3,968 Quotes About Grief

The solution to grief is not a pain-free existence. It is allowing ourselves to grieve and witnessing ourselves in that process. Permission and presence are the remedies for agony and isolation.

In grief and loss, it becomes incredibly hard to recognize who we are. Grief makes us different people. Everything that we identify with—from our emotional states to our patterns to our dreams to our fears to our preferences to our core truths— everything fractures and shatters under the weight of loss.

Permission is the key that unlocks the door that’s been holding us trapped, muzzled, and stifled in our grief. Permission is the opposite of rejection. Permission is the opposite of abandonment. Permission lifts the weight, eases the pressure, and loosens the reins.

Grief wants to be seen, heard, and listened to... just like we do.

She remembered how she had felt cleaning out her father's clothes, wanting at once to hold on to every dirty handkerchief and musty page of sheet music, and yet wishing she were anywhere else on earth, free of it all.

Grief is not fixable, curable, or preventable. It is not a “condition” or pathology.

Life is linear until it isn’t.

Asking our emotions to stay predictable, easy, and flat in grief is like asking the ocean to be a smooth, glassy, back- yard pool. It’s just not possible. Can you imagine an ocean that didn’t roar and crash into the shore? It wouldn’t be an ocean, would it? We allow our humanness in grief by giving ourselves permission to experience our feelings in their fullness as they surface.

Hope is a corpse. A dead thing, watching you suffer with black empty eyes. Any comfort it might have offered, long since gone to the grave.