Top Grief Quotes Collection

Discover a curated collection of Grief quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category.

Image of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Life must go on; I forget just why.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Collection: Grief
Image of Victoria Hanley
I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.
- Victoria Hanley
Collection: Grief
Image of Andrew Harvey
There are no solutions to life, but there is an experience of wholeness, of bliss, of being, of the deathlessness of the Divine Self, of Silence in all its multifacted, diamond splendor that heals all grief, all wounds, all questions.
- Andrew Harvey
Collection: Grief
Image of Susan Mallery
Grief manifests differently in different people. We all get through things in our own time.
- Susan Mallery
Collection: Grief
Image of Mark Doty
Grief does not seem to me to be a choice. Whether or not you think grief has value, you will lose what matters to you. The world will break your heart. So I think we’d better look at what grief might offer us. It’s like what Rilke says about self-doubt: it is not going to go away, and therefore you need to think about how it might become your ally.
- Mark Doty
Collection: Grief
Image of Mark Doty
The World Will Break Your Heart. Grief might be, in some ways, the long aftermath of love, the internal work of knowing, holding, more fully valuing what we have lost.
- Mark Doty
Collection: Grief
Image of Mark Doty
It's unsettling, to lose the safety of the familiar, even when what's disrupted is an ordinary routine. When I began this poem, I was grieving for the loss of my old barbershop in Manhattan, and wondering at the strangeness of my new one. I didn't have any idea the poem would break into the underworld, opening a deeper subject: the continuing force of the old griefs routine helps to mediate, and my strange, sheer wonder at my own survival. Where's home now? In the contingent present, in which anything can disappear, and where we're sometimes granted some form of grace.
- Mark Doty
Collection: Grief
Image of Adelaide Anne Procter
Do no cheat thy Heart and tell her, 'Grief will pass away.'
- Adelaide Anne Procter
Collection: Grief
Image of Jürgen Moltmann
God heals the sicknesses and the griefs by making the sicknesses and the griefs his suffering and his grief. In the image of the crucified God the sick and dying can see themselves, because in them the crucified God recognizes himself.
- Jürgen Moltmann
Collection: Grief
Image of Eileen Wilks
We don't go to the ocean for anything as simple as happiness, do we? We go there to feel alive. Like life, the ocean holds chance and change, grief and terror and beauty. It promises mortality, not peace.
- Eileen Wilks
Collection: Grief
Image of Dodie Smith
Death is too much to ask of the living.
- Dodie Smith
Collection: Grief
Image of Bill Vaughan
Grief and constant anxiety kill nearly as many women as men die on the battlefield.
- Bill Vaughan
Collection: Grief
Image of Susan Wittig Albert
Sharing our stories can also be a means of healing. Grief and loss may isolate us, and anger may alienate us. Shared with others, these emotions can be powerfully uniting, as we see that we are not alone, and realize that others weep with us.
- Susan Wittig Albert
Collection: Grief
Image of Zbigniew Herbert
No time to grieve for roses when the forests are burning.
- Zbigniew Herbert
Collection: Grief
Image of Jean Sasson
(All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadness)
- Jean Sasson
Collection: Grief
Image of Martha C. Nussbaum
Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.
- Martha C. Nussbaum
Collection: Grief
Image of Samuel Daniel
Striving to tell his woes, words would not come; For light cares speak, when mighty griefs are dumb.
- Samuel Daniel
Collection: Grief
Image of Roger Rosenblatt
What is the difference between grief and mourning? Mourning has company.
- Roger Rosenblatt
Collection: Grief
Image of Susan Sarandon
There is no shortcut to grieving.
- Susan Sarandon
Collection: Grief
Image of Meghan O'Rourke
I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was.
- Meghan O'Rourke
Collection: Grief
Image of Meghan O'Rourke
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
Collection: Grief
Image of Meghan O'Rourke
Grief is characterized much more by waves of feeling that lessen and reoccur, it's less like stages and more like different states of feeling.
- Meghan O'Rourke
Collection: Grief
Image of Meghan O'Rourke
If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.
- Meghan O'Rourke
Collection: Grief
Image of Helen Steiner Rice
Comfort comes from knowing that people have made the same journey. And solace comes from understanding how others have learned to sing again.
- Helen Steiner Rice
Collection: Grief
Image of Barbara Park
The upside to grief is it takes away your appetite. When people say you look good they really mean it. Nature's thoughtful that way.
- Barbara Park
Collection: Grief
Image of Stevie Smith
Death's not a separation or alteration or parting; it's just a one-handled door.
- Stevie Smith
Collection: Grief
Image of Rachel Naomi Remen
I have even learned to respond to someone crying by just listening. In the old days I used to reach for the tissues, until I realized that passing a person a tissue may be just another way to shut them down, to take them out of their experience of sadness and grief. Now I just listen. When they have cried all they need to cry, they find me there with them.
- Rachel Naomi Remen
Collection: Grief
Image of Gail Caldwell
The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.
- Gail Caldwell
Collection: Grief
Image of Gail Caldwell
Grief is what tells you who you are alone.
- Gail Caldwell
Collection: Grief
Image of Gail Caldwell
the territory of grief ... is both cruel and commonplace.
- Gail Caldwell
Collection: Grief
Image of William Topaz McGonagall
Ye lover of the picturesque, if ye wish to drown your grief, take my advice and visit the ancient town of Crieff.
- William Topaz McGonagall
Collection: Grief
Image of Anita Shreve
And then she moved from shock to grief the way she might enter another room.
- Anita Shreve
Collection: Grief
Image of David Abram
The animate earth - this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love - is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity
- David Abram
Collection: Grief
Image of Denise Levertov
Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
- Denise Levertov
Collection: Grief
Image of Mary Renault
All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy - and that is as well, for one could not bear it - whose grief is that the principals never met.
- Mary Renault
Collection: Grief
Image of Carolyn Parkhurst
I wake up in that state of grief when you can tell you've been mourning even in your sleep.
- Carolyn Parkhurst
Collection: Grief
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Grief
Image of Michele Bardsley
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 every painful inch of it—no shortcuts and no anesthesia.
- Michele Bardsley
Collection: Grief
Image of Madeline Miller
Perhaps it is the greatest grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.
- Madeline Miller
Collection: Grief
Image of Madeline Miller
There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,” Chiron said. “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?
- Madeline Miller
Collection: Grief
Image of Michael Sheen
No matter how difficult things are, and no matter how much grief and loss there is, you can turn it into something positive.
- Michael Sheen
Collection: Grief
Image of Pericles
For 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
Collection: Grief
Image of Ann Patchett
I believe that, more than anything else, this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.
- Ann Patchett
Collection: Grief
Image of Jane Welsh Carlyle
all griefs, when there is no bitterness in them, are soothed down by time.
- Jane Welsh Carlyle
Collection: Grief
Image of Alison Bechdel
Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure
- Alison Bechdel
Collection: Grief
Image of Alison Bechdel
Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief
- Alison Bechdel
Collection: Grief
Image of Maria von Trapp
The sun has set in your life; it is getting cold. The hundreds of people around you cannot console you for the loss of the one.
- Maria von Trapp
Collection: Grief
Image of Jim Bishop
Death is as casual and often as unexpected as birth. It is as difficult to define grief as joy. Each is finite. Each will fade.
- Jim Bishop
Collection: Grief
Image of Ron Rash
What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.
- Ron Rash
Collection: Grief