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Loneliness is a feeling that, unfortunately, everyone knows. It comes in many different forms and for many different reasons. It’s the feeling of waiting all night for a text that never came, missing a loved one who has passed, or looking for that lost spark in a relationship. It’s missing a beloved pet that’s no longer by your side, or feeling as if all your friends have left you. For some it passes quickly, but for others, it’s a hole deep inside that never quite goes away. Sometimes, when you’re feeling down, it helps just to know that you’re not alone in your pain. Here are some quotes about grief from literature to maybe help you feel just a little bit better.
28 Quotes About Grief from Books to Help You Feel A Little More Okay
1. “Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face—I know it’s an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.”
–Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle
2. “Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
–Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
3. “No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days.”
–Jojo Moyes, After You
4. “You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.”
–J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
5. “So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
–E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
6. “They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite.”
–Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince
7. “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
–John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
8. “I am stronger than I am broken.”
–Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
9. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
–Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
10. “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”
–Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
11. “My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That’s just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.”
–Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
12. “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
13. “What I really fear is time. That’s the devil: whipping us on when we’d rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past, at past that won’t hold still . . .”
–Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists
14. “Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.”
–William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
15. “If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There’s an initial uprush of relief at first, then a profound dislocation.”
–Mary Karr, Lit
16. “In the cycle of nature there is no such thing as victory or defeat; there is only movement.”
–Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra
17. “Grief does not change you. It reveals you.”
–John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
18. “Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.”
–José N. Harris, MI VIDA: A Story of Faith, Hope and Love
19. “I should know enough about loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone—you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence.”
–Alyson Noel, Evermore
20. “You are never stronger . . . than when you land on the other side of despair.”
–Zadie Smith, White Teeth
21. “Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”
–Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi
22. “And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.”
–Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year
23. “Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it. It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”
–Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
24. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
–C. S. Lewis
25. “I’ve lived through Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the British Empire, segregation, apartheid, God knows what. The world will survive this, and with a tiny bit of luck, so will everyone you love.”
–Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows
26. “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
–J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
27. “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”
–Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
28. “We went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another.”
–Patti Smith, Just Kids
In the comments below, please share some quotes about grief that can bring comfort.
Happy reading!
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Grief is a proof that one has truly loved and lost. That you are capable of giving and feeling, appreciate it while you are learning how to accept and move on.