In times of great pain, it can be comforting to know that other people have been exactly where you are, and felt what you are feeling, and have gotten through it. In that way, words can help heal. But it can be hard to know what to say to someone who is deep in grief. Below, we’ve put together a collection of thoughtful quotes about grief, from those who are perhaps more eloquent than we are, to help.
1. “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will 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
2. “What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us.” — Helen Keller
3. “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.” — J.M. Barrie
4. “If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart, I’ll stay there forever.” — Winnie the Pooh
5. “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” — Thomas Campbell
6. “I will not say: Do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
7. “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
8. “People speak to me about my son — ‘I’m so sorry for you’ — but no one says, ‘I loved him so much.’ I was busy in grief, which I don’t expect to stop. Suddenly realizing that the last thing my son would want was for me to be very self-involved and narcissistic and self-stroking. It stopped me from writing. Which doesn’t mean you stop feeling the absence. It was being willing to think about it in a way that was not self-serving.” — Toni Morrison
9. “So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.” — E.A. Bucchianeri
10. “Dear lovely Death
That taketh all things under wing—
Never to kill—
Only to change
Into some other thing
This suffering flesh,
To make it either more or less,
But not again the same—
Dear lovely Death,
Change is thy other name.”
—Langston Hughes
11. “To weep is to make less the depth of grief.” — William Shakespeare
12. “And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure … And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
13. “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
14. “We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.” — C.S. Lewis
15. “Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.” — Orson Scott Card
16. “Now there is one thing I can tell you: You will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power … that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.” — Marcel Proust
17. “Accepting death doesn’t mean you won’t be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, ‘Why do people die?’ and ‘Why is this happening to me?’ Death isn’t happening to you. Death is happening to us all.” — Caitlin Doughty
18. “Life is tragic simply because the Earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” — James Baldwin
19. “There are no happy endings, endings are the saddest part. So just give me a happy middle and a very happy start.” — Shel Silverstein
20. “Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.” — Alphonse de Lamartine
21. “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
22. “A great soul serves everyone all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.” — Maya Angelou
23. “To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.” — Erich Fromm
24. “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” — Henri Mattise
25. “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” — William Shakespeare
26. “Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That’s the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what’s left, that’s the part you have to make up as you go.” — Katharine Weber
27. “Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.” ― Haruki Murakami
28. “There is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.” — Alice Walker
29. “Grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away.” — V.C. Andrews
30. “We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world — the company of those who have known suffering.” — Helen Keller