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The late bell hooks knew that where there is grief, there is powerful, enduring love. “In its deepest sense,” she wrote, “grief is a burning of the heart, an intense heat that gives us solace and release.” Whether you have lost someone yourself or are comforting another who has lost a loved one, it can feel like there is nothing that can be said to make it better. But as exemplified by bell hooks, the greatest grief quotes provide comfort by sharing an experience of this pain.
Collected from the work of historic writers, poets, and songwriters, the following quotes incorporate a number of perspectives to guide through feelings of grief and loss. They stand apart from the rest— offering wisdom about living with their memory, absence, and the grieving process itself.
Find the words you need in our collection of the greatest quotes about grief and healing below.
Quotes about grief and memories:
1. “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 touches 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
2. “If there ever comes a day where we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.”
— A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
3. “I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through.”
— Billie Holiday, “I’ll Be Seeing You”
4. “So when you need her touch
And loving gaze
Gone but not forgotten
Is the perfect phrase
Smiling from a star
That she makes glow
Trust she’s always there
Watching as you grow
Find her in the place
Where the lost things go.”
— Mary Poppin Returns. “The Place Where Lost Things Go”
5. “The song is ended, but the melody lingers on.”
— Irving Berlin
6. “We do not have to rely on memories to recapture the spirit of those we have loved and lost – they live within our souls in some perfect sanctuary which even death cannot destroy.”
— Nan Witcomb
7. “Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it.”
― Stephen Levine
8. “A great soul serves everyone all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.”
— Maya Angelou
9. “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
10. “Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds its way back to you.”
— Ranata Suzuki
Quotes about loss:
11. “One more day
One more time
One more sunset, maybe I’d be satisfied
But then again
I know what it would do
Leave me wishing still, for one more day with you.”
— Diamond Rio
12. “Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.”
— Alphonse de Lamartine, Méditations Poétiques
13. “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
14. “The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?”
― Philip K. Dick
15. “The melody that the loved one played upon the piano of your life will never be played quite that way again, but we must not close the keyboard and allow the instrument to gather dust. We must seek out other artists of the spirit, new friends who gradually will help us to find the road to life again, who will walk the road with us.”
— Joshua Loth Liebman
16. “Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms.”
— Paulo Coelho
17. “I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone-you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence.”
— Alyson Noel
18. “For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms.”
― Lurlene McDaniel
19. “When I saw your strand of hair I knew that grief is love turned into an eternal missing.”
― Rosamund Lupton
20. “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
21. “What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.”
― Gail Caldwell
22. “Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”
— Pablo Neruda
Quotes about grief:
23. “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
— Khalil Gibran
24. “Look closely and you will see almost everyone carrying bags of cement on their shoulders. That’s why it takes courage to get out of bed in the morning and climb into the day.”
— Edward Hirsch
25. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
26. “The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief – But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love.”
— Hillary Stanton Zunin
27. “And once the storm is over you won’t remember you how made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm’s all about.”
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
28. “The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.”
— Kristina McMorris, Bridge of Scarlett Leaves
29. “But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.”
— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
30. “Your grief path is yours alone, and no one else can walk it, and no one else can understand it.”
— Terri Irwin
31. “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
32. “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
33. “And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.”
— Maya Angelou
34. “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
35. “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
That rounds out our collection of 35 quotes about grief and healing. We hope that some of the quotes on this list can provide comfort or clarity for you and yours, or to send to anyone grieving. Whose words have you resonated with when processing a loss?
To meet others who share a similar experience of loss, including access to over 25+ support spaces, download the Untangle app.
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