64 QUOTES ABOUT GRIEF, COPING, and LIFE AFTER LOSS

 A good quote serves many purposes. A quote helps us put our own thoughts and feelings into perspective, it allows us to use words of others to communicate or to convey a message, and it helps us to feel a sense of commonality when we find our feelings, experiences, and observations match those of another.

Here are 64 (Shhh! There are really 58) quotes about grief, coping and life after loss. According to "What's Your Grief", it may be hard to tell how a handful of these would be considered grief-related, just take their word on it.

1. "The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with - nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life." ~~Rob  Sheffield, Love is a MixTape
2. "To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die." ~~Thomas Campbell
3. "Motherhood: All love begins and ends there." ~~Robert Browining
4. "Love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark...to have been loved so deeply...will give us some protection forever" ~~JK Rowling
5.  It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. My mom says some days are like that. ~~Judith Viorst in Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
6. When I Think of Death ~~by Maya Angelou ~~ When I think of death, and of late the idea has come with alarming frequency, I seem at peace with the idea that a day will dawn when I will no longer be among those living in this valley of strange humors. I can accept the idea of my own demise, but I am unable to accept the death of anyone else. I find it impossible to let a friend or relative go into that country of no return. Disbelief becomes my close companion, and anger follows in its wake. I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'it is here in my heart and mind and memories.'
7. At the blueness of the skies and in the warmth of summer, we remember them. ~~Sylvan Kamens & Rabbi Jack Reimer
8. "Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken? ~~Terry Pratchett
9. All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on. ~~Havelock Ellis
10. "G-d gave us memory so that we might have roses in December." ~~J.M. Barrie
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. "Life would be tragic if it weren't funny." ~~Stephen Hawking
13. "It's not how much we give but how much love we put into giving." ~~Mother Theresa
14. "There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, so just give me a happy middle and a very happy start." ~~Every Thing On It
15. "The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases." ~~C.G. Jung
16. "Should you shield the valleys from the windstorms, you would never see the beauty of their canyons." ~~Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
17. "Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back." ~~Mitch Albom (For One More Day)
18. "Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart and you'll never walk alone." ~~Rodgers and Hammerstein, Carousel
19. "On this bald hill the new year hones its edge. Faceless and pale as china the round sky goes on minding its business. Your absence is inconspicuous, nobody can tell what I lack." ~~Sylvia Plath, Parliament Hill Fields
20. "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, Farenheit 451
21. "When we have joy we crave to share; we remember them." ~~Sylvan Kamens & Rabbie Jack Riemer
22. "Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it 'til it comes to have a separate and integral interest.To regret deeply is to live afresh." ~~Henry David Thoreau
23. "I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places that this heart of mind embraces all day through" ~~Billie Holiday, I'll Be Seeing You
24. 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
25. "You gave me a forever within the numbered days..." ~~John Green, The Fault In Our Stars
26. "I would always look for clues to her in books and poems, I realized. I would always search for the echoes of the lost person, the scraps of words and breath, the silken ties that say, Look: she existed," ~~Meghan O'Rourke, Story's End
27. 14 years. My longest relationship. My only experience of maternal love. My constant companion.My best friend. Duck. ~~Sarah Silverman on her dog, Duck
28. "Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy and change ordinary opportunities into blessings." ~~William Arthur Ward
29. Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.~~Edna St. Vincent Millay
30. 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
31. Losing my mother at such an early age is the scar of my soul. But I feel like it ultimately made me into the person I am today. I understand the journey of life. I had to go through what I did to be here. ~~Mariska Hargity
32. "But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" ~~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
33. My father didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. ~~Clarence Budington Kelland
34. "No one ever told me that grief felt like fear" ~~C.S. Lewis
35. "Ain't no shame in holding on to grief...as long as you make room for other things too" ~~"Bubbles" The Wire
36. "She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts." ~~George Eliot
37. "The holiest of holidays are those kept by ourselves in silence and apart: The secret anniversaries of the heart." ~~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
38. When a child dies, you bury the child in your heart. ~~Korean Proverb
39. "As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them." ~~John Fitzgerald Kennedy
40. Promissory Note - If I die before you which is all but certain then in the moment before you will see me become someone dead in a transformation as quick as a shooting star's I will cross over into you and ask you to carry not only your own memories but mine too until you too lie down and erase us both together into oblivion. ~~Galway Kinnell
41. It's coming on Christmas. They're cutting down trees. They're putting up reindeer. And singing songs of joy and peace. Oh I wish I had a river I could skate away on. ~~Joni Mitchell
42. "Hope. Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering 'it will be happier'..." ~~Alfred Tennyson
43. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of dispair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. ~~Martin Luther King Jr.
44. "When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, why you live, and in the manner in which you live." ~~Stuart Scott, 1965-2015
45. The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. ~~Khalil Gibran
46. "Grief sucks." ~~Everyone Ever
47. It takes strength to make your way through grief, to grab hold of life and let it pull you forward. ~~Patti Davis
48. "The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated." ~~Cheryl Strayed
49. "What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we've never met." ~~David Levithan
50. "A merry heart doe th good like a medicine." ~~Proverbs 17:22
51. "You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good." ~~Khalil Gibran
52. Someday soon, we all will be together, if the fates allow, until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow
53. "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man." ~~Heraclitus
54. Next person that minimizes my grief is getting a swift kick to the shin.
55. "Well, every one can master a grief but he that has it." ~~William Shakespeare