35+ Grief Quotes That Aren't Clichès And Will Offer Some Real Comfort

Everyone deals with stages of grief differently. What will comfort one person will enrage another. Some folks want to feel the pain, others want to be distracted. And clichès? The worst. Whether you’re dealing with a loss, navigating your own emotions and mourning, or trying to help a loved one deal with theirs, sometimes it can be helpful to share others’ insights. We’ve collated a number of quotes about grief and thoughts about sadness from literary giants, notable psychologists, and others that will hopefully provide some comfort as you or someone you care about go through the grieving process. Hopefully, these expressions of wisdom about grief and the grieving process that we hope can provide some comfort.

1. “What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us.” — Helen Keller

2. “Grief changes shape, but it never ends.” — Keanu Reeves

3. “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.” — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

4. “Grief starts to become indulgent, and it doesn’t serve anyone, and it’s painful. But if you transform it into remembrance, then you’re magnifying the person you lost and also giving something of that person to other people, so they can experience something of that person.” – Patti Smith

5. “Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.” ― Roland Barthes

6. “And when people try to minimize your pain they are doing you a disservice. And when you try to minimize your own pain you’re doing yourself a disservice. Don’t do that. The truth is that it hurts because it’s real. It hurts because it mattered. And that’s an important thing to acknowledge to yourself. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t end, it won’t get better. Because it will.” — John Green

7. “Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.” – Rumi

8. “If ever there is tomorrow when we’re not together… there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart… I’ll always be with you.” — A.A. Milne

9. “Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope” ― Elizabeth Gilbert

10. “No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.” ― Zora Neale Hurston

11. “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

12. “Grief is the price we pay for love.” — Queen Elizabeth II

13. 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

14. “Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.” — Cheryl Strayed

15. “To spare oneself from grief at all costs can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.” — Erich Fromm

16. “’You’ll get over it…’ It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. 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

17. “One of the things that happens to people in grief is they secretly think they’re crazy, because they realize they are thinking things that don’t make sense.” — Joan Didion

18. “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

19. “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

20. “When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don’t try to take it away. Forgive yourself for not having that power. Grief and pain are like joy and peace; they are not things we should try to snatch from each other. They’re sacred. they are part of each person’s journey. All we can do is offer relief from this fear: I am all alone. That’s the one fear you can alleviate.”

― Glennon Melton

21. “Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief.” ― Alison Bechdel

22. “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

23. “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

24. “We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world—the company of those who have known suffering.” — Helen Keller

25. “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 Kübler-Ross

26. “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

27. “Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing…” ― Elizabeth Gilbert

28. “Some people, they can’t just move on, you know, mourn and cry and be done with it. Or at least seem to be. But for me… I don’t know. I didn’t want to fix it, to forget. It wasn’t something that was broken. It’s just…something that happened. And like that hole, I’m just finding ways, every day, of working around it. Respecting and remembering and getting on at the same time. ” ― Sarah Dessen

29. “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” — Thomas Cambell

30. “When I think of death, and of late the idea has come with alarming frequency, I seem at peace with the idea that a day will dawn when I will no longer be among those living in this valley of strange humors.

I can accept the idea of my own demise, but I am unable to accept the death of anyone else. I find it impossible to let a friend or relative go into that country of no return. Disbelief becomes my close companion, and anger follows in its wake. I answer the heroic question ‘Death, where is thy sting? ‘ with ‘ it is here in my heart and mind and memories.'” – Maya Angelou, “When I Think Of Death”

31. “It is not length of life, but depth of life.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

32. “For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.” — Kahlil Gibran

33. “Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

34. “Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.” ― Anna Quindlen, Every Last One

35. “Everyone is ‘extremely nice’—and yet I feel entirely alone. (“Abandonitis”).”

― Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

36. “I thought maybe we mourned not only for the dead but also for the living. We felt their absence before we knew for sure they were gone.” ― Vaddey Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan

37. “Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.” ― Joan Didion