65 Quotes About Grief, Love, and Life

When someone we love dies, it feels like our world comes crashing down. We are left with a gaping hole in our hearts and an emptiness that can never be filled. The pain of grief can be all-consuming, and it can seem like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. I lost my beloved mother in February of 2022 and it’s been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever gone through in my life.

But grief is a natural part of life, and it is something that we all must go through at one point or another. It is often said that time heals all wounds, but that doesn’t make the journey any easier. Grief is a process, and it takes time to work through it. There are ups and downs, just like with anything else in life. Some days will be better than others, but eventually, you will find your way back to living a positive and fulfilling life.

In the meantime, these 65 quotes about grief, love, and life will help you get through this difficult time. They offer comfort, understanding, and hope; everything you need to keep going. So read on for some words of wisdom from those who have been there before…

Quotes about Grief, Love, and Life…

1) “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, Memoirs of a Geisha

2) “Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.” – Pablo Neruda

3) “All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” – Havelock Ellis

4) “Although it’s difficult today to see beyond the sorrow, May looking back in memory help comfort you tomorrow.” – Unknown

5) “Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: You bleed and bleed and bleed.” – David Mitchell

6) “At the blueness of the skies and in the warmth of summer, we remember them.” – Sylvan Kamens & Rabbi Jack Reimer

7) “I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.” – Robert Fulghum

8) “You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.” – J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

9) “Grief changes shape, but it never ends.” – Keanu Reeves

Inspirational grief quotes for people we wish could live forever.

10) “Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream.” – Euripides

11) “The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

12) “Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

13) “Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?” – Terry Pratchett

14) “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” – John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

15) “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, The Fault in Our Stars

16) “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.” – J.M. Barrie

17) “There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.” – Aeschylus

18) “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

Grief Quotes by Rumi

19) “Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.” – Rumi

20) “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 

21) “Grieving doesn’t make you imperfect. It makes you human.” – Sarah Dessen

22) “When the heart grieves over what it has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left.” – Sufi Epigram

23) “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” – Winnie the Pooh

24) “Grief is so human, and it hits everyone at one point or another, at least, in their lives. If you love, you will grieve, and that’s just given.” – Kay Redfield Jamison

25) “If I can see pain in your eyes then share with me your tears. If I can see joy in your eyes then share with me your smile.” – Santosh Kalwar

26) “If tears could build a stairway, and memories a lane, I’d walk right up to Heaven and bring you home again.” – Unknown

27) “Grief is itself a medicine.” – William Cowper

28) “Grief is just love with no place to go.” – Jamie Anderson

29) “Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.” – Vicki Harrison

We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us…

30) “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

31) “Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature’s delight.” – Marcus Aurelius

32) “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

33) “Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.” – The Wonder Years

34) “Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms.” – Paula Coelho

When grief feels like fear…

35) “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” – C.S Lewis

36) “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

37) “Nothing that grieves us can be called little; by the external 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, Which Was The Dream?

38) “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

39) “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” – Pierre Auguste Renoir

The price we pay for love…

40) “Grief is the price we pay for love.” – Queen Elizabeth II

41) “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

42) “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.” – Hillary Stanton Zunin

43) “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.” – Washington Irving

44) “They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite” – Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

Grief quotes for a friend we’ve lost…

45) “Should you shield the valleys from the windstorms, you would never see the beauty of their canyons.” – Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

46) “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

47) “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

48) “Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.” – Alphonse de Lamartine

49) “The song is ended but the melody lingers on.” – Irving Berlin

Grief quotes for the loss of a mom, dad, or other family members…

50) “Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.” – Jose N. Harris

51) “There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

52) “The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with; Nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.” – Rob Sheffield, Love is a Mix Tape

53) “There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, so just give me a happy middle and a very happy start.” – Shel Silverstein

54) “They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies.” – William Penn

55) “I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.” – Anne Frank

56) “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” – Thomas Campbell

57) “Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart and you’ll never walk alone.” – Rodgers and Hammerstein, Carousel

58) “We need to grieve the ones we have loved and lost in this lifetime — not to sustain our connection to suffering, but to sustain our connection to love.” – J. W.

59) “What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” – Helen Keller

Grief quotes when a memory becomes a treasure…

60) “When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure.” – Unknown

61) “While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.” – Samuel Johnson

62) “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

63) “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

64) “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. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived. For people like me and Echo, our souls contained more scar tissue than life.” – Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits

65) “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

I hope you enjoyed these healing quotes about grief, love, and life…

“The only thing I could not protect you from was time.”

Please share these quotes about grief with your friends and family.

Last update on 2024-04-25 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

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