Quotes About Grief and Sorrow

Awesome Quotes and Sayings About Grief and Sorrow

Quotations & Citations:

 

 

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

~George Eliot

 

I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.

~J.R.R. Tolkien

 

 

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

~Rumi

 

While we are mourning the loss of our friend, others are rejoicing to meet him behind the veil.

~John Taylor

 

Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.

~José N. Harris

 

Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face – I know it’s an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.

~Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle

 

The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.

~Henry Maudsley

 

 

In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life

~Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

 

In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.

~Robert Ingersoll

 

The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!

~Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

 

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.

~Marcus Aurelius

 

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 have learned so many lessons,
Since our heads were bowed in grief,
That have kept our boat from crashing
On life’s ragged, rocky reef.

~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham

 

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

~Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

 

If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble.

~Moliere

 

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

~C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

 

Come, ye disconsolate, where’er you languish,
Come at the shrine of God fervently kneel;
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish—
Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal.

~Thomas Moore

 

 

They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite

~Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

 

There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.

~Lou Reed

 

You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.

~J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

 

The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.

~Arthur Schopenhauer

 

It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses.

~Colette

 

 

Time is a physician that heals every grief.

~Diphilus

 

Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.

~Veronica Roth, Insurgent

 

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

~Winston Churchill

 

To weep is to make less the depth of grief.

~William Shakespeare

 

Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place.

~Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

 

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.

~William Shakespeare, Macbeth

 

 

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

 

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.

~Kenji Miyazawa

 

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.

~Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

 

Grief is a house
where the chairs
have forgotten how to hold us
the mirrors how to reflect us
the walls how to contain us

grief is a house that disappears
each time someone knocks at the door
or rings the bell
a house that blows into the air
at the slightest gust
that buries itself deep in the ground
while everyone is sleeping

grief is a house where no one can protect you
where the younger sister
will grow older than the older one
where the doors
no longer let you in
or out

~Jandy Nelson, The Sky is Everywhere

 

 

And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.

~Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

 

Grief is itself a medicine.

~William Cowper, Charity

 

“It doesn’t get better,” I said. “The pain. The wounds scab over and you don’t always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you’ll never be the same.”

~Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits

 

Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief.

~Nicholas Sparks, The Rescue

 

 

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;
For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as
the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

~Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

 

Grief is a species of idleness.

~Samuel Johnson

 

Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears. An ember still smolders inside me. Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.

~Maria V. Snyder, Storm Glass

 

I have outlasted all desire,
My dreams and I have grown apart;
My grief alone is left entire,
The gleamings of an empty heart.

The storms of ruthless dispensation
Have struck my flowery garland numb,
I live in lonely desolation
And wonder when my end will come.

Thus on a naked tree-limb, blasted
By tardy winter’s whistling chill,
A single leaf which has outlasted
Its season will be trembling still.

~Alexander Pushkin

 

Sorrow makes us all children again — destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.

~Pat Schweibert, Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss

 

Every morning, I wake up and forget just for a second that it happened. But once my eyes open, it buries me like a landslide of sharp, sad rocks. Once my eyes open, I’m heavy, like there’s to much gravity on my heart.

~Sarah Ockler, Twenty Boy Summer

 

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.

~William Shakespeare

 

Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.

Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.

~Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

 

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

 

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

 

 

Sorrow you can hold, however desolating, if nobody speaks to you.  If they speak, you break down.

~Bede Jarrett

 

Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can’t even cry.

~Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

 

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

~Kahlil Gibran

 

No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn’t stop for your grief.

~Faraaz Kazi

 

There are all kinds of ways for a relationship to be tested, even broken, some, irrevocably; it’s the endings we’re unprepared for.

~Katherine Owen, Not To Us

 

 

Grieving doesn’t make you imperfect. It makes you human.

~Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever

 

There’s a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality–there’s mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.

~Christopher Moore

 

Love is an engraved invitation to grief.

~Sunshine O’Donnell, Open Me

 

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, Angel