21 Absolutely Heartwrenching Quotes On Loss And Grief

 Evdokimov Maxim
Evdokimov Maxim

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay


“Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.”

–William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing


“Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.”

–Vicki Harrison


“It is 4am.
Your perfume is on
Everything, on me
On all the world – you
Are all around, you
Are all of my tattered
Senses and no poetry,
No song, no writing,
Nothing in the world
Will make this better.”

–David Jones, Could You Ever Live Without?


“It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”

–John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent


“My life is like a stroll upon the beach,
As near the ocean’s edge as I can go”

–Henry David Thoreau, The Fisher’s Boy


“Grief is the price we pay for love.”

–Queen Elizabeth II


“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time — the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes — when there’s a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she’s gone, forever — there comes another day, and another specifically missing part.”

–John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany


“What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”

–Helen Keller


“The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief – But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love.”

–Hilary Stanton Zunin


“I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.”

–Anne Frank


“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”

–Anne Lamott


“I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone-you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence.”

–Alyson Noel, Evermore


“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.”

–Washington Irving


“… And here am I, budding
among the ruins
with only sorrow to bite on,
as if weeping were a seed and I
the earth’s only furrow.”

–Pablo Neruda, “Lightless Suburb”


“There are no happy endings.
Endings are the saddest part,
So just give me a happy middle
And a very happy start.”

–Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic


“Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.”

–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion


“My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.”

–Emily Dickinson


“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


“Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.”

–Alphonse de Lamartine, Méditations Poétiques


“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart.”

–Helen Keller Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Related: 65+ Inspirational Quotes For Life, Love, Success, Work & More


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