1. She heard him mutter, ‘Can you take away this grief?’ ‘I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.’

- Terry Pratchett

2. 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

3. Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys.

- Alphonse de Lamartine

4. When you part from your friend, you grieve not; for that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

- Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

5. It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.

- Marcus Tulius Cicero

6. Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.

- José N. Harris

7. And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.

- Sarah Waters

8. 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

9. Well, everyone can master grief but he that has it.

- William Shakespeare

10. When someone you love becomes a memory, that memory becomes a treasure.

- Unknown

11. 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

12. In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life.

- Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

13. Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.

- Pablo Neruda

14. Those we love don’t go away, they walk beside us every day…unseen, unheard, but always near, still loved, still missed, and very dear.

- Unknown

15. Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.

- Matthew 5:4, NASB

16. Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face – I know it’s an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.

- Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle

17. You attend the funeral, you bid the dead farewell. You grieve. Then you continue with your life. And at times the fact of her absence will hit you like a blow to the chest, and you will weep. But this will happen less and less as time goes on. She is dead. You are alive. So live.

- Neil Gaiman

18. So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.

- E.A. Bucchianeri

19. What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us.

- Helen Keller

20. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.

- Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

21. You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.

- J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Ph

22. They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite.

- Cassandra Clare

23. Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.

- Mark Twain

24. 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

25. The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God!

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

26. You will survive and you will find purpose in the chaos. Moving on doesn’t mean letting go.

- Mary Van Haute

27. The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

- John Green

28. She was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

- George Eliot

29. And when your sorrow is comforted (for time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend.

- Antonie de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

30. We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.

- C.S. Lewis

31. We are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.

- Michelle Moran

32. Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.

- John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

33. Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.

- Meghan O’Rourke

34. Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time. It tell us to tell each other right now that we love each other.

- Leo Buscaglia

35. Grieving doesn’t make you imperfect. It makes you human.

- Sarah Dessen

36. 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

37. Envy, after all, comes from wanting something that isn’t yours. But grief comes from losing something you’ve already had.

- Jodi Picoult

38. When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.

- Pat Schweibert

39. I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

- Gail Caldwell

40. In the garden of memory, in the palace of dreams…that is where you and I shall meet.

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

41. The worst type of crying wasn’t the kind everyone could see–the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it.

- Katie McGarry

42. Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears.

- Maria V. Snyder

43. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

- C.S. Lewis

44. 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

45. 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

46. If you cannot hold me in your arms, then hold my memory in high regard. And if I cannot be in your life, then at least let me live in your heart.

- Ranata Suzuki

47. Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

- Leo Tolstoy

48. Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

49. There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.

- Aeschylus

50. You can not die of grief, though it feels as if you can. A heart does not actually break, though sometimes your chest aches as if it is breaking.

- Laurel K. Hamilton

51. Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.

- Orson Scott Card

52. Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.

- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

53. The only way to end grief was to go through it.

- Holly Black

54. Grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.

- George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

55. Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here’s what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it’s still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it’s been too long since you missed them last.

- Kristen O’Donnell Tubb

56. Accepting death doesn’t mean you won’t be devastated when someone you love dies. It means you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by bigger existential questions like, “Why do people die?” and “Why is this happening to me?” Death isn’t happening to you. Death is happening to us all.

- Caitlin Doughty

57. You can’t truly heal from a loss until you allow yourself to really feel the loss.

- Mandy Hale

58. Great grief does not of itself put an end to itself.

- Seneca

59. 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

60. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven’t, you cannot possibly imagine it.

- Lemony Snicket