Grief is a deeply personal journey, one that often leaves us feeling isolated and overwhelmed by emotions that are difficult to articulate. In times of loss, finding solace can seem like an impossible task. However, amidst the pain and sorrow, there is a glimmer of hope to be found in the words of others who have walked a similar path. As someone who has recently experienced the profound loss of a loved one, I have come to realize the power of quotes on grief and loss. In moments when words fail me, these poignant reflections offer a sense of connection and understanding. A lot of these quotes are from books I've read and found helpful. I created another post with a list of those books here. My heart goes out to all who are hurting.
QUOTES ON GRIEF AND LOSS
"We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don't disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms." - Paulo Coelho
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ” - Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.” - Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved."- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.
“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.”- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief
“I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief
“For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief
“I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. "Find peace in your memories," I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, "This is what you will never again have.”- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us." - Helen Keller
“Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.”― Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers
“I missed her so much that I wanted to build a hundred-foot memorial to her with my bare hands. I wanted to see her sitting in a vast stone chair in Hyde Park, enjoying her view. Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her. How physical my missing is. I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her. Eugh,”― Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
“I think,” Juna says after a pause, “that the thing about losing someone isn’t the loss but the absence of afterwards. D’you know what I mean? The endlessness of that.” She looks sideways at me and sniffs. “My friends were sad, people who knew my sister were sad, but everyone moves on after a month. It’s all they can manage. It doesn’t mean they weren’t sad, just that things keep going or something, I don’t know.” She rolls her shoulder, shakes her head. “It’s hard when you look up and realise that everyone’s moved off and left you in that place by yourself. Like they’ve all gone on and you’re there still, holding on to this person you’re supposed to let go of.”- Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.”- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“The death of a beloved is an amputation.”- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” - C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache an about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
“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, A Grief Observed
“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.”- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
" To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die." - Thomas Campbell
"Love gets in the way of death. Love is life. Every single thing I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is-everything exists-only because I love. Everything is bound up with love, and love alone. Love is God, and dying means me, a tiny particle of love, going back to its universal and eternal source."- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
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