Parenting

70+ Pregnancy Loss Quotes to Help Parents Who Are Grieving

by Team Scary Mommy

Updated: Feb. 4, 2021

Originally Published: November 25, 2019

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It’s difficult to come up with the right words when someone you know is coping with grief over a pregnancy loss or miscarriage. Thankfully, there are a number of meaningful, comforting, and loving pregnancy loss quotes available that are soothing and put words to a mother or parent’s heartbreak. If you’ve gone through a miscarriage, first and foremost (hugs). Pregnancy is complicated and delicate, and sometimes you’re at a loss for words. But we got you.

Whether it’s you who has miscarried or someone close to you, we found the most poignant pregnancy loss quotes to help parents cope with grief.

Looking for more quotes to ease your mind? Check out our pages on strength, encouragement, and Monday motivation.

” Listen for my footfall in your heart. I am not gone but merely walk within you.” — Nicholas Evans
“Any woman who’d ever lost a child knew of the hollowness that remained within the soul.” — Brittainy C. Cherry
“I guess love just wasn’t enough for us to survive. I swear, I swear, I swear I tried. You took the life right out of me. I’m so unlucky I can’t breathe. You took the life right out of me. I’m longing for your heartbeat, heartbeat.” — Beyoncé
“I’m broken. We’re all broken and right now we’re all isolated within that brokenness. The cure for the loneliness is connection — connection with that broken part of ourselves and with each other — and we can’t achieve that connection while pretending we are okay. We’re not okay.” — L.M. Browning
“We were going to have a baby, but we had an angel instead.” — Unknown
“A person’s a person, no matter how small.” — Dr Seuss
“The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.” — Cheryl Strayed
“Maybe learning to live with the question marks, recognizing that closure does not always occur, is all I really needed to do. I hadn’t expected, coming from a world that fights to see life’s beginnings in black and white, to be so comforted by a shade of gray.” — Peggy Orenstein
“At sunset the little soul that had come with the dawning went away, leaving heartbreak behind it.” — L.M. Montgomery
“You didn’t stay for long, but in those precious few weeks, you changed me forever.” — Zoe Clark-Coates
“As long as I can I will look at this world for both of us, as long as I can, I will laugh with the birds, I will sing with the flowers, I will pray to the stars, for both of us.” — Unknown
“We do not ‘get over’ a death. We learn to carry the grief and integrate the loss in our lives. In our hearts, we carry those who have died. We grieve and we love. We remember.” — Nathalie Himmelrich
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched, but are felt in the heart.”— Helen Keller
“It’s amazing how much people hide it. They feel like,‘What did I do wrong?’ But in so many cases you didn’t do anything at all.” — Giuliana Rancic
“When a child is born, it is the mother’s instinct to protect the baby. When a child dies, it is the mother’s instinct to protect the memory.” — Unknown
“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” — Winnie the Pooh
“What my sister needed was not people urging her, as so many did, to get pregnant again as soon as possible, but acknowledgment of her loss and the violence that she experienced in that loss. She needed to know that this was not a failure or that she was a bad mother. She needed to be allowed to be not only sad but also, in her grief, to be angry. But as Gunther explained, ‘Society does not like to hear from us castaway mothers.’” — Soraya Chemaly
“We do not have control over many things in life and death but we do have control over the meaning we give it.” — Nathalie Himmelrich
“Just because we lost a life, doesn’t mean we have to lose ourselves.” — Tamara Gabriel
“Those we have held in our arms for a short while we hold in our hearts forever.” — Unknown
“When you carry a life and it’s there, and then gone, a part of your soul dies. Forever.” — Casey Wiegano
“As you danced in the light with joy, love lifted you. As you brushed against this world so gently, you lifted us.” — TC Ring
“How very softly you tiptoed into our world, almost silently, only a moment you stayed. But what an imprint your footsteps have left upon our hearts.” — Dorothy Ferguson
“I’ll love for forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.” — Robert Munsch
“Grief is not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith. It is the price of love.” — Unknown
“I told myself, if it can happen once, it can happen again.” — Brooke Shields
“A mother is never defined by the number of children you can see, but by the love that she holds in her heart.” — Franchesca Cox
“There is a unique pain that comes from preparing a place in your heart for a child that never comes.” — David Platt
“Sometimes it’s hard to see the rainbow when there’s been endless days of rain.” — Christina Greer
“It hurts because it matters.” — John Green
“Perhaps they are not stars in the sky, rather openings where our loved ones shine down to let us know they are happy.” — Proverb
“There is no foot too small that it cannot leave an imprint on this world.” — Unknown
“Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.” — W.S. Merwin
“Blaming the woman for the loss of a child is like blaming the soldier for the loss of his life in battle.” — Katherine Longshore
“Babies lost in the womb were never touched by fear. They were never cold, never hungry, never alone, and importantly always knew love.” — Zoe Clark-Coates
“I held you every second of your life.” — Stephanie Paige Cole
“Sometimes when life doesn’t work out as you planned, there is a greater force at work.” — Deanna Kahler
“Heaven and earth may separate us today, but nothing will ever change the fact that you made me a mom.” — Unknown
“A mother’s grief is as timeless as her love.” — Joanne Cacciatore
“In lieu of letting go of our trauma and rather than healing completely, in my experience, we learn how to carry it and there are some days when it is heavier than others. Some days, I hardly know it is there, distracted as I am by present joys and excitement; while other days, the burden is cripplingly-heavy and I can hardly breathe under the weight of grief.” — L.M. Browning
“I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye, was the trouble. I wanted to kiss you goodnight, and there’s a lot of difference.” — Ernest Hemingway
After the first miscarriage, I tried to take the attitude that it was my body’s way of telling me that this pregnancy wasn’t meant to be, and that it was better for everybody. But after the second one, it was really devastating. Four months is a lot of living with that little life in you—thinking about it, eating right for it, nurturing it—and all of a sudden, it dies.” — Christie Brinkley
“The one who left gentle footprints on our hearts left a story worth telling.” — Unknown
“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
“…hope is never wasted. Even if what I hoped for did not come to fruition as I had imagined, as I had hoped. Hope is placing the beautifully vulnerable parts of ourselves, our raw selves, into His hands. I believe hope moves His heart; but hope also moves our hearts into His hands. Hope builds trust.” — Natalie BrennerRelated: How To Cope With A Miscarriage
“It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.” — Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
“But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen.” — Ariel Levy
“Learn to see the gift in the adversity. By doing this you will begin to find true peace in your struggle.” — Stacey Urrutia
“In one of the stars, I shall be living. In one of them, I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night . . . You—only you—will have stars that can laugh!” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“To lose a child is to lose a piece of yourself.” — Dr Burton Grebin
“A life may last just for a moment, but memory can make that moment last forever.” — Unknown
“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.” — Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Grief, I’ve learned, is really love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot give. The more you loved someone, the more you grieve. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes and in that part of your chest that gets an empty and hollow feeling. The happiness of love turns to sadness when unspent. Grief is just love with no place to go.” — Jamie Anderson
“Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”— A. A. Milne
“The one true hurdle I’ve faced in life is that I have a broken belly.” — Elizabeth Banks
“The best advice that I got during counselling: Don’t judge your spouse’s grief response. Give them the freedom to grieve their own way.” — Rachel Crawford
“Even those that never fully blossom bring beauty into the world.” — Unknown
“And grief is not something you complete, But rather, you endure. Grief is not a task to finish. And move on, But an element of yourself-An alteration of your being.” — Gwen Flowers
“Throughout my life, there were a few hard days. Days where even when I tried to be happy, my heart still cracked, and Mother’s Day was one of those. For others, it stood as a celebration. For me, it spoke of loss and failure. Because there’s no such thing as an ‘almost’ Mother’s day.” — Brittainy C. Cherry
“We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love anymore.” — Anne Enright
“I carry your heart with me, I am never without it.” — E. E. Cummings
“Some say you are too painful to remember. I say you are too precious to forget.” — Unknown
“How very quietly you tiptoed into our world, silently, only a moment you stayed. But what an imprint your footprints have left upon our hearts.” — Dorothy Ferguson
“You’re never really ready to be told that there’s no heartbeat. But stay strong because life goes on and it is nobody’s fault.” — Elisabeth Canalis
“We can’t deny our journey. We can’t pretend we’re fine when we’re not. All we can do is own it—own our suffering.” — L.M. Browning
“Something significant in me snapped when I miscarried; that something hadnt unsnapped yet. It hadn’t been put back together and I was afraid it never would. I knew Jesus was with me, but my insides twirled threatening to take me down from the inside out. I knew He was with me, giving me permission to be in the broken parts of my story…” — Natalie Brenner
“You never arrived in my arms, but you will never leave my heart.” — Zoe Clark-Coates
“A life need not be long to be meaningful.” — Unknown
“Every day, in every day, I am getting better and better.” — Emile Coue
“Each new life, no matter how brief, forever changes the world.” — Unknown
“For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep.” — Diana Gabaldon
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou
“What does a miscarriage feel like? It feels as if you have been short-changed by nature. You will cry for what might have been but nobody will understand because they didn’t feel it.” — Unknown

This article was originally published on November 25, 2019