quotes on grief

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.

from a headstone in Ireland

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

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

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

Bede Jarrett

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

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

William Shakespeare

Man, when he does not grieve, hardly exists.

Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W. S. Merwin

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.

E. M. Cioran

Grief is a species of idleness.

Samuel Johnson

Grief is itself a medicine.

William Cowper, Charity

In my Lucia's absence
Life hangs upon me, and becomes a burden;
I am ten times undone, while hope, and fear,
And grief, and rage and love rise up at once,
And with variety of pain distract me.

Joseph Addison

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

Kenji Miyazawa

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.

from the television show The Wonder Years

If you're going through hell, keep going.

Winston Churchill

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Time is a physician that heals every grief.

Diphilus

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

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

Lou Reed, "Magic and Loss"

Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.

Dan Rather

You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.

Jan Glidewell

There are things that we don't want to happen but have to accept, things we don't want to know but have to learn, and people we can't live without but have to let go.

author unknown

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

Moliere

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

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

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

Robert Ingersoll

Even if happiness forgets you a little bit, never completely forget about it.

Jacques Prévert

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

Henry Maudsley

Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He's going to be up all night anyway.

Mary C. Crowley

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

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

John Taylor