Have you been confronted with the death of a beloved friend or family member? The following quotes about losing a loved one will help you in coping with your grief. And for even more uplifting, loving, and supporting words for the bereaved, have a look at these grief quotes.
Sadly, all good things in life will eventually come to an end. We all are given the precious gift of life but with it comes the tragic fact that our lives will eventually end. Even though we all can rationally accept this fact, it doesn’t really prepare you for the time when you are actually confronted with the death of a loved one.
“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
Mitch Albom
Having to deal with the tragic death of a person very dear to you is never easy. It is perhaps one of the saddest experiences that life will ever confront you with. All of a sudden, your entire life is turned upside down and nothing is as it once was. Navigating through this exceptionally traumatic and emotionally charged period can be painfully difficult.
These quotes about losing a loved one may be just the right support during times of grief
When you are mourning the loss of a loved one, it is important to find something that helps you in coming to terms with what happened. Understanding how to cope with your loss will allow you to work yourself through your grief and emotional pain.
This help can come in the form of understanding and loving individuals who are willing to accompany you through the process of grieving your loved one. From friends, family members, therapists or priests, there are many people who can support you during this difficult time. For even more help, we have created the following selection of quotes.
107 Quotes about Losing a Loved One to Help You Cope
What makes the following thoughts so unique is that they were written by individuals who themselves were confronted with the pain of losing a beloved person. These authors had to cope with similar emotions and had to face similar problems such as yourself.
As tough and difficult as this time may have been to these individuals, they all have found ways to cope with their grief. Their quotes about losing a loved one may be just the right support for you to take the very first steps to work yourself through the pain.
Here’s our selection of quotes about losing a loved one
1.
“Even when a river of tears
courses through
this body,
the flame of love
cannot be quenched.”
Izumi Shikibu
2.
“Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.”
Dylan Thomas
3.
“The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
4.
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
5.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
Rumi
6.
“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.”
Charles Dickens
7.
“In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once.”
Abraham Lincoln
8.
“I am always saddened by the death of a good person. It is from this sadness that a feeling of gratitude emerges. I feel honored to have known them and blessed that their passing serves as a reminder to me that my time on this beautiful earth is limited and that I should seize the opportunity I have to forgive, share, explore, and love. I can think of no greater way to honor the deceased than to live this way.”
Steve Maraboli
9.
“Gifts of grace come to all of us. But we must be ready to see and willing to receive these gifts. It will require a kind of sacrifice, the sacrifice of believing that, however painful our losses, life can still be good — good in a different way than before, but nevertheless good.”
Jerry Sittser
10.
“Sorrow comes in great waves… but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.”
Henry James
11.
“I will never recover from my loss and I will never get over missing the ones I lost. But I still cherish life. . . . I will always want the ones I lost back again. I long for them with all my soul. But I still celebrate the life I have found because they are gone. I have lost, but I have also gained. I lost the world I loved, but I gained a deeper awareness of grace. That grace has enabled me to clarify my purpose in life and rediscover the wonder of the present moment.”
Jerry Sittser
12.
“The world is full of widows – several among my closer friends. We have each known that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged but found a way of living after and beyond. It is an entirely changed life, for anyone who has been in a long marriage – forty-one years, for me: alone in bed, alone most of the time, without that presence towards which you turned for advice, reassurance, with whom you shared the good news and the bad.”
Penelope Lively
13.
“Grief needs an outlet. Creativity offers one. Some psychiatrists see mourning and creativity as the perfect marriage, the thought processes of one neatly complementing the other. A child’s contradictory impulses to both acknowledge and deny a parent’s death represents precisely the type of rich ambiguity that inspires artistic expression.”
Hope Edelman
14.
“There is no right or wrong way to experience grief. Everyone is different. There can be interruptions and delays, depending on how we cope. In addition, we may bounce between denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However, there’s no rhyme or reason for the order or the length of time.”
Dana Arcuri
15.
“Love and loss,” he said, “are like a ship and the sea. They rise together. The more we love, the more we have to lose. But the only way to avoid loss is to avoid love. And what a sad world that would be.”
V.E. Schwab
16.
“You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair.”
Eva Ibbotson
17.
The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.”
Dean Koontz
18.
“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.”
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
19.
“Turn your wounds into wisdom.”
Oprah Winfrey
20.
“I can’t see the logic in medicating a grieving person like there was something wrong with her, and yet it happens all the time… you go to the doctor with symptoms of profound grief and they push an antidepressant at you. We need to walk through our grief, not medicate it and shove it under the carpet like it wasn’t there.”
Richard Wagner
21.
“I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.”
Gail Caldwell
22.
“You couldn’t have strength without weakness, you couldn’t have light without dark, you couldn’t have love without loss”
Jodi Picoult
23.
“Loss is only temporary when you believe in God!”
Latoya Alston
24.
“We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.”
John Green
25.
“As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation – either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
26.
“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
27.
“Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss?”
Susan Gordon Lydon
28.
“Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.”
José N. Harris
29.
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”
Kahlil Gibran
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.
“My scars remind me that I did indeed survive my deepest wounds. That in itself is an accomplishment. And they bring to mind something else, too. They remind me that the damage life has inflicted on me has, in many places, left me stronger and more resilient. What hurt me in the past has actually made me better equipped to face the present.”
Steve Goodier
32.
“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
33.
“There are memories that time does not erase… Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.”
Cassandra Clare
34.
“We endure. We have faith that there is purpose. We hope for things we can’t see. We believe there are lessons in loss, power in love, and that we have within us the potential for a beauty so magnificent, our bodies can’t contain it.”
Amy Harmon
35.
“When someone is grieving, you don’t have to say anything. Just be present. Be nonjudgmental. Let them cry, scream, or sit in silence. You don’t have to fix them.”
Dana Arcuri
36.
“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
37.
“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”
Rumi
38.
“Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.”
Dean Koontz
39.
“As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss.”
Cassandra Clare
40.
“People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So, in the end, we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.”
Fredrik Backman
41.
“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
42.
“Someday you’re gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You’ll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing.”
Elizabeth Gilbert
43.
“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.”
Joan Didion
44.
“The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn’t eased, but there was room there for humor, too.”
Nalo Hopkinson
45.
“What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again.”
Suzanne Collins
46.
“There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name.”
Jodi Picoult
47.
“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power … that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
Marcel Proust
48.
“Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears.”
Criss Jami
49.
“Our wounds are often the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.”
David Richo
50.
“Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me, they are proof of the fact that there is healing.”
Linda Hogan
51.
“And that’s just it, isn’t it? That’s how we manage to survive the loss. Because love, it never dies, it never goes away, it never fades, so long as you hang on to it.”
Gayle Forman
52.
“It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.”
Paulo Coelho
53.
“I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.”
Frida Kahlo
54.
“Every love is carved from loss.”
Jonathan Safran
55.
“We need never be ashamed of our tears.”
Charles Dickens
56.
“To weep is to make less the depth of grief.”
William Shakespeare
57.
“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
C.S. Lewis
58.
“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
G.K. Chesterton
59.
“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
Chuck Palahniuk
60.
“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.”
Sophocles
61.
“It sucks that we miss people like that. You think you’ve accepted that someone is out of your life, that you’ve grieved and it’s over, and then bam. One little thing, and you feel like you’ve lost that person all over again.”
Rachel Hawkins
62.
“No matter how bad your heart is broken, the world doesn’t stop for your grief.”
Faraaz Kazi
63.
“A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.”
Leonard Cohen
64.
“In the midst of happiness or despair
in sorrow or in joy
in pleasure or in pain:
Do what is right and you will be at peace.”
Jess Rothenberg
65.
“Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.”
Roland Barthes
66.
“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”
Haruki Murakami
67.
“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
68.
“When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.”
Pat Schweiber
69.
“The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.”
Kristina McMorris
70.
“That’s just life. You can fight it or you accept it. The only difference is, if you accept it, you get to do other things. If you fight it, you’re stuck in the same spot forever.”
David Wroblewski
71.
“If you ever lose someone dear to you, never say the words they’re gone. They’ll come back.”
Prince
72.
“People tell you to keep your “courage” up. But the time for courage is when she was sick, when I took care of her and saw her suffering, her sadness, and when I had to conceal my tears. Constantly one had to make a decision, put on a mask and that was courage. Now, courage means the will to live and there’s all too much of that.”
Roland Barthes
73.
“The mourning of a loved one never ends with a funeral. It comes back every so often, like a stage performer eager for a curtain call and expects you to be loud about it. I gave it all the lung capacity I had.”
Kevin Hearne
74.
“Everyone grieves in different ways. For some, it could take longer or shorter. I do know it never disappears. An ember still smolders inside me. Most days, I don’t notice it, but, out of the blue, it’ll flare to life.”
Maria V. Snyder
75.
“A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll ‘have’ to get used to existing quite ‘naturally’ within the solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, ‘fastened to’ the “presence of absence.”
Roland Barthes
76.
“If you have ever lost a loved one, then you know exactly how it feels. And if you have not, then you cannot possibly imagine it.”
Lemony Snicket
77.
“We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.”
Michael Ondaatje
78.
“Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people.”
Orson Scott Card
79.
“It’s always hard to lose somebody. It leaves a hole in your heart that never grows back. „
Kevin Brooks
80.
“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.”
Kristin O’Donnell Tubb
81.
“I’ve noticed in my life that the people who act as my angels are not some strange angelic creatures that seem almost untouchable, but are more real than that. They are people who have tasted sorrow, who have felt pain, and in a way, that makes them capable of being an angel. In their darkest moments, they have become strong.”
Hippie
82.
“Chase away sorrow by living”
Melissa Marr
83.
“When one person is missing the whole world seems empty.”
Pat Schweibert
84.
“When I was a girl I would look out my bedroom window at the caterpillars; I envied them so much. No matter what they were before, no matter what happened to them, they could just hide away and turn into these beautiful creatures that could fly away completely untouched.”
Patch Adams
85.
“For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.”
Alexandre Dumas
86.
“Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.”
Shakespeare
87.
“Tears are words the mouth can’t say nor can the heart bear.”
Joshua Wisenbaker
88.
“Tears are words the mouth can’t say nor can the heart bear.”
Joshua Wisenbaker
89.
“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
90.
“Great depth of beingness and creativity often come with great woundedness.”
Kathryn V. White
91.
“Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
C.S. Lewis
92.
“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside while still alive. Never surrender.”
Tupac Shakur
93.
“What is clear is that meaning may not be something we find. We found no meaning in our son’s death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning.”
Elaine Pagels
94.
“I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.”
C.S. Lewis
95.
“Understand there’s no right or wrong way to grieve, including anticipatory grief. It’s like the ocean. It ebbs and it flows. There can be moments of calm. But out of nowhere, it can feel like you’re drowning.”
Dana Arcuri
96.
“I thought maybe we mourned not only for the dead but also for the living. We felt their absence before we knew for sure they were gone.”
Vaddey Ratner
97.
“After a week, it’s better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable – so young, so much a citizen of a different era – that it is hard to feel fully deprived.”
Scott Turow
98.
“Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can’t even cry.”
Charles Bukowski
99.
“Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.”
J.K. Rowling
100.
“The mourning process can feel like going through a carwash without a car.”
Jodi Livon
101.
“What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.”
John Banville
102.
“To lose someone close to you is to enter an experience no amount of forethought or hindsight can free you from. You must live through grief. You cannot outsmart it, nor think through the fact of someone’s being gone, and forever. You must survive the sorrow.”
Kevin Young
103.
“Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone. Or set me on an airplane traveling west, crossing the dateline, again and again, losing this day, then that, until the day of loss still lies ahead, and you are here instead of sorrow.”
Nessa Rapoport
104.
“For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive.”
John Scalzi
105.
“Nothing on earth can make up for the loss of one who has loved you.”
Selma Lagerlöf
106.
“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
Lois Lowry
107.
“I have lived with you and loved you, and now you are gone. Gone where I cannot follow, until I have finished all of my days.”
Victoria Hanley
I hope you enjoyed this collection of quotes about losing a loved one. Feel free to share this collection of quotes with a grieving person.
Stay victorious!
