12 Quotes to Help with Grief

In life, we go through a wide variety of situations and experience emotions as diverse as anger, elation, and heart-rending agony. In the words of the writer of Ecclesiastes:

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a atime for peace. – Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

At one point or another in our lives, we will encounter grief. Human beings are built for relationships, and because of that, the possibilities for grief are multiplied. We are not alone in this and finding other people along the way who have felt what we feel, and who have endured despite the challenges thrown their way can be exactly the encouragement and companionship we need in our grief.

The twelve quotes below are from a broad range of sources, but they reflect the ways in which we try to cope with the realities of grief. What emerges is that while grief is a complicated process that one never really and truly gets over, life is possible after we’ve encountered loss. We aren’t the same people we were before our loss, but we can continue living and find joy again.

One author featured below is C.S. Lewis, whose reflections on life are always incisive and clear. He authored the book A Grief Observed after the passing of his wife Joy who had suffered from cancer. They had been married for less than four years when she died.

Lewis was well-known at this point as a Christian writer and defender of Christianity, but the loss of his wife severely tested his faith in God. The book contained his reflections on his grief, and some of those may resonate in deep ways with you. Other authors and sources are quoted as well because the experience of grief among people is diverse.

12 Quotes to Help You Process Your Grief

Below are twelve quotes to help you as you process your grief:

“I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache and 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

“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

“For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often – will it be for always? – how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, “I never realized my loss till this moment?” The same leg is cut off time after time.” – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“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

“Grief can destroy you –or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see that it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the way of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day, not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.” – Dean Koontz, Odd Hours

“God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.” – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?” – Jeanette Winterson, Written on the body

“Real grief is not healed by time…If time does anything, it deepens our grief. The longer we live, the more fully we become aware of who she was for us, and the more intimately we experience what her love meant for us. Real, deep love is, as you know, very unobtrusive, seemingly easy and obvious, and so obvious that we take it for granted. Therefore, it is often only in retrospect – or better, in memory, that we fully realize its power and depth. Yes, indeed, love often makes itself visible in pain.” – Henri Nouwen

“Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals, or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present, I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.” – C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not “get over” the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.” – Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler

“Ain’t no shame in holding on to grief . . . as long as you make room for other things too.” –Bubbles, The Wire

“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

Grief and sorrow are a process. It’s a journey you don’t have to undertake alone, though. Others are going through a similar journey, and so finding a grief support group or a grief therapist to walk with you can help you with the tools you need to cope with grief and create room for other things in your life too.