori -
WHE YOU FOCUS ON HEALING AND OVERCOME A TRAGEDY OR CHANGE IN YOUR LIFE, YOU BECOME A SURVIVOR, NOT A VICTIM ANYMORE.
N. Maria Kwami - Secrets of the Bending Grove
But time soon passes. Even the deepest pain eventually loses its edge in the more vivid reality of the present; then, what once was unbearable becomes strangely familiar. And after much familiarity, it assumes the insignificance of just another milestone, ever marking the journey to higher ground.
Laurie Perez - The Look of Amie Martine
Now, what’s stirring in this murky sea of complexity and foolishness is an almost suffocating need to breathe fresh history.
Shannon Drury - Atheist Voices of Minnesota: An Anthology of Personal Stories
At night, my own century-old wooden floors creaked while I dreamed of her, as she looked before radiation destroyed her famously enormous hair and removed all evidence of her addiction to homemade brownies. I woke to clammy sheets and the grim reminder that Liz’s soul was not, in fact, speaking to me from beyond the grave. Rationally, I knew that memory synapses of plump, frizzy Liz were bursting forth from the depths of my brain. Emotionally, I wanted Liz back with me, no matter what her form—b
Jessi Kirby - In Honor
I closed my eyes and listened to the occasional chirps of tiny birds hidden in the trees around us, the bubbling of water over rocks down below, cicadas rattling a chorus off in the distance. All sounds of the world carrying on like it always had. So much could change or be lost, and still, the rest of the world went on like it was nothing. It didn't seem wrong, but it didn't seem right either. I'd gone on today like it was nothing. I'd laughed and felt happy and forgotten for a little while tha
Chris Womersley - Bereft
After all, the girl actually had faith in something, which was more than most people had in these dark times. It was wrong to destroy it.
Jeanette LeBlanc -
The audacity is in the living, not in the choosing. You are fearless enough to keep breathing; in the face of loss and pain and humility and gratitude and gifts and brilliance and confusion. This is the amazing thing. Right or wrong can never be anything but small things in the face of your gigantic, intrepid spirit
Fiona Barton - The Child
People say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. They say that when you been through something terrible ... But it doesn't. It breaks your bones, leaving everything splintered and held together with grubby bandages and yellowing sticky tape. Creaking along the fault lines, Fragile and exhausting to hold together. Sometimes you wish it had killed you.
Melanie Bennett - Learning to Dance in the Rain
But in a home where grief is fresh and patience has long worn thin, making it through another day is often heroic in itself.
Connie Kerbs - and the Miracle of Love
Three, 300, or 3,000 - these are the number of unknown days, a week, a year, or a decade, each far too precious little and yet, poignantly too much at the same time, to see an irrevocably declined loved one languish and suffer. That fear-ridden, irreversible release lingers in the doorway, but hesitates for reasons we don't understand, leaving us to weep with a mixture of angst and gratitude all at the same time. It is finally ushered all the way in, to comfort and carry our loved one to that Be
Connie Kerbs - and the Miracle of Love
Three, 300, or 3,000 - these are the number of unknown hours, days, a week, a year, or a decade, each far too precious little and yet, poignantly too much at the same time, to see an irrevocably declined loved one languish and suffer. That fear-ridden, irreversible release lingers in the doorway, but hesitates for reasons we don't understand, leaving us to weep a special cocktail of tears made of angst and gratitude, permeating us with some of the deepest emotions we will ever know. Finally, the
Simon Van Booy - Everything Beautiful Began After
Your grief is something to be admired – the pain of severance. A scar where something used to be.
Lolah Runda - Hikari Okami: Kitsune Series
Never say you understand someone's pain if you haven't felt the same, because not only would you sound mocking but also ignorant.
Tessa Shaffer - Heaven Has No Regrets
Heaven left a hole in your heart. But it’s up to you to choose if that hole will be filled with pain, anger, and the eternal darkness of loss . . . Or if you will choose to fill it with light and love and have that hole shine out of you like a spotlight into your life, keeping their memory alive . . .{It’s up to you.}
Donna Goddard -
Every wonderful quality "in" someone is waiting to be recognized in all of life's great symphony.
Marianne Williamson - Tears to Triumph: The Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment
How odd that we spend so much time treating the darkness, and so little time seeking the light. The ego loves to glorify itself by self-analysis, yet we do not get rid of darkness by hitting it with a baseball bat. We only get rid of darkness by turning on the light.
Matt Haig - A Boy Called Christmas
To lose someone you love is the very worst thing in the world. It creates an invisible hole that you feel you are falling down and will never end. People you love make the world real and solid and when they suddenly go away forever, nothing feels solid any more.
Sarah Noffke - Awoken
No one ever told me how sorrow traumatizes your heart, making you think it will never beat exactly the same way again. No one ever told me how grief feels like a wet sock in my mouth. One I’m forced to breathe through, thinking that with each breath I’ll come up short and suffocate.
Durgesh Satpathy -
Being in home is like magic moments, in a magic world, among magicians.
Durgesh Satpathy -
God is a creation of human brain
Kelly Wilson - Caskets from Costco
For me, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is like a good friend. A necessary girlfriend, but with chronic PMS. A temperamental – and even volatile – friend who does not play well with others and whom I dearly love. It’s a strange relationship.
Kelly Wilson - Caskets from Costco
We will remember what it was like to lose you, our pain the black background of our electric blue joy. We will remember that there are few answers to our questions; the questions that seem to float into an endless expanse of sky.
Kelly Wilson - Caskets from Costco
I have become conscious of my own “cry face.” My face puckers like the business end of a hot dog except for my mouth, which stretches in a grimace so wide as to accommodate said hotdog horizontally within it. It’s not pretty.
Kelly Wilson - Caskets from Costco
I realized at that moment that depression and I will always be linked, tugging back and forth, like the drunken uncle who still gets invited to the family reunion even though everyone knows he’s going to make a messy scene.
Kelly Wilson - Caskets from Costco
I have attempted for years to make fun of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is a dangerous game. It’s similar to poking fun at the largest, scariest bully at your school and assuming you won’t get beat up.
Asa Don Brown -
The process of grieving any loss is dependent upon your relationship to the person.
Lisa See - Shanghai Girls
In my life, no three miles have been flat and no three days have had sun. I've been brave in the past, but now I'm beyond devastated. My grief is like dense clouds that cannot be dispersed. I can't think beyond the blackness of my clothes and heart.
Seneca - On the Shortness of Life
Sorrowers tend to avoid what they are most fond of and try to give vent to their grief.
Tessa Shaffer - Heaven Has No Regrets
But in all of the sadness, when you’re feeling that your heart is empty, and lacking, You’ve got to remember that grief isn’t the absence of love. Grief is the proof that love is still there.
Tessa Shaffer - Heaven Has No Regrets
Death will paint everything a different shade of remorse. You’ll feel guilty that you’re still breathing. But you can’t stop.You’ll feel guilty for wanting to laugh again. And it will be awful the first time that you do. You’ll feel guilty for just about everything at first.And someday, at some point, you’ll start to feel guilty . . . for forgetting to feel guilty.But of all Heaven’s lessons, guilt isn’t one of them. You don’t need to hold on to it. It doesn’t need to be a practice and it shoul
Judith Butler - Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
It is not as if an 'I' exists independently over here and then simply loses a 'you' over there, especially if the attachment to 'you' is part of what composes who 'I' am. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. Who 'am' I, without you? When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost 'you' only to discover that 'I' have gone missing as well. At
Nathalie Himmelrich - Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple
We do not have control over many thingsin life and deathbut we do have controlover the meaning we give it.
Nathalie Himmelrich - Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple
Never compare your grief.You - and only youwalk your path.
Joan Didion -
Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it.
Amy Poehler -
Someday you will wake up feeling 51 percent happy and slowly, molecule by molecule, you will feel like yourself again.
Ambrose Bierce -
Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs.
Katherine McIntyre - Poisoned Apple
Harsh, bitter laughs exploded from her like shrapnel, and she didn’t care who was cut in the process.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
We lose the understanding that death always begets life of some sort, and that life is always an opportunist, persistently standing ready to build something out of the smoldering ashes and raise something up out of the tangled carnage.
Craig D. Lounsbrough -
There’s something of a restorative quality about spring, where something whispers wild rumors of new beginnings arising from the seemingly dead seeds in our lives. There’s something almost cruel about it all, as if there might be some sort of truth about a new life actually being possible. Yet, maybe it is true.
J. Aleksandr Wootton - Forgetting: impressions from the millennial borderland
Grief is always sudden as winter, no matter how long the autumn.
Jocelyn Murray - Khu: A Tale of Ancient Egypt
There is nothing more painful than the untimely death of someone young and dear to the heart. The harrowing grief surges from a bottomless well of sorrow, drowning the mourner in a torrent of agonizing pain; an exquisite pain that continues to afflict the mourner with heartache and loneliness long after the deceased is buried and gone.
Tessa Hadley - Married Love and Other Stories
I'm really all right, she would think, carefully, lightly, as she pulled the key from the ignition, trying not to examine the sensation too closely or lose it with any sudden movement, as if it were a thin-filmed shiny bubble poised in her chest.
Taylor Jenkins Reid - Interrupted
Sweetheart, I’m telling you, you love someone like that, you love them the right way, and no time would be enough. Doesn’t matter if you had thirty years,” she tells me. “It wouldn’t be enough.
Taylor Jenkins Reid - One True Loves
When you lose someone you love, it's hard to imagine that you'll ever feel better. That, one day, you'll manage to be in a good mood simply because the weather is nice or the barista at the coffee shop on the corner remembered your order. But it does happen. If you're patient and you work at it.
Lynda Cheldelin Fell -
It’s okay to cry. Giving in to the tears is terrifying,like freefalling to earth without a parachute. But it’s vital to our wellbeing as we process the deep anguish.
Lynda Cheldelin Fell -
Just as it is impossible to explain childbirth to a woman who has never given birth, it is impossible to explain child loss to a person who has never lost a child.
Taylor Jenkins Reid - Interrupted
I find myself smiling, finally. I guess I do remember how to do it. You just turn the corners of your mouth up.
Christopher Dines - The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours
The process of recovering from addictiveness happens at a deeper level of consciousness and through feeling our pain without using old addictive fixes. There is no escaping that getting in touch with our original pain is the touchstone to mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
Kelly Wilson - Caskets from Costco
The morning after Jim’s death, as I dried off after my shower, I wondered to what extent, if at all, Jim was…around. Could he be with us, unseen or unsensed by us, but able to observe? Most importantly at this moment, could he possibly see me naked?
Kathleen Fucci -
I am the mother of three children whose birth mother died of cancer when they were young. When I met them, they were ages twelve, ten, and eight, all grieving in very different ways. I have seen first hand the pain and confusion that accompanies childhood loss. But I have also seen the healing that can take place when children begin to understand who Jesus is and how much He loves them. By using our family's personal experience as a foundation, I hope this book will be a refuge for grieving chil
Aleksandra Layland - The Feathered Crown: A Windflower Saga Novella
Grief, as in everything, should be experienced in moderation. There is a time to grieve heavily but then there is a time to set it aside and become happy in life again.
Rachel Joyce - Perfect
Mrs. Sussex said Byron’s loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub: he didn’t want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she’d never been there.
Michael Lee West - American Pie
I was tired of well-meaning folks, telling me it was time I got over being heartbroke. When somebody tells you that, a little bell ought to ding in your mind. Some people don't know grief from garlic grits. There's somethings a body ain't meant to get over. No I'm not suggesting you wallow in sorrow, or let it drag on; no I am just saying it never really goes away. (A death in the family) is like having a pile of rocks dumped in your front yard. Every day you walk out and see them rocks. They're
Michelle Moran - Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution
...we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.
David Mitchell - Slade House
Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.
Marceline Loridan-Ivens - But You Did Not Come Back
To everyone in the foyer reading the lists, or on the sidewalks waving signs and photos of their families who’d disappeared, I said over and over again: “Everyone is dead.” If they insisted, showing me family photos, I’d calmly say: “Were there any children? Not a single child will come back.” I didn’t mince my words, I didn’t try to spare their feelings, I was used to death. I’d become as hard-hearted as the deportees who saw us arrive at Birkenau without saying a single comforting word. Surviv
Ann Benjamin -
Maybe there is no one way to deal with grief, but knowing that we're not totally alone is the best we can do.
Kayko Tamaki -
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.
Wayne Gerard Trotman -
Those who do not care, escape the anguish of mourning but never know the delights of love. The meaning of life forever eludes them.
Stina Leicht - Of Blood and Honey
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 som
Debbie Howells - The Bones of You
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.
Amy Eldon -
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.
Wylie R. Weeks -
Grief, we know where we've been. We know where we want to be.
Wylie R. Weeks -
On grief. We know where we've been. We know where we want to be.
Wylie R. Weeks -
I will always wear this scar. It's called love.
James Patterson -
Do you ever miss it, not being a doctor anymore?" I shook my head, frowned a little. "I really don't. Something delicate and essential broke inside me when Isabella died. It will never be repaired, Kyle, at least I don't think so. I couldn't be a doctor now. I find it hard to believe in healing anymore.
William Shakespeare - Othello
My particular grief Is of so flood-gate and o'erbearing nature That it engluts and swallows other sorrows, And it is still itself.
Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls
The closet bond that we share with our brethren is that of grief. Every community knows sorrow.
Lisa J. Shultz - A Chance to Say Goodbye: Reflections on Losing a Parent
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.
Dee Williams - The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir
Grief makes gravity heavier and air molecules denser, so breathing is accomplished in a shallow, half-hearted way.
Sharon Salzberg - Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection
Grief helps us to relinquish the illusion that the past could be different from what it was.