3,968 Quotes About Grief

It’s odd, isn’t it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it’s a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you’re not alone.

I wonder, if I keep faking it, will I eventually believe it? A part of me worries that I’ll keep faking it and completely forget what’s real at all.

If you can keep acting normal before your family, friends and society, your sorrow has not yet breached your limits, it is not intense enough to transform you.

I wonder if it hurts to live,And if they have to try,And whether, could they choose between,They would not rather die.

Healing is not about moving on or “getting over it,” it’s about learning to make peace with our pain and finding purpose in our lives again.

When a play ends, the audience gets up and follows signs for the exit. For a few hours after Momma died, I lay in my bed and thought I might not ever be able to get up again--without her and her direction, I worried that I'd forget the basic rules of existing.

I took out my anger on my hair when Momma had none. Momma was dying, and her body was destroying itself from the inside out—and I didn’t want to live in a body that was healthy, or with a head full of hair, if she couldn’t have that, too. If her body was collapsing, I wanted to destroy mine.

A major loss can suck everything else in with it.

...there are certain tragedies from which we never recover. We may eventually adjust to the sense of loss that pervades every waking hour of the day. We may accept the desperate sadness that colors all perception. We may even learn to live with the loss. But it doesn't mean we will ever fully cauterize the wound or shut away the pain in some steel-tight box and consider it vanquished.