Browse 904 quotes about Grief And Loss.
“Sometimes there is a sadness,
That even tears cannot speak.
My heart alone knows the pain,
A pain so sharp and deep.
Why then do I hold on?
Why do I follow where it leads?
Ah, perhaps because it draws me closer,
It carries me where it is sweet.”
Source: Of Waves and Butterflies: Poems on Grief
“How I wish to be stronger
So I could bleed without fainting,
And in bleeding
I may cry,
With all the love I have in me.”
Source: Of Waves and Butterflies: Poems on Grief
“You have no idea how grief will take you. The same with severe illness, motherhood, any profound experience. You don’t know yourself. Others don’t know you. These events show who you are. And you’ll be surprised, shocked even. You’ll feel the way you feel when you’ve done a particularly offensive-smelling shit – That couldn’t possibly have come out of me – and start to rationalize it – Must be that bag of pistachios I ate earlier, or perhaps I am unwell. You can’t believe you could do something so foul and unrecognizable. Something so outside yourself.”
Source: To Throw Away Unopened
“With permission to grieve, we stop yelling at ourselves to be stronger or different or better in our pain and shift to witnessing ourselves instead.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“Permission is the key that unlocks the door that’s been holding us trapped, muzzled, and stifled in our grief. Permission is the opposite of rejection. Permission is the opposite of abandonment. Permission lifts the weight, eases the pressure, and loosens the reins.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“I began to call friends and relatives. Some called me. They'd heard the news on the radio. Others just came by. I greeted each one in the foyer. Few words were spoken. Mostly, we embraced. People often say they don't know what to say to someone like me at a time like this. Nothing need be said. The presence of those you care about is comfort enough; a warm embrace communicates far more than words do.”
Source: And I Don't Want to Live This Life: A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder
“When we refuse ourselves permission to grieve, we shut off a vital piece of our hearts that needs seeing, expressing, and loving: a wounded child, a raging wolf, an injured spirit.
When we give ourselves permission to grieve, we embrace the child. We release the wolf. We heal the spirit. We run towards what scares us most only to find that “it” is ourselves... and it’s not so much scary as is it is afraid. And we don’t want the fear to go away as much as we want the fear to be seen, heard, and wholeheartedly loved.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“If love is the only thing we can take with us when we die, what's left for the people who stay?”
Source: What if Stars Don't Die
“But I guess death is like that. It takes away from you in an instant the people you've cherished for a whole lifetime. Just like that. As simple as that. And you are suddenly left with two things: anger for having been deprived of your beloved for no reason at all; and emptiness, a vacuum that gnaws right at your heart where all the joyful moments once had been.”
Source: In Your Hour Of Grief: When Mourning the Death of a Loved One
“For no soul can ever be replaced, and death claims a beauty and a magnificence that will always be missed.”
Source: In Your Hour Of Grief: When Mourning the Death of a Loved One
“I walked in the garden of life, caressing soft petals here and there. And lo! After a while they were no more, and my heart bled for each fragrant petal that fell. If every flower withers, never to return to its full blossom, then what good indeed is passing by in the garden of life? Herein lies my hope: That for every flower that withers, another one blooms, one that will remain forever fragrant and fresh, never ever to pass away…”
Source: In Your Hour Of Grief: When Mourning the Death of a Loved One
“I wait and pray and hope
I will look forward to each brand new day
thankful for all that I've had and will always have
thankful for the sun that shines again
believing and hanging on
believing that life will go on
it can't help but go on
it shall go on
and in so going
there really is no end
only mornings and evenings
and life that never ever ends.”
Source: In Your Hour Of Grief: When Mourning the Death of a Loved One
“For those struggling with grief, there’s no timetable. It can last months, years, or longer. There is no rush. Give yourself permission to take however long it may be to fully heal from your loss.”
Source: Sacred Wandering: Growing Your Faith In The Dark
“If you sense the tide of grief welling up in you, treat it like the sacred emotion it is, and honor it. Give yourself time to sink into it, allow it to immobilize you with its weight, and trust that it will flow through you and out - if you let it. Grief truly felt never lasts forever - only grief avoided does.”
“I'm gonna tell you some stories, and some of them might be true."
Jack Bates”
Source: The Final Road Trip: Dust To Dust (Rascal Publishing)
“The instinctive posture of grief is a shuffling compromise between defiance and prostration; and pride feels the need of striking a worthier attitude in face of such a foe.”
Source: The Moving Finger
“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.”
Source: Heaven Has No Regrets
“She did not belong to the healthy group of widows and widowers who, after mourning, would nurture the seed of their grief into growing from loss—perhaps continuing the dreams of the lost, or learning to cherish alone the things they’d cherished together.
She belonged instead to the sad lot who clung to grief, who nurtured it by never moving beyond it. They’d shelter it deep inside where the years padded it in saudade layers like some malignant pearl.”
Source: A Star-Reckoner's Lot
“He took her like He took my mother. To torment me! To kill me and keep me alive to live dead! She did this, she let that bastard do this and your stupid loving GOD allowed it!!" ~Solomon Gorge~”
Source: Desecrating Solomon
“Grief makes gravity heavier and air molecules denser, so breathing is accomplished in a shallow, half-hearted way.”
Source: The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir
“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 another level, perhaps what I have lost 'in' you, that for which I have no vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as *the tie* by which those terms are differentiated and related.”
Source: Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
“... he wasn't crying for the woman who had died. He was crying for the woman she had been.”
Source: Going Once
“I was scared of living a life not worth the living. Why did I deserve to live when my sister had died? I was responsible now for two lives, my sister's and my own, and, damn, I'd better live well.”
Source: Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading
“Whatever might be taken from me need not leave me with a deficit in its wake.”
“I understood then, the immense honor it is to hurt like she does. To have loved someone so much that the taste of maple syrup can make you cry and laugh at the same time.”
Source: Happy Place
“We are a grief-illiterate nation, and Kübler-Ross dedicated her life to helping people find peace in challenging losses. She gave us permission to grieve.”
Source: On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss
“Some losses never return what they take. They open a space inside you, a hollow shaped exactly like the person, the moment, or the dream that disappeared.”
Source: Beacon of the Dark Night: Shining Hope Through the Shadows
“Today will be different. Perhaps the only way to cope with loss, or guilt, is to name it and defy its potential to destroy you...
Maybe all you can do is give yourself permission to embrace the rest of your life. To play, to love, to risk. To take the beauty that someone brought into your life and share it.”
Source: Good Dirt
“I can't speak. I can't think. words are water and everything melds into a sea of suffering.”
Source: Forgotten Sisters
“I watch Maya sipping her tea and I wonder how many women carry the memory of a child nobody knew but them. How many women grieve alone and in silence, without sympathy or ceremony, too afraid or ashamed to speak of their loss? And why should they feel ashamed, or afraid, or alone? Why are there so many others, when this is common, why isn't it something we talk about? And when it happened to my friend, why didn't I know what to do?”
Source: Out of Love
“Loss is a part of life, my lord Cassiapeus, and grief is constant. It is unbearable at first. Then you find you can indeed bear it. Over and over again. As many times as necessary.”
Source: Year of the Reaper
“If beginnings are certain to occur, endings are certain to end.”
“Nothing is lost here, in this place before language, before longing. The love is the same, after all. Only the names change.”
Source: The Sea Once Swallowed Me: A Memoir of Love, Solitude, and the Limits of Language
“I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall.”
Source: Writers & Lovers
“What are we to do in this time? How do we function? How do we not completely lose it?
I choose to use my #pen
to cut open my shell
to release the pus
of pain and trauma
and loss
mixed with
sludge-like #ash.”
Source: Chronicles Of A Seawoman: A Collection Of Poems
“Losing a loved one is a piece of your soul leaving this place. When enough pieces are lost, so is the soul.”
“So this is what it’s like when someone you love dies, I thought. Like constantly trying to swallow a sharp stone.”
Source: White Pines
“Three men and they all took something from me: my affection, my promise, and my innocence. What has love given me...? Nothing. Nothing but pain.”
Source: Harvest Moon
“A memory unearthed itself: the way his wife had looked in the weeks following the news, the way she looked at things but never really saw them. The way she always seemed to be staring at something he couldn’t make out. The broken-down pits of her eyes, high on painkillers, opiates, staring at the wall, silent tears streaking drug-slacked cheeks. Maybe that had finished them off even before the divorce papers. Neither of them could live with what happened and neither wanted to watch the other one die so slowly.”
Source: The War Beneath
“Feeling must have rendered her numb.”
Source: Crow Lake
“You cannot fix, change, or remove another person’s grief. You cannot “spare” someone the pain of grieving a loss. Your grief belongs to you; their grief belongs to them.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“Grief is pervasive. It cannot be quarantined any more than love can be quarantined. Grief affects all areas of life.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“The solution to grief is not a pain-free existence. It is allowing ourselves to grieve and witnessing ourselves in that process. Permission and presence are the remedies for agony and isolation.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“From the time we’re children, we’re taught that the path is more important than the obstacles that appear on it. We’re told to focus on the destination rather than the journey. We repeatedly hear the story of the phoenix rising from the ashes, but we fail to remember (or conveniently forget to remember) that the ashes are made of the charred, scorched remains of the phoenix’s “life before.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“Grief ripples out and sends powerful tremors through our foundation, through our hobbies, through our loved ones, and through our minds. For the first time in our lives, we can- not compartmentalize the hard, the bad, or the sad. There’s nowhere to tuck it away because every single aspect of our lives is infected with and tainted by grief.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“In grief and loss, it becomes incredibly hard to recognize who we are. Grief makes us different people. Everything that we identify with—from our emotional states to our patterns to our dreams to our fears to our preferences to our core truths— everything fractures and shatters under the weight of loss.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“If you’re grieving, you have become—at least partially—someone you don’t recognize.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“Sitting next to grief and allowing it to root through your former life while slowly unfurling into your new life requires the kind of patience, gentleness, and self-love that many of us have never had to summon before. Remember that at its core, permission is about telling the truth about where you are right now. And sometimes that truth means saying, “I don’t know.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“As life continues, so will grief.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss
“Grief does not exist within a vacuum, but it also does not exist within just one life. It spreads out and affects the people “above you” in your family tree and the people who will come after you or “below you.” Grief also impacts entire races, genders, generations, and communities, and those beliefs about grief and the stories we tell ourselves about whether or not grief is acceptable, what’s at the root cause of grief, and whether or not we can recover from that grief have an enormous impact on how we give ourselves permission to grieve, whether we consciously acknowledge it or not.”
Source: Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss