Grief Quotes

1. "Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face."
Author: Adam Berlin

2. "Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear."
Author: Aimé Césaire

3. "Nothing could assuage the secular grief that was your heritage."
Author: Aldous Huxley

4. "Grief is a process, not a state."
Author: Anne Grant

5. "Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence."
Author: Anne Lamott

6. "Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life."
Author: Anne Roiphe

7. "For years, I had used these fractured men to justify my cynicism and workaholism, and the grief, insomnia and casual anorexia were no longer of any interest to me."
Author: Antonella Gambotto Burke

8. "My grief was a heavy, despairing sadness caused by parting from a companion of many years but, more important, it was a despair rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found. And even if it were lurking somewhere, I might never know it in my lifetime. It had become hard for me to continue to believe in love's promise when everywhere I turned the enchantment of power of the terror of fear overshadowed the will to love."
Author: Bell Hooks

9. "The naïve girl in me had been bitch-slapped into womanhood. I'd been razed by pain, grief, loss and suffering, and honed by lust, rage and an acute awareness of my need to survive."
Author: C.J. Roberts

10. "I want you to want me because you want me, not because of grief, not because he is not here. I want you to love me for me. I want you to kiss me first and not because you need me to help you, but because you need to kiss me."
Author: Carrie Jones

11. "They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite"
Author: Cassandra Clare

12. "Simos said, "Grief work must be shared. In sharing, however, there must be no impatience, censure or boredom with the repetition, because repetition is necessary for catharsis and internalization and eventual unconscious acceptance of the reality of the loss. The bereaved are sensitive to the feelings of others and will not only refrain from revealing feelings to those they consider unequal to the burden of sharing the grief but may even try to comfort the helpers." (97)"
Author: Charles L. Whitfield

13. "Reserved people often really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive. The sternest-seeming stoic is human after all, and to burst with boldness and good-will into the silent sea of their souls is often to confer on them the first of obligations."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

14. "Oh, my God,' she said, between sobs. ‘Oh, my God.'Olanna reached out often to squeeze her arm. The rawness of Edna's grief made her helpless, brought the urge to stretch her hand into the past and reverse history. Finally, Edna fell asleep. Olanna gently placed a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off. She thought about how ephemeral life was, about not choosing misery. She would move back to Odenigbo's house."
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

15. "I now knew there was no such thing as a broken heart. It will go on beating to taunt you and mock you and tell you that even in grief it is indestructible and full of love."
Author: Clara Kramer

16. "This is what language is:a habitual grief. A turn of speechfor the everyday and ordinary abrasionof losses such as this:which hurtsjust enough to be a scarAnd heals just enough to be a nation."
Author: Eavan Boland

17. "The first rose on my rose-treeBudded, bloomed, and shattered,During sad days when to meNothing mattered.Grief or grief has drained me clean;Still it seems a pityNo one saw,—it must have beenVery pretty."
Author: Edna St. Vincent Millay

18. "I made an attempt to reach him in his grief. I said, "I've had this pain. To tell you it will go away would be a lie. It will never go away. But, if you live long enough, it will cease to torture and will instead favor you. As we rely on the bitterness of strong tea to wake us, this too will become something you can use."
Author: Eli Brown

19. "I can wade Grief --Whole Pools of it --I'm used to that --But the least push of JoyBreaks up my feet --And I tip -- drunken --Let no Pebble -- smile --'Twas the New Liquor --That was all!"
Author: Emily Dickinson

20. "You can, for just a moment, fuse grief like a bone, but the memory of the ability to bend lingers inside, like an itch running in the blood, just beneath the skin: relief is always only temporary. Grief, we understood, would now hijack a part of our day for the rest of our lives, sneaking in, making the world momentarily stop, every day, forever."
Author: Emily Rapp

21. "The old grief of the great mystery of human life gradually passes into a quiet, tender joy; in place of the boiling blood of youth there comes a meek serene old age: I bless the daily rising of the sun, and my heart sings to it as it did of old, but now I am more enamored of its setting, its long, oblique rays, and the quiet, gentle, tender memories that accompany them, the dear images from the whole of a long and blessed life--and above it all the truth of God, moving, reconciling, all-forgiving!"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

22. "Oh, yes, we'll be in chains, and there will be no freedom, but then, in our great grief, we will arise once more into joy, without which it's not possible for man to live, or for God to be, for God gives joy, it's his prerogative, a great one...Lord, let man dissolve in prayer! How would I be there underground without God? Rakitin's lying: if God is driven from the earth, we'll meet him underground! It's impossible for a convict to be without God, even more impossible than for a non-convict! And then from the depths of the earth, we, the men underground, will start singing a tragic hymn to God, in who there is joy! Hail to God and his joy! I love him!"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

23. "Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out...though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love."
Author: J.K. Rowling

24. "The only way past the pain is through it. Pain, grief, anger, misery...they don't go away--they just increase and compound and get worse. You have to live through them, acknowledge them. You have to give your pain its due."
Author: Jasinda Wilder

25. "Hold in, hold in, one crack and the wall is breached. I need now to be finite, self-contained, to stop this bacterial grief dividing and multiplying till its weight is the weight of the world. Bacteria: agents of putrefaction. My father's decay lodged in me."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

26. "Christ walked the path every mortal is called to walk so that he would know how to succor and strengthen us in our most difficult times. He knows the deepest and most personal burdens we carry. He knows the most public and poignant pains we bear. He descended below al such grief in order that he might lift us above it. There is no anguish or sorrow or sadness in life that he has not suffered in our behalf and borne away upon his own valiant and compassionate shoulders."
Author: Jeffrey R. Holland

27. "She has never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James. He thought of pushing open the half-closed door and kneeling before his wife, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and helping her upstairs. He raised his hand, stroking the wood of the door, planning to say something to calm her. But what wisdom could he offer Gus, when he could not even heed it himself? James walked upstairs again, got into bed, covered his head with a pillow. And hours later, when Gus crept beneath the sheets, he tried to pretend that he did not feel the weight of her grief, lying between them like a fitful child, so solid that he could not reach past it to touch her."
Author: Jodi Picoult

28. "I am conscious that knowing me has caused you pain, and grief, and I hope that one day when you are less angry with me and less upset you will see not just that I could only have done the thing that I did, but also that this will help you live a really good life, a better life, than if you hadn't met me."
Author: Jojo Moyes

29. "He took the box but did not avail himself of a tissue. She understood. Sometimes it was comforting to feel the wetness of grief's tears on your face."
Author: Julius Lester

30. "Yeah, you lose this attitude, I can help you work that hurt out."Who was this man? He held onto his tragedy for seventeen fucking years, how could he stand there and tell mehe could help me work through mine?"Really, Joe? Like you helped me work out my grief at losing Tim?" I asked sarcastically."That's not what I was offerin', buddy, but you want it like that I'll give it to you.""You're unbelievable," I snapped."I'm yours."That socked me in the gut too, so hard it winded me and all I could do was stare up at him.Taking advantage, his face dipped close and his hands curled around both sides of my head."First fuckin' time you smiled at me in my bed, that's when it happened," he murmured."
Author: Kristen Ashley

31. "Yes, and our sister's sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere - not anywhere. The goat farmer, whose name is James Carmalt Adams, Jr., said this about it to me, tapping his forehead with his fingertips: "It isn't the museum, it should be." The museums in children's minds, I think, automatically empty themselves in times of utmost horror - to protect the children from eternal grief."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

32. "Grief can choke you. It's dangerous, something else you have to beat."
Author: Lauren Kate

33. "It was a look that suggested emotions happening just past your line of sight: a grief so deep you'd never be able to see it, a love so fierce it could swallow itself completely."
Author: Leslie Jamison

34. "She wears her grief like a coat of feathers too heavy for flight. He crossed out heavy, wrote weighted instead, then decided that was downright pretentious and put heavy back in."
Author: Libba Bray

35. "By the sacred earth on which I kneel, by the shades that wander near me, by the deep and eternal grief that I feel, I swear; and by thee, O Night, and the spirits that preside over thee, to pursue the demon who caused this misery, until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict."
Author: Mary Shelley

36. "I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was."
Author: Meghan O'Rourke

37. "Grief is like a moving river, so that's what I mean by it's always changing. It's a strange thing to say because I'm at heart an optimistic person, but I would say in some ways it just gets worse. It's just that the more time that passes, the more you miss someone."
Author: Michelle Williams

38. "Praise the world to the angel, not what can't be talked about.You can't impress him with your grand emotions. In the grand cosmoswhere he so intensely feels, you're just a novice. So showhim some simple thing shaped for generation after generationuntil it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it's ours.Tell him about things. He'll stand amazed, just as you didbeside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;how even grief's lament purely determines its own shape,serves as a thing, or dies in a thing — and escapesIn ecstasy beyond the violin."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

39. "Some of your griefs you have cured,And the sharpest you still have survived,But what torments of grief you've enduredFrom evils that never arrived."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

40. "But little Mouse, you are not alone,In proving foresight may be vain:The best laid schemes of mice and menGo often askew,And leave us nothing but grief and pain,For promised joy!Still you are blest, compared with me!"
Author: Robert Burns

41. "Love Dogs One night a man was crying, Allah! Allah! His lips grew sweet with the praising, until a cynic said, "So! I have heard you calling out, but have you ever gotten any response?" The man had no answer to that. He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep. He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls, in a thick, green foliage. "Why did you stop praising?" "Because I've never heard anything back." "This longing you express is the return message." The grief you cry out from draws you toward union. Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup. Listen to the moan of a dog for its master. That whining is the connection. There are love dogs no one knows the names of. Give your life to be one of them."
Author: Rumi

42. "A Thirsty FishI don't get tired of you. Don't grow wearyof being compassionate toward me!All this thirst equipmentmust surely be tired of me,the waterjar, the water carrier.I have a thirsty fish in methat can never find enoughof what it's thirsty for!Show me the way to the ocean!Break these half-measures,these small containers.All this fantasyand grief.Let my house be drowned in the wavethat rose last night in the courtyardhidden in the center of my chest.Joseph fell like the moon into my well.The harvest I expected was washed away.But no matter.A fire has risen above my tombstone hat.I don't want learning, or dignity,or respectability.I want this music and this dawnand the warmth of your cheek against mine.The grief-armies assemble,but I'm not going with them.This is how it always iswhen I finish a poem.A great silence comes over me,and I wonder why I ever thoughtto use language."
Author: Rumi

43. "But anyone who has been that young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least."
Author: Sarah Dunant

44. "Good grief. You two look like Village of the Sofa Damned. (Cassandra)"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

45. "Gradually, the night stumbled as if stunned and wandering aimlessly into an overcast day -- limped through the wilderland of transition as though there were no knowing where the waste of darkness ended and the ashes of light began. The low clouds seemed full of grief -- tense and uneasy with accumulated woe -- and yet affectless, unable to rain, as if the air clenched itself too hard for tears. And through the dawn, Atiaran and Covenant moved heavily, unevenly, like pieces of a broken lament."
Author: Stephen R. Donaldson

46. "Missing someone is a vague, unpleasant sensation, like gnawing anxiety. It isn't as concrete as grief, but it's just as pervasive and there's no escaping it."
Author: Sue Grafton

47. "Life is just one long day separated into sections by sleep. Life never stops happening until you are dead. So whatever happens-love, grief, hate, shame- never disappears. It just gets easier to live with. It just scabs over, waiting for something else significant to happen."
Author: Sunshine O'Donnell

48. "Much like trains in India, grief is a circular, irrational process with no discernible rhythm or timetable. Here it comes, there it goes."
Author: Suzanne Finnamore

49. "His eyes looked sad and cautious.  I recognized the grief, but there seemed to be more to it, a depth beyond what even I had experienced, a regret I couldn't quite grasp."
Author: Tyra Lynn

50. "One does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour's."
Author: W. Somerset Maugham

Grief Quotes Pictures