Grief quotes
2.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside grief — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Grief - Happiness is to feel that one's soul is good; there is no other, in truth, and this kind of happiness may exist even in sorrow, so that there are griefs perfable to every joy, and such as would be preferred by all those who have felt them."
"He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds."
"I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind."
"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?"
"Grief seems at first to destroy not just all patterns, but also to destroy a belief that a pattern exists."
"This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist."
"Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be."
"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."
"Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is."
"I wonder why bereaved people even bother with mourning clothes when the grief itself provides such an unmistakable wardrobe."
"grief is a house that disappears each time someone knocks at the door or rings the bell a house that blows into the air at the slightest gust that buries itself deep in the ground while everyone is sleeping"
"When I'm with him, there is someone with me in my house of grief, someone who knows its architecture as I do, who can walk with me, from room to sorrowful room, making the whole rambling structure of wind and emptiness not quite as scary, as lonely as it was before."
"Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief."
"And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old-or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give."
"Oh! grief is fantastic; it weaves a web on which to trace the history of its woe from every form and change around; it incorporates itself with all living nature; it finds sustenance in every object; as light, it fills all things, and, like light, it gives its own colors to all."
"Precious attribute of woe-worn humanity! that can snatch ecstatic emotion, even from under the very share and harrow, that ruthlessly ploughs up and lays waste every hope."
"Even the eternal skies weep, I thought; is there any shame then, that mortal man should spend himself in tears?"
"the sentiment of immediate loss in some sort decayed, while that of utter, irremediable loneliness grew on me with time."
"We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being."
"Inside my mother's death / I lay and could not breathe."
