Top 100 About Grief Quotes
#1. People talk about grief as emptiness, but it's not empty. It's full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you'd have.
Elan Mastai
#2. War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.
Russell Crowe
#3. Learning about all those different things psychologically - about grief and my own addictions and problems and stuff like that, and really getting an education on it, I think it was part of the process of it, learning about it and trying to lick it.
Richie Sambora
#4. The thing about grief is that it's a roller coaster - it's up, it's down. The emotions sometimes take over.
Brent Sexton
#5. That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.
Sarah Dessen
#6. 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.
Brene Brown
#7. It was like Percy had faced death before, like he knew about grief. What mattered was listening. You didn't need to say you were sorry. The only thing that helped was moving on - moving forward.
Rick Riordan
#8. I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.
Julian Barnes
#9. One of the things about grief - I wouldn't generalise, because everybody responds to tragedies in different ways - but I had a huge amount of energy.
David Toop
#10. Playing a Disney princess is the most amazing, unbelievable thing and on the other, it's completely terrifying. I would say it's a cocktail of every sort of emotion. Princesses are great role models, they teach you about grief loss and have big hearts.
Lily James
#11. And so I learned about grief, and about the absence and emptiness that for a long time make grief unforgettable.
Wendell Berry
#12. Politics is about grievances.... Poetry is about grief.
Raymond Paul
#13. Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.
Eudora Welty
#14. What no one told me about grief is how lonely it is. No matter who else is mourning, you're in your own little cell.
Jodi Picoult
#15. What was so terrible about grief was not grief itself, but that one got over it.
P.D. James
#16. The weird thing about grief, for me at least, was when each of my parents died, for a year or two afterwards I was pretty wildly brave - just willing to take life on.
Mike Mills
#17. Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.
Joan Didion
#18. One of the strange things about grief is the way it ambushes you when you least expect it.
J.P. Delaney
#19. No one knows what to do with me now that I'm alive. There's no protocol for how to treat someone who comes back from the dead. There are so many books about grief and loss, about saying good-bye to the people you love. But there is no book about taking back that good-bye.
Amy Reed
#20. What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.
Gail Caldwell
#21. From Laurie Colwin: Lovely writing! About grief she writes: I realized that grief is metabolic: it crawls through you like a disease and takes your energy away. Then it gathers and hits like a sudden migraine, like being hit by a car, like having a large, flat rock hurled at your chest.
Laurie Colwin
#22. That was the thing about grief. It wasn't something you worked through once. It was something you worked through over and over again. The effects of losing someone lasted a lifetime.
Stephanie Reid
#23. One thing I have learned about grief," I said to her, "is that nothing anyone says to you is useful, but it can still be comforting sometimes to know you're not alone
Jo Walton
#24. One of the things about grief is that it can bring a deeper perspective into your life; in the end, it has, for me, though it's also brought sorrow.
Meghan O'Rourke
#26. A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.
Duane Michals
#27. And no matter what anybody says about grief and about time healing all wounds, the truth is, there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#28. 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
#29. Again and again, I learn how much friendship enriches my life, bringing warmth, assurance, humour, inspiration, a sense of security. It depends on honesty, trust, loyalty. It's about giving. It's for sharing the good times, but also the tough times, hurt, grief, sadness.
Quentin Bryce
#30. It is a fact that the majority of a man's griefs comes about through lack of self-control.
Napoleon Hill
#31. When Cecily comes to sit beside me, we rest our heads together and I tell her a final story about the twins. The one whose grief drove him to set the country ablaze. And the one who found a way to love her captor.
Lauren DeStefano
#32. Community is about sharing my life; about allowing the chaos of another's circumstances to infringe on mine; about permitting myself to be known without constraint; about resigning myself to needing others.
Sandy Oshiro Rosen
#33. I was a little bit perturbed by the whole big grief machine that grew out of 9/11. I knew that I wanted to write about it, but I wasn't sure about how to go about it.
Colum McCann
#34. A relationship is like a holiday from loneliness, beginning and ending in the same airport. The most awful thing about the end is that it reminds you so clearly of the beginning with the joy with which you set off. Everything is the same, yet everything has been inverted by grief.
Louis Buss
#35. Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.
Edith Wharton
#36. But tormented souls have this incredible ability to recognize and approach one another, thus compounding their grief.
Why hadn't I noticed this in him? Why did I see only the superficial way he talked about politics or the pedantic way he tasted the wine?
Paulo Coelho
#37. The trauma said, 'Don't write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.
Andrea Gibson
#38. The thing about dead people ... The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is ... complicated, I guess.
John Green
#39. If a man be gloomy let him keep to himself. No one has the right to go croaking about society, or what is worse, looking as if he stifled grief.
Benjamin Disraeli
#40. It occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him
his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and 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
#41. And while they were in the same place, there came a great mist about them and a darkness, so that they could not know what way they were going, and they heard the noise of a rider coming towards them. 'It would be a great grief to us,' said Conn, 'to be brought away into a strange country.
Lady Augusta Gregory
#42. Talking about your feeling with someone who is willing to listen can be enormously consoling, especially if that person has experienced a death similar to the one you are grieving.
Candy Lightner
#43. When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is 'acquainted with Grief', we listen, for that also is an Acquaintance of our own.
Emily Dickinson
#44. I never knew I could suffer so much. And then, at the same time, you think, now I'm ready to open myself up to life in another way, to make it worth something and make it about the right things and not waste time.
Gwyneth Paltrow
#45. Harrison wrote a two-page poem about his deep feelings of loss when his dog Filbert died, and Mrs. Minerva, the creative writing teacher, gave it a B-minus. Do you know what that does to a a person to get a B-minus in Grief?
Joan Bauer
#46. Why do we as humans always tend to remember the worse things about people? We may know someone for many years, know them as vibrant and healthy, yet when they fall ill and pass away, we can only picture them at their sickest, as though they were born and lived their whole lives wearing a death mask.
K. Martin Beckner
#47. And she knows then that she was right about her brother, that it takes an unbelievable strength to feel this kind of grief, and she doesn't know if she can handle it, because it really hurts, hurts her more than the razor ever could.
Julia Hoban
#48. I look up, and Jackson's eyes find mine. For a second, it almost feels like we're about to race into the hole to join you. Being buried alive has got to be better than whatever comes next.
Adam Silvera
#49. They were talking about things that didn't matter a fig, not with the huge yawning grief burning a hole in his chest because of what had happened to her. To Josie. His Josie, now.
Eloisa James
#50. Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it.
Jean De La Bruyere
#51. I'd lost my family to my years of failing as a songwriter. All I had were bills, child support, and grief. And I was about to get fired. It looked like I'd trashed my act. But there was something liberating about it. By not having to live up to people's expectations, I was somehow free.
Kris Kristofferson
#52. I loved everything about her, and I didn't care how dark she got. If anything it was what I loved the most, the veil of pain that fell across her face most of the day, and all of the night.
Brendan Cowell
#53. If I talk about my father's funeral, as I did when I was promoting the last novel, 'Being Dead,' I'm not going to tell any lies, but there are certain things I'm not going to tell you, and I'm certainly not going to tell my grief.
Jim Crace
#54. Sometimes I just needed to talk about it, even though it singed like touching the end of a match. I just needed to feel that pain for a moment, to know that it was real. It was my pain. I had earned it by living through it.
Shelly Crane
#55. How I longed to tell her about Harriet
but somehow I could not. The grief in the room belonged to Porcelain and I realized, almost at once, that it would be selfish to rob her of it in any way.
Alan Bradley
#56. Question me now about all other matters, but do not ask who I am, for fear you may increase in my heart it's burden of sorrow as I think back; I am very full of grief, and I should not sit in the house of somebody else with my lamentation and wailing. It is not good to go on mourning forever.
Homer
#57. I cried harder. I didn't want to, but I couldn't stop myself.
I couldn't stop myself, so I thought about all the bad things and I fed it and fed it until I was crying so hard I had to gasp for breath between sobs.
Ransom Riggs
#58. In truth, nothing was the same. She forgot about the stars ... and taking notice of the sea. She was no longer filled with all the curiosities of the world and didn't take much notice of anything ... other than how heavy ... and awkward the bottle had become.
Oliver Jeffers
#59. Hearing him talk about his mother, about his intact family, makes my chest hurt for a second, like someone pierced it with a needle.
Veronica Roth
#60. The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off - it just gives up, resets itself to zero. Admit it. None of us feel a damn about these people.
Alastair Reynolds
#61. 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
#62. I don't know about the first steps in a geography of loss, and I know that it's unmapped. I know that we all have to go by ourselves.
Wayne Earl
#63. Grief is as much about regret for what you've never had as sadness for what you've lost.
David Nicholls
#64. Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.
Wallace Stegner
#65. The reason that you call it 'grief' is because you've been programmed to believe that you should feel bad about death.
Esther Hicks
#66. There is something embarrassing about someone else's grief. It is hard to know what to do around it. The right answer, always, is hugs.
Adam Gidwitz
#67. It is too late. I love him. I know it may bring me grief, and I can't do a thing about it. Mr. Congreve was right about love being a frailty of the mind.
John Jakes
#68. Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty. And Harry felt, as he had felt about phoenix song before, that the music was inside him, not without: It was his own grief turned magically to song..
J.K. Rowling
#69. There was something about other people's grief that was so exposing, so personal, that she felt she shouldn't be looking.
Jane Fallon
#70. His mother was as frosty as the polar icecaps. His sister was gone. Who did he have that cared about him? Who would remind him that he mattered?
Sofia Grey
#71. It is of no avail to know what is about to happen; for it is a sad thing to be grieved when grief can do no good.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#72. It's about believing two opposing ideas in your head at the same time: hope and grief.
Claire Fuller
#73. 'The Killing' has a really great combination of qualities: Even though it's very sad and deals with mourning and grief, it's still exciting. It's about real people and it doesn't shy from the painful points of life.
Joel Kinnaman
#74. All the troubles of the world, especially the spiritual, such as grief, impatience, disillusionment, despair, the truly basic troubles of man-they came about only because of the failure to view clearly the majesty of God.
Abraham Isaac Kook
#75. ( ... ) and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death was Augustus Water.
John Green
#76. Maybe the relationships we can't get over are more about the grief of losing the precious dreams we'd created with that person, attached to that person, planned to share with that person than because of the person themselves?
Claire Garber
#77. She'd crawled into her grief and cocooned it around her, unable to care about anyone or anything -
Kristin Hannah
#78. What could you say about someone who walked daily into his grief and lived at the bottom of its hole and didn't even want to come out?
Marie Rutkoski
#79. We actually wanted to ask you a few questions. About the interview you did this morning."
At the mention of her KTVU debut, Caitlyn softened a little. "You saw that?"
I nodded.
"How did I look on camera?"
Her grief was touching.
Gemma Halliday
#80. 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
#81. I have no right to be sad about anything. No right to have therapy from expensive doctors like you for losing children who never existed. There is real grief in the world. There are real mothers losing real children.
Liane Moriarty
#82. My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.
Alice Hoffman
#83. As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.
Rosanne Cash
#84. She knows by now that grief is about endurance, understanding over and over that the person you loved is not coming back.
Joan Wickersham
#85. I've had people tell me to get over it. I politely tell them, 'How about if I chop off your finger and see if it grows back?
Jim Sheeler
#86. When I'm talking about depression, I'm talking about the more severe forms of depression, and I think that conceptualising as a form of grief is probably not the most effective way of looking at it. I mean, at the end of the day, people suffer enormously, and you want to treat it.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#87. I got a lot of grief from my teammates about that. It might backfire on my mom. Hopefully, my brother will have another chance somewhere down the road.
Scott Niedermayer
#88. The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.
James Patterson
#89. In the chain of events, it is arbitrary to be sentimental about the passing of any one link.
Johnny Rich
#90. Trials are not arbitrary. When I speak about them, I am referring to the mindful suffering.Man has come to his present development thanks to his hardships and trials.These are what prepare man for the Coming of Love.
Peter Deunov
#91. And this evening when I close my eyes against the darkness and think about her, I'll imagine iridescent wings fluttering, if only for a moment, against cloudless blue skies.
Nancy Stephan
#92. I try to remember everything, every thing, but sometimes I forget something. I don't even know what it is sometimes, but I know it's not coming to me, something about him isn't coming to me and when that happens, when a piece is missing, it makes me crazy. I don't know what to do with that.
Adam Berlin
#93. Joy mingled with sadness, even with grief, is the deepest human joy. It winds itself about the soul with indescribable sweetness, with a dim but unerring sense for what will some day be born of it.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
#94. You take a handful of rocks and put them in a jar. Then once a week, you take one tiny pebble out of the jar and throw it away. When the jar is empty, why, you'll just about be over your grief ... Time alone will do if you're short on rocks.
Sharyn McCrumb
#95. The more I learn about life and people, the more I realise that everyone has a story and everyone's story is the biggest in their own mind." - Laylla Jonson
L.B. Malpass
#96. That's the nature of grief: It's a creature with many arms but few legs, and it staggers about, searching for support.
Yann Martel
#97. Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.
Siri Hustvedt
#98. Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
C.S. Lewis
#99. Somehow he's looked inside me and he's seen what lurks in there: that even in my grief, all I worry about is myself.
Stephen Lloyd Jones
#100. I guess I'm curious about how people process grief and how they process loss. And I'm also interested in the ways in which an event can have long-reaching consequences and a life over the course of years.
Dan Chaon
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
