21 QUOTES ABOUT DEATH, GRIEF, AND REMEMBERANCE

The Funeral Friend

There are hundreds of grief quotes out there just waiting to be shared (or re-shared rather) and, as it turns out, people like hearing and reading them! Quotes are great for so many reasons. They come to our aid when we are struggling for words. They turn our messy experiences into eloquent prose. They connect us and help us to know that, at the very least, one other person out there in the universe knows how we feel.

Some of the best quotes are those that (1) normalize and validate what it means to experience loss and to grieve and (2) those which acknowledge the ongoing love and connection grieving people have with those who had died.

So here we go...

1. "What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes part of us."  ~Helen Keller

2. "And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, if 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 this storm's all about." ~Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

3. "Life has to end. Love doesn't." ~Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven

4. "They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies." ~William Penn

5. "An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior." ~Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

6. "Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated." ~Alphonse de Lamartine, Meditations Poetiques

7. "Love is really the only thing we can possess, keep with us, and take with us." ~Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

8. "But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bare witness that a man had the greatest courage, the courage to suffer." ~Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

9. "Death ends a life, not a relationship." ~Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

10. "The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?" ~Edgar Allan Poe

11. "To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die." ~Thomas Campbell

12. "The holiest of holidays are those kept by ourselves in silence and apart: The secret anniversaries of the heart." ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

13. "I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are evil." ~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

14. "God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December." ~J.M. Barrie

15. "The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love." ~Kristina McMorris, Bridge of Scarlett Leaves

16. "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 Kubler-Ross and David Kessler

17. "Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the
o-er wrought heart and bids it break." ~William Shakespeare, Macbeth

18. "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

19. Where he shall die,
      Take him and cut him out in little stars,
      And he will make the face of heaven so fine,
      That all the world will be in love with night,
      And pay no worship to the garish sun." ~William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

20. "The song is ended, but the melody lingers on." ~Irving Berlin

21. "Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything." ~C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed