Quotes about grief
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“Silence is not just about secrecy, Your Majesty. It is grief and it is shame.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Froi of the Exiles

“Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Life, Youth, Sadness, Feeling

“Good grief, Molly. He doesn't scare you?"
"Of course not."
"But he's…"
"He's sweet," Molly insisted.
Dare snorted. "He's still listening.”

Lori Foster (1958) American writer

Source: When You Dare

“Give me a land of boughs in leaf
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen there is grief;
I love no leafless land.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

Love, Tree

“Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?”

Alison Bechdel (1960) American cartoonist, author

Source: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Disappointment, Failure, Sea

“He'd lived long enough to know that everyone handled grief in different ways, and little by little, they all seemed to accept their new lives.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Choice

Source: The Choice

Way

“There's no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

Source: Cash

World, Way, Loss

“I hoped that grief was similar to the other emotions. That it would end, the way happiness did. Or laughter.”

Neil Jordan (1950) Irish filmmaker and fiction writer

Happiness, Hope, Way, Laughter

“My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.”

Alice Hoffman book Green Angel

Source: Green Angel

Feeling

“Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Rescue

Source: 2000s, The Rescue (2000), Chapter 1, p. 9

Life, Happiness, Youth, Reality

“There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief… is the weight of a sleeping child.”

Anne Michaels book Fugitive Pieces

Source: Fugitive Pieces

Love, Death, Sleep, Loss

“Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature.”

Anthony Rapp book Without You

Source: Without You

Change

“After all the dangerous adventures I'd had, I couldn't die like this. Sadie would be devastated. Then, once she got over her grief, she'd track down my soul in the Egyptian afterlife and tease me mercilessly for how stupid I'd been.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Sobek

Source: The Son of Sobek

Stupidity, Soul

“Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.”

William Faulkner book If I Forget Thee

Variant: Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief
Source: The Wild Palms

“The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley.
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

To a Mouse, st. 7 (1785)
Source: Collected Poems of Robert Burns

Men, Pain, Joy

“That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.”

Sarah Dessen book The Truth About Forever

Source: The Truth About Forever

“Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic

Men, Hate, Disappointment, Selfishness

“Sometimes my grief is overwhelming, and even though I understand that we will never see each other again, there is a part of me that wants to hold on to you forever.”

Nicholas Sparks book Message in a Bottle

Source: Message in a Bottle

Understanding, Parting

“I loathe a friend whose gratitude grows old, a friend who takes his friend's prosperity but will not voyage with him in his grief”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Gratitude

“There's a fine edge to new grief, it severs nerves, disconnects reality--there's mercy in a sharp blade. Only with time, as the edge wears, does the real ache begin.”

Christopher Moore (1957) American writer of comic fantasy

Reality, Time

“In the sea of grief, there were islands of grace, moments in time when one could remember what was left rather than all that had been lost.”

Kristin Hannah (1960) American writer

Source: Night Road

Time, Sea

“These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Feeling, Time

“Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.”

Stephen King book Bag of Bones

Source: Bag of Bones

Housing

“For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow's life.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Source: Dune

Life, World, Sea

“Grief is when you feel so helpless and stupid that you think nothing will ever be right again, and your macaroni and cheese tastes like sawdust, and you can't even jerk off because it seems like too much trouble.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Stupidity, Jerk, Feeling, Thinking

“A young woman in love always looks like Patience on a monument Smiling at Grief.”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

Love, Smile, Patience

“But grief makes a monster out of us sometimes… and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can't forgive yourself for.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

Love, People, Forgiveness

“Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.”

Andrew Solomon book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Source: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Depressing

“be a good listener, don't judge and don't put boundaries on someone else's grief.”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

Source: The Storyteller

“The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-com, and you never will outpace your grief.”

Sue Monk Kidd (1948) Novelist

Source: The Invention of Wings

Truth

“Even extreme grief may ultimately vent
itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy”

Joseph Conrad book Heart of Darkness

Source: Heart of Darkness

“I can wade Grief --
Whole Pools of it --
I'm used to that --
But the least push of Joy
Breaks up my feet --
And I tip -- drunken --
Let no Pebble -- smile --
'Twas the New Liquor --
That was all!”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Source: Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems

Smile, Joy

“She knew what it was to wait for someone who would never come home. She knew that grief, like a scar, faded but never really went away.”

Libba Bray book The Diviners

Source: The Diviners

Home, Waiting

“… and motioned me toward a spot next to a middle-aged Moroi in a very formal and very designer black suit. The suit screamed, I'm sorry the queen is dead, and I'm going to look fashionable while showing my grief”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

Age, Fashion, Dead

“Every day has its great grief or its small anxiety…. One cloud is dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day in a hundred of real joy and bright sunshine.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Joy

“Monsters are born of pain, and grief, and loss, and anger. Your heart is full of them.-
-"And?"
And it makes you vulnerable.”

Jim Butcher book Summer Knight

Source: Summer Knight

Pain, Loss, Heart, Anger

“I was on the verge of crying with grief at still being alive.”

Knut Hamsun book Hunger

Source: Hunger

Cry

“Call me a sinner,
Mock me maliciously:
I was your insomnia,
I was your grief.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

“In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

Heart

“He smiled despite the grief he felt at the deaths of his men; he smiled because that was what he did. That was how he proved to the Lord Ruler-and to himself-that he wasn't beaten.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Final Empire

Death, Men, Smile

“I knew a girl, once, immortal like me-"

"And she was with someone mortal?" said Alec. "What happened?"

"He died," Magnus said. There was a finality to the way he said it that spoke of a deeper grief than words could paint.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Way, Girl, Painting

“Both she and I have grief enough and trouble enough, but as for regrets – neither of us have any.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

“So much grief, so much anger. So unlike the usual Adrian.”

Richelle Mead book Last Sacrifice

Source: Last Sacrifice

Anger

“The first rose on my rose-tree
Budded, bloomed, and shattered,
During sad days when to me
Nothing mattered.

Grief of grief has drained me clean;
Still it seems a pity
No one saw,—it must have been
Very pretty.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Source: Renascence and Other Poems

Sadness, Tree

“Envy comes from wanting something that isn't yours, but grief comes from losing something you've already had.”

Jodi Picoult Perfect Match

Variant: Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn't yours. But grief comes from losing something you've already had.
Source: Perfect Match

Envy

“And I don’t want his body touching something I wear. He’ll contaminate it. (Sasha)
Oh, good grief, Sasha. Grow up. You’re four hundred years old and you’re acting like a whelp. It’s not like he has cooties or anything. (Astrid)
Yes he does! (Sasha)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

“Grief, as I read somewhere once, is a lazy Susan. One day it is heavy and underwater, and the next day it spins and stops at loud and rageful, and the next day at wounded keening, and the next day numbness, silence.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

Silence, Rage, Reading

“The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

Source: All the Pretty Horses

Communication

“Why have you come to me here, dear heart, with all these instructions? I promise you I will do everything just as you ask. But come closer. Let us give in to grief, however briefly, in each other's arms.”

Homér Iliad

Source: The Iliad

Heart

“YOU don’t choose your life; it chooses you. There’s no point asking why life has reserved certain joys or griefs, you just accept them and carry on.”

Paulo Coelho book Adultery

Source: Adultery

Life, Joy

“His absence seemed a solid thing, a burden I must carry in addition to my grief… Yet I knew I would continue to live. Sometimes that knowledge seemed the worst part of my loss.”

Robin Hobb (1952) American fiction writer (pseudonym)

Source: Golden Fool

Knowledge, Loss, Parting

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

“Grief makes you feel alone, but you're not. I know you don't believe in-in religion-the same way I do, but you can believe you're surrounded by people who love you, can't you?”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Love, People, Religion, Way

“They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty,” they’d joke.
Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: The Piper's Son

Life, Youth

“Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Borrowing From the French http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=20649&c=323 <br class="br">1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

Evil, Hurt

“It's like when someone dies, the initial stages of grief seem to be the worst. But in some ways, it's sadder as time goes by and you consider how much they've missed in your life. In the world.”

Emily Giffin Something Borrowed

Variant: Someday being with Dex will be a distant memory. This fact makes me sad too. Its the initial stages of grief that seem to be worst but in some ways, Its sadder as time goes by and you consider how much they're missed in your life.
Source: Something Borrowed

Life, World, Way, Time

“Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.”

Upton Sinclair book Dragon's Teeth

Source: Dragon's Teeth

Fate, Pleasure, Sadness, Suffering

“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

Source: The Year of Magical Thinking

Life

“It was like Percy had faced death before, like he knew about grief. What mattered was listening. You didn’t need to say you were sorry. The only thing that helped was moving on—moving forward.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Death, Help

“Grief was like a newborn, and the first three months were hard as hell, but by six months you'd recognized defeat, shifted your life around, and made room for it.”

Ann Brashares book Sisterhood Everlasting

Source: Sisterhood Everlasting

Life, Hell

“And no matter what anybody says about grief and about time healing all wounds, the truth is, there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken.”

Tiffanie DeBartolo (1970) American writer

Truth, Time, Heart

“There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

“… you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help… And then finally, the way through grief is grieving.”

Jane Hamilton (1957) American novelist

Pain, Way, Learning, Help

“That life isn't fair?" Yeah, that, of course. But I also learned that it's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief… lessens.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Tim Wheddon, Chapter 20, p. 265
Variant: ... I learned that it's possible to go on, no matter how impossible it seems, and that in time, the grief... lessens. It may not ever go away completely, but after a while it's not overwhelming.
Source: 2000s, Dear John (2006)

Life, Learning, Time

“Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?”

Julian Barnes (1946) English writer

Source: Levels of Life

Time

“Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.”

Mary Doria Russell Children of God

Source: Children of God

Love

“I know how to be the witness to her grief. I don't know how to be this kind of villain.”

Holly Black book Red Glove

Source: Red Glove

“There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Fear, Music, Feeling

“Grief wraps around people, takes them to a place they would not go otherwise.”

Patti Callahan Henry American writer

Source: Between The Tides

People

“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Pain, Beauty, Birth, Heart

“Every love story is a potential grief story.”

Julian Barnes (1946) English writer

Source: Levels of Life

Love

“The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins with love and ends with grief.”

Steven Erikson book Toll the Hounds

Source: Toll the Hounds

Love, Soul

“Stunned and still not suffering. Swollen with care and anxiety and still not suffering. Useless, old and full of grief, but still not suffering.”

Leonard Cohen book Book of Longing

Source: Book of Longing

Suffering

“We ourselve are the authors of almost all our woes and griefs, of which we so unreasonably complain.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge —
That myth is more potent than history.
I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts —
That hope always triumphs over experience —
That laughter is the only cure for grief.
And I believe that love is stronger than death.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

"Credo" at his official website http://robertfulghum.com/index.php/fulghumweb/credo/; this may be partly influenced by remarks of Albert Einstein in "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck" The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929): I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. <br class="br">Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Love, Death, Dreams, Hope