Are you looking for inspirational quotes about grief? Inspiring Lizard has got you covered! In this article we present the 373 most beautiful grief quotes we could find. Let’s get inspired!
Grief quotes
It is some relief to weep grief is satisfied and carried off by tears.
— Ovid
There is no grief which time does not lessen and soften.
— Cicero
When I could find something to laugh about for 30 minutes, my grief lightened just enough to make the day bearable.
— Sharon E. Rainey, The Best Part of My Day Healing Journal
People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you.
— Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange
He did touch people’s lives, the lives of strangers, in an entirely unanticipated way. It was they who really mourned him – or what they thought was him – with a grief that was no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Despite the fact that every sport this side of badminton worries about concussions that result in brain damage, CTE, the National Hockey League refuses to accept the overwhelming medical science. Good grief – the NHL still permits fights.
— Frank Deford
January grey is here Like a sexton by her grave February bears the bier March with grief doth howl and rave And April weeps – but O ye hours! Follow with May’s fairest flowers.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
My grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together! For now it would be heavier than the sand of the desert.
— Compton Gage
That’s how it is with a thing like grief as well. It lies oil slick over everything you do. It will pour out through the gaps in the most ordinary afternoons.
— Barney Norris, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain
He that is thy friend indeed, He will help thee in thy need:If thou sorrow, he will weep;If thou wake, he cannot sleep:Thus of every grief in heartHe with thee doth bear a part.These are certain signs to knowFaithful friend from flattering foe.
— William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
— Meghan O’Rourke, The Long Goodbye
‘The grief didn’t fade, but it changed into something I could carry around with me, a noose I wore around my neck. It wasn’t until I saw you that the knot loosened.’
— Sara Bell, The Devil’s Fire
I hoped that grief was similar to the other emotions. That it would end, the way happiness did. Or laughter.
— Neil Jordan
I’ll fight when needed, revel when there’s an occasion, mourn when there is grief and die if my time comes…But I will not let anyone use me against my will.
— Christopher Paolini, Eragon
The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet or relief, In word, or sigh, or tear.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Once you have walked down the grief path, what you have gained on your journey may turn into invaluable advice for someone else.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick’s Path from Loss to Hope
I had met death before, in different forms–I knew quite well the pattern of my grieving. First came shock, and then tears, and then a bitter anger, followed by a softer grief that time would wear away.
— Susanna Kearsley, The Splendour Falls
Apparently there were seven stages of grief but that was a neat way of putting it. Grief was messy and didn’t colour inside the lines
— Emily Gale, The Other Side of Summer
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
The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.
— Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
Three grey women walk with me Fate and Grief and Memory. My fate brought grief; my grief must be With me through Eternity, Such thy power, memory.Three grey women walk with me.
— Adelaide Crapsey, Verse by Adelaide Crapsey
Sorry. Don’t need sorry. Not in this house. Sorry laid the hearth here. Sorry ways and sorry people and heavensent grief and heartache to make you pine for your death.
— Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark
Tears and grief are good for reflection, moving on is still the best solution.
— Mat Luthfi
Extraordinary what the body remembers. The bones loded with love, grief silting the arteries, fear the bowels’ recurring mould. Who would have thought mere flesh and blood could hold so much of psyche’s ghostly script?
— Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer
A mind that tastes the grief obtains a good chance to travel to the Land of Wisdom!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In Louisiana, one of the first stages of grief is eating your weight in Popeyes fried chicken. The second stage is doing the same with boudin. People have been known to swap the order. Or to do both at the same time.
— Ken Wheaton, Sweet as Cane, Salty as Tears
And I can’t be running back and fourth forever between grief and high delight.
— J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Rage and grief are savage companions, but despair is the final undoing.
— Mia Farrow, What Falls Away: A Memoir
They say grief occurs in five stages. First there’s denial followed by anger. Then comes bargaining, depression and acceptance. But grief is a merciless master. Just when you think you’re free you realize you never stood a chance.
— Emily Thorne
Well, every one can master a grief but he that has it.
— William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
There was something about other people’s grief that was so exposing, so personal, that she felt she shouldn’t be looking.
— Jane Fallon, Getting Rid Of Matthew
This is another day! Are its eyes blurred With maudlin grief for any wasted past? A thousand thousand failures shall not daunt! Let dust clasp dust death death I am alive!
— Don Marquis
The only way to end grief was to go through it.
— Holly Black, The Darkest Part of the Forest
Some grief shows much of love, But much of grief shows still some want of wit.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
As I walk through the redwood trees, my sneakers sopping up days of rain, I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes, when grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
Well, it is a particular sin to permit grief for what is gone to poison the praise for what blessings remain to us.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion
Four years after my father’s death, when the subject of parents came up in conversation i would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact tone eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me.
— Alison Bechdel
He sought…to transform the grief which looks down into the grave by showing it the grief which looks up to the stars.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Someone experiencing the stages of grief is rarely aware of how his behavior might appear to others. Grief often produces a “zoom lens effect, ” in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.
— Sol Luckman, Snooze: A Story of Awakening
The grief of widowhood, of losing a husband and only to be harassed by his brothers, remained pressed on her.
— Panashe Chigumadzi, Sweet Medicine
A little while with grief and laughter And then the day will close The shadows gather . . . what comes after No man knows.
— Donald R. P. Marquis
Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief itself arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
I have discovered that sitting still leaves little spaces for the grief to get in, so I stay busy.
— Veronica Roth, Insurgent
Her grief was a burden so heavy, he came close to collapsing under it, and yet he couldn’t lay it down.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
What torments of grief you endured from evils that never arrived.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death – the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.
— Thomas Lynch
Grief turns us inward, but compassion turns us outward, and that’s what we need when grief threatens to crush us. The Bible says, “Carry each other’s burdens” [Galatians 6:2 NIV].
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
Perhaps that’s what she caught, not Life Fatigue but just grief over a broken heart–and the bitterness that comes with being cheated too early of something true–like a young husband’s love.
— Joseph G. Peterson, Wanted: Elevator Man
He who is overly attached to his family members experiences fear and sorrow, for the root of all grief is attachment. Thus one should discard attachment to be happy.
— Chanakya
It is true that the grief journey is very lonely, but it is also up to you to decide just how lonely you will make it.
— Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick’s Path from Loss to Hope
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
Tearless grief bleeds inwardly
— Christian Nestell Bovee
Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy.
— Dean Koontz, Saint Odd
The cure for grief is motion.
— Elbert Hubbard
Writers are in many ways like demi-gods. With one stroke of a pen they can give life to a character, or strike them from existence, with nary a twinge of grief at their passing.
— Steven Lake
A rule without exceptions is an instrument capable of doing mischief to the innocent and bringing grief — as well as injustice — to those who should gain exemptions from the rule’s functioning.
— Derrick A. Bell
Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure Marry’d in hast we may repent at leisure.
— William Congreve
Beware! Balance rules the cosmos. It is not concerned with good or bad. You can be struck by misfortune and be buried in grief if that is what it takes to restore the imbalance you have wrought unto the world.
— Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
Somehow, grief had seemed easier to bear when the skies were dark and a cold wind kept cats and prey inside their nests.
— Erin Hunter, Bramblestar’s Storm
. . . when the horror of his grief was new to him, and every object in life, however trifling or however important, seem saturated with his one great sorrow.
— Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
— Thornton Wilder
The world is full of grief and no peace but every body has a different way of ending it.
— Auliq Ice
If you want to connect with people who are in distress and great grief and scared, you need to do it in a certain way. I move kind of slow. I talk kind of slow. I let them know that I respect them.
— James Nachtwey
When I die, I shall then have my greatest grief and my greatest joy; my greatest grief, that I have done so little for Jesus, and my greatest joy, that Jesus has done so much for me.
— William Grimshaw
Of course it’s heavier, he thought. It’s got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do.
— Stephen King, The Dark Tower
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain and the noise of battle. It has the power to give grief or universality that lends it a youthful beauty.
— John Cheever
Grief keeps coming back with the same things in its hands — you know this. You know that the hands of grief are memory. Again and again, grief holds the same few things.
— Lindsay Hill, Sea of Hooks
I knew a girl, once, immortal like me-“”And she was with someone mortal?” said Alec. “What happened?””He died, ” Magnus said. There was a finality to the way he said it that spoke of a deeper grief than words could paint.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
If love finds you again, don’t fight it. Don’t let grief hold you back. Love is a risk. There are no guarantees. But, in the end, it is always, always worth it.
— J.L. Berg, When You’re Ready
Don’t be sad don’t be angry if life deceives you! Submit to your grief your time for joy will come believe me.
— Aleksandr Pushkin
The grief that does not speak whispers the o’erfraught heart and bids it break.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
In grief we know the worst of what we feel But who can tell the end of what we fear?
— Hannah More
I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana’s loss, and gratitude for her all-too-short life. It is a chance to show to the whole world the British nation united in grief and respect.
— Queen Elizabeth II
We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.
— John Green
…when the pain subsides the grief remains.
— Jonathan Brett Kennedy, Mad World
I am not wise enough to know if there is ever purpose in tragedy, if there is ever virtue in resisting it. If it cannot be overcome, then grief has beaten you, and you are right to say so.
— Dan Groat, Monarchs and Mendicants
Some of your hurts you have cured And the sharpest you still have survived But what torments of grief you endured From the evil which never arrived.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
A grief travels with us as far as we carry it.
— Marty Rubin
There are some men above grief and some men below it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Waking in the morning, I had to remember grief all over again. It was sunny, a white winter sun, and that made me sad.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
For each person I lost I found a new layer of grief to cover myself with, and each time I tried to bring something of their essence into my own being – be it unconditional love, kindness and piety.
— A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel For words like Nature half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.
— Lord Alfred Tennyson
But, over time, grief fades. And so did my lust for vengeance.
— Catherine Jones Payne, Breakwater
If you suppress grief too much it can well redouble.
— Moliere
I always thought of grief as a blow that took everything out of you. And it is like that. But it stays, past that first hard hit. It stays and blows its breath into you. It’s always there, reminding you of what you’ve lost. What’s gone.
— Elizabeth Scott, Heartbeat
I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.
— Lauren Oliver
This is another day! Are its eyes blurred with maudlin grief for any wasted past? A thousand thousand failures shall not daunt! Let dust clasp dust death death I am alive!
— Don Marquis
Remember that grief is a necessary pain. It’s your only way to heal. To starve it will destroy you.”~The Grimoire
— S.M. Boyce, Lichgates
I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling – somewhere between diarrhoea and sex – this grief that is almost genital.
— Anne Enright, The Gathering
Neal! It’s your grief counselors. We’re here to hug!
— Dean Winchester
You couldn’t make someone love you with a rune, and you couldn’t assuage grief with it either. So much magic, Clary thought, and nothing to mend a broken heart.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
The opposite of grief is not laughter or happiness or joy. It is love. It is love. It is love.
— Akif Kichloo, Poems That Lose
Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.
— James Russell Lowell
Your grief is something to be admired – the pain of severance. A scar where something used to be.
— Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After
Therefore you too have grief now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.
— Jesus Christ
Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn’t yours. But grief comes from losing something you’ve already had.
— Jodi Picoult, Perfect Match
When a relationship of love is disrupted, the relationship does not cease. The love continues; therefore, the relationship continues. The work of grief is to reconcile and redeem life to a different love relationship.
— W. Scott Lineberry
The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.
— Anton Chekhov
While death is sadly inevitable, our grief will soon pass like a swallowed penny through one’s bowels.Painful change just takes time.
— Jessica Watts, Frank N’ Goat: A Tale of Freakish Friendship
I take no joy in mead nor meat, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.
— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Perhaps grief is not about empty, but full. The full breath of life that includes death. The completeness, the cycles, the depth, the richness, the process, the continuity and the treasure of the moment that is gone the second you are aware of it.
— Alysia Reiner
Gratitude is both a vaccine and an antidote for grief. Grief may be an inevitable fact of life, but gratitude has the power to transform the experience of grief from agonizing suffering to profound joy.
— Darren Main, The River of Wisdom: Reflections on Yoga, Meditation, and Mindful Living
Psychologists have clinically observed that overly prolonged grief in the bereaved usually signifies a poor relationship with the one who died.
— Robert E. Neale, The Art of Dying
Happiness is so nonsynonymous with joy or pleasure that it is not infrequently sought and felt in grief and deprivation.
— Wilhelm von Humboldt, Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt
By day, Ian was like the stars, there but not there. At night was when the beasts of grief came for her.
— Eleanor Morse, White Dog Fell from the Sky
Cry your grief to God. Howl to the heavens. Tear your shirt. Your hair. Your flesh. Gouge your eyes. Carve out your heart. And what will you get from Him? Only Silence. Indifference.
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love.
— Washington Irving
My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn’t yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly
— John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van
The accumulation of grief over one lifetime is more then one heart can bear.”Robert explained.”Only the heartless could withstand more.Or the very young, those too naive to truly understand loss.
— James Rollins, Bloodline
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft a-gley And leave us nought but grief and pain For promised joy.
— James Drummond Burns
Help me to understand, what my grief has prevented me from seeing – within.
— Eleesha, The Soulful Pathway to Healing After Loss: Soulfully Inspiring You Whilst Mourning Loss and Working Through Grief
Raindrops fall from clouds of gray.The fragile flowers grow.Teardrops seem all I can say.They speak of endless woe.Your fingers wipe my grief away.A seed of love you sow.A hardened heart reverts to clay.You mold my love just so.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.
— Alice Hoffman, Green Angel
Her grief still burdened her, and she knew she would bear it the rest of her days.
— Dana Fuller Ross, Independence!
In childbirth grief begins.
— Euripides, Medea
The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Modern anxiety is expressed in the longing for what most people fear, even as modern grief is expressed in the unconsummated mourning for what they never really had.
— Joseph Roach, It
Given the dark fears we feel when we experience loss, nothing is more generous and loving than the willingness to embrace grief in order to forgive. To be forgiven is to be loved.
— Brené Brown, Rising Strong
I decide this is just A Bad Day. We all get them, because grief doesn’t care how many years it’s been.
— Sara Barnard, A Quiet Kind of Thunder
…yet he [Levon] somehow sings with the wounded humanity of a man without a tribe, a man who has known both love and grief and understands that one is the price of the other.
— Greg Iles, Mississippi Blood
I grief for the foolishness of my ignorance.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
There is often grief that comes with loving, Moshe. But it is worth it.
— Bodie Thoene, The Return to Zion
And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been darkness, sputtered, grew dim and went out for ever.
— Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
How terrible to be a god of change and endure grief unending.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Here’s a little secret that’s going to save you a LOT of unnecessary grief in life. Are you ready? Your worth is not tied to any person.
— Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
Grief comes with many losses. Whatever its cause, grief will come to all of us.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
An empath is capable of taking on the grief of another in order to lessen their suffering. In order to not be consumed with pain, an empath should have an outlet for that pain lest they lose themselves in feeling for others.
— Donna Lynn Hope
Only by the shuddering of the bed did Toby realize the girl was sobbing. Molly herself made no sound; it was as though her grief was trapped in a jar, her cries inaudible to anyone but her.
— Tess Gerritsen, Life Support
Besides a burial service is rather lovely. Makes you feel uplifted, the grief is real. It makes you feel awful but it does something to you. I mean, it works it out like perspiration.
— Agatha Christie, By the Pricking of My Thumbs
There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.
— Sappho
I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see.Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
We shall me much less miserable together.’ -Emma Darwin to husband Charles upon grief for loss of daughter Annie
— Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith
…determined to enjoy her luxury of grief uncomforted.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
More grief to hide than hate to utter love. Polonius, Hamlet.
— William Shakespeare
Every day my anxiety is higher, every day the grief more mortal.Today more than yesterday terror exalts me…
— Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems
The world believes it was built by love but reading Shah Jahan’s own words on the Taj, one could say it was grief that built the Taj Mahal and it was sorrow that saw it through sixteen years till completion.
— Aysha Taryam, The Opposite of Indifference: A Collection of Commentaries
You will find the way, daughter of the forest. Through grief and pain, through many trials, through betrayal and loss, your feet will walk a straight path.
— Juliet Marillier, Daughter of the Forest
My life has become a dismal sigh fettered by pangs of grief and anguished weeping.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
The road of grief is often long and lonely and many stones need to be moved out of the way, but it is not without its lighter moments.
— Louise Suzanne Boyd, Journey to the Rainbow
Horizontal (human-centered) grief is much less concerned with being broken and more concerned with being busted.
— Matt Chandler, Into the Great Outdoors
Do you not believe that animals know grief and fear and pain? The world of men is not an easy one for them.
— Lloyd Alexander, The Book of Three
Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
— Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
I feel no grief for being called somethingwhichI am not;in fact, it’s enthralling, somehow, like a goodback rub
— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
In seasons of distress and grief My soul has often found relief And oft escaped the tempter’s snare By thy return sweet hour of prayer.
— W. W. Walford
But grief is the ultimate unrequited love. However hard and long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels…
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
But grief changes. It softens, adapts its shape to become a part of you. That kind of sorrow never gets any lighter, but you grow accustomed to the weight as you carry it on.
— Claudia Gray, Ten Thousand Skies Above You
My particular grief Is of so flood-gate and o’erbearing nature That it engluts and swallows other sorrows, And it is still itself.
— William Shakespeare, Othello
How can it be that there is such a colossal gap between what we think we know about grief and mourning and what we actually find out when it comes to us?
— Jim Beaver, Life’s That Way
[F]or grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have never known, as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed.
— Pericles
The grief of children was unconditional, fueled by the implicit belief that it would last forever; for a child, grief was not grief unless it was eternal.
— Andrew Taylor, The Four Last Things
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
We want to take the energy surrounding the Sandy Hook anniversary that might otherwise be consumed by grief or anger – or this week in San Bernardino by fear – and channel some of that to honor our common humanity and love each other.
— Elizabeth Esty
Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind, And makes it fearful and degenerate; Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep.
— William Shakespeare
If that’s the case, I understand why emotions are hard for you. You’ve numbed yourself to make room for the grief you carry.
— Brent Jones, The Fifteenth of June
No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
She is not with me, this grief is not bigger then this happiness that she is with her choice
— Mohammed Zaki Ansari
I see what grief does, how it strips you bare, shows you all the things you don’t want to know. That loss doesn’t end, that there isn’t a moment where you are done, when you can neatly put it away and move on.
— Elizabeth Scott, Heartbeat
She thought, I need no cup. I am Chalice. I am filling with the grief and hurt and fear of my demesne; the shattered earthlines weigh me down; I am brimming with the needs of my people.
— Robin McKinley, Chalice
I’d give in to the grief but make sure I wasn’t loud enough to draw attention from those who think words will make me feel better.
— Adam Silvera, History Is All You Left Me
With the word “Repent” He was beckoning to us as the Savior, offering us His love and salvation. But behind this word we can also see the grief of God that His children have turned away from Him.
— M. Basilea Schlink
When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.
— Rosamund Lupton, Sister
I should like to tell you again of my bitter troubles so that mutually by recounting our grief we can lighten each other’s sorrow.
— The Kanteletar
While grief is fresh every attempt to divert it only irritates.
— Samuel Johnson
I felt like the sky around me was closing me in. Trapping me in some sort of bubble where time stands still and grief would linger on forever.
— Molli Fields, Returning Home
Grief shared was grief lessened.
— Karen Marie Moning, Kiss of the Highlander
Every one can master a grief but he that has it.
— William Shakespeare
I don’t know how to describe it, but the more I stare at him, the more I see his grief wrapped around him like shackles he can never take off.
— Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes
I do not believe that grief is ever so great that it can not be contained within.
— Judith McNaught, Once and Always
She’d never been religious. She hadn’t allowed grief to send her crawling to the church.
— Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days
Strange, what the heart can bear. It can carry grief beyond measure. It can bear a weight that is too great to speak of. But a heart can’t bear the world. It has its limits…
— Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea
They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty, ” they’d joke.Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.
— Melina Marchetta, The Piper’s Son
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.
— Lisa See, Shanghai Girls
Consider how much more you often suffer from your anger and grief than from those very things for which you are angry and grieved.
— Marcus Aurelius
His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
The response of a loyal man against the most severe grief from their love once, is always a silence, a silence forever.” T.R.Fraz
— T.R.Fraz
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.
— Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.
— Cicero
But in a home where grief is fresh and patience has long worn thin, making it through another day is often heroic in itself.
— Melanie Bennett, Learning to Dance in the Rain
The trick was not to stifle the emotions, but to control them. Love, anger, grief – all were weapons in their way, but they needed to be kept in check.
— John Connolly, The Wolf in Winter
You have strength born of years of grief and anger… The strength of a man denied revenge.
— Compton Gage
There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.
— Julian Barnes, Levels of Life
Strange that grief should now almost choke me, because another human being’s eye has failed to greet mine.
— Charlotte Brontë, Shirley
However much grief I carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It’s only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once.
— Mark Doty, Dog Years
Who elected Larry King America’s grief counselor? We, the viewing public, did, by driving up his ratings whenever somebody famous passes.
— James Wolcott
If you’ve got to my age, you’ve probably had your heart broken many times. So it’s not that difficult to unpack a bit of grief from some little corner of your heart and cry over it.
— Emma Thompson
We live, oblivious of the reality that grief is an incessant stream that flows into our life time and again and brings all those boulders back, which we had discarded in the hope of never meeting again.
— Balroop Singh
You need time for the grief to heal, for the memories to fade in sharpness, time to adjust your expectation for the future. Be gentle with yourself, you’ll make it.
— Dee Henderson, The Guardian
Happiness is a choice, but grief is a certainty.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.
— Lauren Oliver, Requiem
There are words and accents by which this grief can be assuaged, and the disease in a great measure removed.
— Horace
Forgive me that I felt forsaken, That grief and angst was all I knew. Forgive me that I kept mistaking Too many other men for you.
— Anna Akhmatova, White Flock
It is much better to die of hunger unhindered by grief and fear than to live affluently beset with worry, dread, suspicion and unchecked desire.
— Epictetus
It is the capacity to feel consuming grief and pain and despair that also allows me to embrace love and joy and beauty with my whole heart. I must let it all in.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
We have such numerous interests in our lives that it is not uncommon, on a single occasion, for the foundations of a happiness that does not yet exist to be laid down alongside the intensification of a grief from which we are still suffering.
— Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
I decided to write ‘True Refuge’ during a major dive in my own health. Diagnosed with a genetic disease that affected my mobility, I faced tremendous fear and grief about losing the fitness and physical freedom I loved.
— Tara Brach
The mind is a thing capable of destroying itself when deep grief sets in, and when left alone to muse over one’s misery, the most irreparable damage can be done. You need people to heal.
— Austin Cochran, Totem Lake
We were familiar with the line that separates grief from madness, and we know that sometimes the only way to stay on the right side of it is to scream.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
A greater love was always with me. Guiding me and waiting for me to surrender myself so that the glory of grief could bring me back to joy, where it greeted me once again.” – Just Be
— Lindsa Gibson
He thinks he can see all her grief in her face, all her love and empty days.
— Susan Fletcher, The Silver Dark Sea
I don’t even know how long she sobs. Time ceases to pass, and she cries, cries, cries. Clutches me and makes these sounds of a soul being ripped in two, the grief so long denied taking its toll. Fermented grief is far more potent.
— Jasinda Wilder, Falling into You
Enough pain will keep you humble.Enough grief will keep you compassionate.Enough trouble will keep you strong.Enough hardship will keep you grateful.
— Matshona Dhliwayo
Our relationship had been doomed form the start, because it was based on grief, and unlike love, grief eventually passed.
— Ilona Andrews, Magic Burns
My inheritance is grief and sunlight and the ability to choose which to hold on to.
— Emily Henry, A Million Junes
Debriefing-style counseling after a trauma often aggravates a victim’s stress-related symptoms, for example, and 4 in 10 bereaved people do better without grief therapy.
— Winifred Gallagher
The person you consider ignorant and insignificant is the one who came from God, that he might learn bliss from grief and knowledge from gloom.
— Khalil Gibran
Poverty, oppression, grief and depression will increase, if a country does not live according to the rules of God.
— Sunday Adelaja
You don’t go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be.
— Nigella Lawson
I suppose that the human mind can only stand so much grief and anguish. After that the fuses blow.
— Fynn, Mister God, This is Anna
2.15 GRIEFAll the grief of every man, Remove himself – he only can, For this grief that be within, Be caused by his own thinking.[110] – 2
— Munindra Misra, Eddies of Life
And remember, it’s also very funny, because side by side with grief lies joy.
— Fran Drescher
…there’s the suffering from love and the suffering from grief – either pain permanently scars the soul…
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
The shadow of my sorrow. Let’s see, ’tis very true. My griefs lie all within and these external manners of laments are mere shadows to the unseen grief which swells with silence in the tortured soul.There lies the substance.
— William Shakespeare, Richard II
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley.An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’
— Robert Burns, Collected Poems of Robert Burns
I know that it’s easier to look at death than it is to look at pain, because while death is irrevocable, and the grief will lessen in time, pain is too often merely relentless and irreversible.
— Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life
The sun will set and the sun will rise, and it will shine upon us tomorrow in our grief and our gratitude, and we will continue to live with purpose, memory, passion, and love.
— Brent Schlender, Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader
Everyone’s pain is relative. We’ve learned how to deal with grief, because we’ve had to. But Bree hasn’t. And our grief was shared, because we all felt it at the same time. She had to deal with hers alone.
— Kate Lattey, Dream On
I have always fought for ideas – until I learned that it isn’t ideas but grief struggle and flashes of vision which enlighten.
— Margaret Anderson
Here’s what I know: death abducts the dying, but grief steals from those left behind.
— Katherine Owen, Seeing Julia
So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
Isn’t it tragic that sometimes it takes grief to understand what we have held so dear?
— Priscille Sibley, The Promise of Stardust
The belief that a person can and should only feel grief over one sad event at a time is a truly disturbing estimate of our emotional capacity.
— Jennifer Armintrout
…you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help… And then finally, the way through grief is grieving.
— Jane Hamilton
Honour pricks me on. Yea but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word.
— William Shakespeare
All I can tell you is this. Some hearts break from grief some from joy. Some even break from love. But hearts break because they are too small to contain the gifts life gives us. Your task will be to let your heart grow large enough not to break
— Catherine M. Wilsonson
But I knew very well how the persona you chose to present to the world could be very different from what was inside.I knew how grief could make you behave in ways you couldn’t even begin to understand.
— Jojo Moyes, Me Before You
We all suffer our share of grief but we are stronger than our grief.
— Marty Rubin
If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble.
— Moliere
Furthermore, as the body suffers the horrors of disease and the pangs of pain, so we see the mind stabbed with anguish, grief and fear. What more natural than that it should likewise have a share in death?
— Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things
… I have waited for this day, and grief faded with time.Or did it? Perhaps grief never leaves us but is merely drowned out by a flood of life overwhelming it. Perhaps the wound that bled once is bleeding still, and I did not notice it until now.
— Claire North
My grief has burrowed into me like a dark thing that eats away at my life.
— Morgan Rhodes, Falling Kingdoms
If it is possible to die of grief then why on earth can’t someone be healed by happiness?
— Jodi Picoult, Keeping Faith
In that moment, I welcomed back the light and let go of the fear, the feelings of unworthiness, the past, the loss, the wallowing, the grief and the anger. I let go of the illusion of control in our losses, of our afflictions.
— Ariana Carruth, Love for Our Afflictions: Allowing Pain to Pave the Way to Peace
But grief makes a monster out of us sometimes . . . and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can’t forgive yourself for.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety. … One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite
— Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
Man is more himself, more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing and grief superficial.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Oh Lady, let the sad tears fall To speak thy pain, Gently as through the silver dusk The silver rain. Oh, let thy bosom breathe its grief In such soft sigh As hath the wind in gardens where Pale roses die.
— Adelaide Crapsey, Verse by Adelaide Crapsey
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. I know, he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.
— Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
Sleep Silence’s child sweet father of soft rest Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings Indifferent host to shepherds and kings Sole comforter to minds with grief oppressed.
— William Drummond
My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.
— Cheryl Strayed
I could feel their grief as if it were a beast holding us down.
— Belinda Jeffrey, One Long Thread
All human wisdom works and has worries and grief as reward.
— Johann Georg Hamann
Accept your defeats With your head up and your eyes open With the grace of woman not the grief of a child …
— Kara DiGiovanna
Joy multiplies when it is shared among friends, but grief diminishes with every division. That is life.
— R.A. Salvatore, Exile
…with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.
— Anita Shreve, The Pilot’s Wife
I know what it’s like to lose kits, Oakheart, I wouldn’t wish that kind of grief on any cat.
— Erin Hunter, Forest of Secrets
We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in order to determine the provision made within it.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn’t.
— Megan Devine, It’s Ok That You’re Not Ok: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand
Now I know that grief is a whetstone that sharpens all your love, all your happiest memories, into blades that tear you apart from within.
— Claudia Gray, A Thousand Pieces of You
Those of us who receive the blessing of a long life will also need to understand and manage grief and loss many times throughout our lives. Grief will come again, and again. Loss is a requisite part of the aging process and the human experience.
— Brent Green
…a passing face together with his grief turned you into a weeping Madonna…
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
It was amazing that you did not become your grief entirely, and walk about leaking it everywhere.
— J. Courtney Sullivan, Saints for All Occasions
There’s no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.
— Johnny Cash, Cash
Divorce is a process, not an event. It takes months to unfold, a barrage of emotional ups and downs as denial is replaced by grief, grief by anger, and anger gradually eases into acceptance.
— M. K. Tod, Time and Regret
In the monotony of everyday existence grief comes as a holiday, and a fire is an entertainment. A scratch embellishes an empty face.
— Maxim Gorky, My Childhood
Catching something is purely a byproduct of our fishing. It is the act of fishing that wipes away all grief lightens all worry dissolves all fear and anxiety.
— Gladys Taber
For me, adoption was grief in reverse.
— Jody Cantrell Dyer, The Eye of Adoption: The True Story of My Turbulent Wait for a Baby
Ah, grief makes us precise!
— Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
Nature does not abandon us. Rather, it helps us in accepting our loss, grief and pain. It stays with us, even cries with us. It gifts us openings, may be more than once, to heal, transcend and re-emerge. (Page xii)
— Neena Verma, A Mother’s Cry… A Mother’s Celebration
Sometimes the grief was nearby, waiting, just barely held back, and I could ignore it for a while. But at other times it was like a cup that was always full and kept spilling over.
— Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t: Stories
A brave action is often followed by grief. Do not let my resistance to grief stop the brave action.
— Alanis Morissette
With emotions ranging from fear, grief and anger to happiness and relief, the process of bringing home a child who needs in-home care can be complicated
— Charisse Montgomery, Home Care CEO: A Parent’s Guide to Managing In-home Pediatric Nursing
She is not with me this grief is not bigger then this relax that she is with her choice
— Mohammed Zaki Ansari, “Zaki’s Gift Of Love”
As far as you can avoid it, do not give grief to anyone. Never inflict your rage on another. If you hope for eternal rest, feel the pain yourself; but don’t hurt others.
— Omar Khayyám, Quatrains
You lose a child and you do understand each other’s grief at first, but if you get out of step with each other, it’s all over. Suddenly each of you is alone.
— Alison Bruce, Cambridge Blue
So it is with grief where, if all goes well, can come a strengthening of the inner world, of memory and definition.
— Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory
History dressed up in the glow of love’s kiss turned grief into beauty.
— Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams
Cursed the crown that brought such grief to me
— J. Leigh Bralick, The Madness Project
Forgive my grief for one removedThy creature whom I found so fairI trust he lives in Thee and thereI find him worthier to be loved.
— Alfred Tennyson
Shared grief is just pride with a sad face.
— Matt Chandler
Even extreme grief may ultimately ventitself in violence–but more generally takes the form of apathy
— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
They had not yet started out across a continent of grief that a lifetime of walking could not cover.
— Sebastian Junger, A Death in Belmont
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.
— Leslie Jamison, The Gin Closet
You stay in the war because it would be shameful to stay out of it. An then grief seizes you and hold its grip till anger has turned you into a soldier.
— Erri De Luca, Tre cavalli
Strength isn’t about bearing a cross of grief or shame. Strength comes from choosing your own path, and living with the consequences.
— Jenny Trout
And my desire, ‘ he said, ‘is a desire that is as long as a year; but it is love given to an echo, the spending of grief on a wave, a lonely fight with a shadow, that is what my love and my desire have been to me.
— Lady Augusta Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and the Fianna of Ireland
The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.
— Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
See how time makes all grief decay.
— Adelaide Proctor
Someday being with Dex will be a distant memory. This fact makes me sad too. Its the initial stages of grief that seem to be worst but in some ways, Its sadder as time goes by and you consider how much they’re missed in your life.
— Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed
Never does a man know the force that is in him till some mighty affection or grief has humanized the soul.
— Frederick W. Robertson
As seductive as it might have been to erase the grief and pain of the last ten years, it was also a lie. Young Alice was a fool. A sweet, innocent fool. Young Alice hadn’t experienced ten years of living.
— Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot
Our silence about grief serves no one. We can’t heal if we can’t grieve; we can’t forgive if we can’t grieve. We run from grief because loss scares us, yet our hearts reach toward grief because the broken parts want to mend.
— Brené Brown, Rising Strong
I’ve never seen grief like it. Grief like that, it’s like an animal. She’s not eating. She’s not sleeping. She’s whimpering. She’s sluggish. She’s not herself
— Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here
The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway; and asserting a right to predominate: to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes, –and to speak.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
I know you’re hurting, Taylor, but grief is clouding your judgement and you need to stay focused. If you attack her now, you won’t win. You know she has the advantage, Taylor. I’ve taught you this. Please, we just need to get out of here.
— Embee, Tess Embers
Silence is not certain token That no secret grief is there Sorrow which is never spoken Is the heaviest load to bear.
— Frances Ridley Havergal
No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days. Today was just a bad day, a kink in the road, to be traversed and survived.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.
— Gail Caldwell, Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
Adoption is grief in reverse.
— Jody Cantrell Dyer, The Eye of Adoption: The True Story of My Turbulent Wait for a Baby
Great grief does not of itself put an end to itself.
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Get out of bed. Go to classes. Try to be normal, and pretty soon all that grief you carry…it gets easier.
— Kristan Higgins, The Best Man
It happened. It was awful. You aren’t perfect. That’s all there is. Don’t confuse your grief with guilt.
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
Love is infinite. Grief can lead to love. Love can lead to grief. Grief is a love story told backward just as love is a grief story told backward.
— Bridget Asher
And did with sighs their fate deplore, Since I must shelter them no more;And if before my joys were such, In having heard, and seen too much, My grief must be as great and high, When all abandoned I shall be, Doomed to a silent destiny.
— Aphra Behn
No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days.
— Jojo Moyes, After You
Grief is a normal and natural response to loss. It is originally an unlearned feeling process. Keeping grief inside increases your pain.
— Anne Grant
All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road
A heartless Christian must be a terrible grief to our Lord.
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
The point is to turn your grief into love. The roses are helping you find grace.
— Holly Lynn Payne, DAMASCENA – The Tale of Roses and Rumi
It’s better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won’t get it.
— Hilary Thayer Hamann, Anthropology of an American Girl
To say that my grief will be eternal would be ridiculous – nothing is eternal.
— Marie Bashkirtseff
The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing… not healing, not curing… that is a friend who cares.
— Henri Nouwen
Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
— Marcel Proust
Regression in grief must be seen and supported as a means toward adaptation and health.
— Lily Pincus
There is no feeling except the extremes of fear and grief that does not find relief in music.
— George Eliot
Silence then, and the scent of apple trees, and the nightmare sense of grief that comes when a man wakes again to feel a loss he has forgotten in sleep.
— Mary Stewart
I do kabbalistic meditation. It’s not unlike time travel it can change the past and not just the future. You can look at what was lost and go beyond the grief of what was lost.
— Roseanne Barr
Among other things, Kathryn knew, grief was physically exhausting.
— Anita Shreve, The Pilot’s Wife
Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength.
— Oivd
The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.
— Vincent van Gogh
I had always turned to books, to knowledge, to help me get through everything in my life—and, sometimes, to escape it. But grief was a journey through a forest of razor blades. I walked through everypainful inch of it—no shortcuts and no anesthesia.
— Michele Bardsley, Don’t Talk Back To Your Vampire
I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.
— Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
Having difficult times and grief and brokenness, does not mean that life is over. These are just bumps in the road, obstacles to be overcome and made stepping stones into a long successful life.
— Teresa St. Frances, What Happens the Day After?
There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
I can only think how good life on earth can be, at times. What grief two people can give to one another! And what pleasure!
— Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy
Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek.
— Tana French, Broken Harbour
Unexpressed grief leaves the deepest scars.
— Marty Rubin
One often calms one’s grief by recounting it.
— Pierre Corneille
No matter what we are or who created us, we’re all energy. And energy that becomes bound together by love cannot be torn apart. Not by time. Not by grief and pain. Not even the veil of death.
— Callie Hart, Calico
[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.
— Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward
He had no idea how to deal with the staggering amount of grief he felt, so he looked to the sun and blinded himself with its light.
— Scott Stabile
He’d lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.
— Nicholas Sparks, The Choice
And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.
— Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
I think grief and fear are going to come to him suddenly. They’ll be undiluted and words won’t work. We’re all going to get hit and won’t know how to hit back. I wish I knew the answers, how to help myself and the people who will hurt all around me.
— Kaui Hart Hemmings
The first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing mattered. Grief of grief has drained me clean; Still it seems a pity No one saw, —it must have been Very pretty.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Renascence and Other Poems
With time, grief has a way of slipping down in the crevices of your heart. It never really leaves; it just makes room for more.
— Nancy B. Brewer, Beyond Sandy Ridge
My friends love me terribly, and their grief will be a screaming storm if I die.
— Tessa Gratton, The Strange Maid
Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.
— Xenophon
Poetry is emotion, passion, love, grief – everything that is human. It is not for zombies by zombies.
— F. Sionil Jose
He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
The facade of grief may be indifference, preoccupation, anger, cheerfulness, or any variety of emotions. But if we try to understand it, we may learn how to cope with it.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.
— Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven
True comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.
— Megan Devine, It’s Ok That You’re Not Ok: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand
The greater the time of grief or stress the greater reason we have to be in alignment with peace.
— Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace
The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom; no one can sound its depths.
— Primo Levi, If Not Now, When?
When I was young I wanted so much to be like her. What a blessing are those moments when there is nothing to worry about, no thought of trouble or grief in the world.
— Belinda Jeffrey, One Long Thread
Grief came in waves, sometimes big, sometimes small, but even on the calmest days, the grief remained. The tide still came ashore.
— Dianna Hardy, Rise Of The Wolf
My head is full of fireand grief and my tongueruns wild, piercedwith shards of glass.
— Federico García Lorca, Three Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma, Bernarda Alba
No one really understands the grief or joy of another.
— Franz Schubert
By all means, become an abomination–but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.
— Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf
The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.
— Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind
It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.
— Marcel Proust
When we grieve over someone who has died in Christ, we are sorrowing not for them but for ourselves. Our grief isn’t a sign of weak faith, but of great love.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
Most of us go through this journey of grief at different speeds
— Louise Suzanne Boyd, Journey to the Rainbow
And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.
— Mary Shelley
In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.
— James Thurber
And Nephilim—we tend to love very overwhelmingly. To fall in love only once, to die of grief over love—my old tutor used to say that the hearts of the Nephilim were like hearts of angels: They felt every human pain, and never healed.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire
Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face.
— Adam Berlin, The Number of Missing
This heart is a hurricane, turbulent with ache screaming winds of grief waiting to make the skyfall, to pluck the cloudsfrom their beds with itswhipping winds
— Jack Southfield
I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.
— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
It were a grief so brief to part with thee.Farewell.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
I have become a sour woman. I take no joy in meat nor mead, and song and laughter have become suspicious strangers to me. I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.
— George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
When a child can be brought to tears, and not from fear of punishment, but from repentance he needs no chastisement. When the tears begin to flow from the grief of their conduct you can be sure there is an angel nestling in their heart.
— Horace Mann
…all winter the acorns and red Maple leaf moldered in silence – in the same way grief is gnawing at me – slowly, imperceptibly… consuming…
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
How we respond to grief can shape our present
— K.C. Rhoads, The Corn Stalker
The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.
— Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase: By Andrea Gibson
Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you – it’s born with us the day that we are born.
— Homer, The Iliad
The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire. I am saying this again because I want it to be true.
— Sebastian Barry
There’s enough grief in this world without always getting into whose fault it is.
— Lisa Samson, Hollywood Nobody
Experience teaches that the fire of mental grief is intensified by being confined to its own hearth.
— Fr James Groenings
You start to understand that grief is chronic. That it’s more about remission and relapse than it is about a cure. What that means to you is that you can’t simply wait for it to be over. You have to move through it, like swimming in an undertow.
— Taylor Jenkins Reid, One True Loves
How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
The only cure for grief is action.
— G. H. Lewes
What was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gatsby Girls
Time takes away the grief of men.
— Desiderius Erasmus
On a fulcrum in my chest, grief and relief are balanced in equal measure.
— Nayomi Munaweera, What Lies Between Us
I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away.
— Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward
[W]e’ve learned that grief can sometimes get loud, and when it does, we try not to speak over it.
— Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family
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