50 Inspirational Quotes to Comfort You After the Death of a Loved One

"Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break."

- William Shakespeare

"The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not get over the loss of a loved one; you’ll learn to live with it."

- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time - the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone. Just when the day comes - when there's a particular missing part that overwhelms you with the feeling that she's gone, forever - there comes another day, and another specifically missing part."

- John Irving

"Tears have a wisdom all their own. They come when a person has relaxed enough to let go and to work through his sorrow. They are the natural bleeding of an emotional wound, carrying the poison out of the system. Here lies the road to recovery."

- F. Alexander Magoun

"Grief is the price we pay for love."

- Queen Elizabeth II

"There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love."

- Washington Irving

"Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve."

- Earl Grollman

"Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal."

- From a headstone in Ireland

"Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone; his own burden in his own way."

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"There is no grief like the grief that does not speak."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living."

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

"The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief - But the pain of grief isonly a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love."

- Hillary Stanton Zunin

"Grief is like a moving river, it's always changing. I would say in some ways it just gets worse. It's just that the more time that passes, the more you miss someone."

- Michelle Williams

"When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight."

- Kahlil Gibran

"Grieving is a necessary passage and a difficult transition to finally letting go of sorrow - it is not a permanent rest stop."

- Dodinsky

"We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one."

- Dean Koontz 'The Darkest Evening Of The Year'

"There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rule book that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass - if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it's okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays."

- Jodi Picoult

"You will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly - that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp."

- Anne Lamott

"Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality."

- Emily Dickinson

"So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love."

- E.A. Bucchianeri

"What we have once enjoyed, we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us."

- Helen Keller

"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened."

- Dr. Seuss

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies... 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 when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there."

- Ray Bradbury

"Say not in grief that they are gone, but give thanks that they were yours."

- Hebrew Proverb

"Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer a great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them."

- Leo Tolstoy

"Grief and love are conjoined — you don’t get one without the other."

- Jandy Nelson

"When the heart grieves over what is has lost, the spirit rejoices over what it has left."

- Sufi

"Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you've lived."

- Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"You can’t truly heal from a loss until you allow yourself to really feel the loss."

- Mandy Hale

"In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods of tears and despair and make it through the potholed street of life."

- Nicholas Sparks 'The Notebook'

"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

"Our grief is as individual as our lives."

- Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"We get no choice. If we love, we grieve."

- Thomas Lynch

"Say not in grief 'he is no more' but live in thankfulness that he was."

- Hebrew proverb

"Life is not the way it is supposed to be. It is the way it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference."

- Virginia Satir

"The melody that the loved one played upon the piano of your life will never be played quite that way again, but we must not close the keyboard and allow the instrument to gather dust. We must seek out other artists of the spirit, new friends who gradually will help us to find the road to life again, who will walk the road with us."

- Joshua Loth Liebman

"I will welcome happiness for it enlarges my heart; Yet I will endure sadness for it opens my soul. I will acknowledge rewards for they are my due; Yet I will welcome obstacles for they are my challenge."

- Og Mandino

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."

- Helen Keller

"We do not have to rely on memories to recapture the spirit of those we have loved and lost – they live within our souls in some perfect sanctuary which even death cannot destroy."

- Nan Witcomb

"Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, how it holds you in place."

- Sarah Dessen

"Life is full of grief, to exactly the degree we allow ourselves to love other people."

- Orson Scott Card

"Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for."

- Terry Pratchett

"We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world – the company of those who have known suffering."

- Helen Keller

"I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil."

- J.R.R. Tolkien

"Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect."

- J. K. Rowling

"The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking."

- James Patterson

"Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it."

- Helen Keller

"Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms."

- Paulo Coelho

"I don't know why they call it heartbreak. It feels like every part of my body is broken too."

- Chloe Woodward

"I'm gone now, but I'm still very near, death can never separate us. Each time you feel a gentle breeze, it's my hand caressing your face. Each time the wind blows, it carries my voice whispering your name. When the wind blows your hair ever so slightly, think of it as me pushing a few stray hairs back in place. When you feel a few raindrops fall on your face, it's me placing soft kisses. At night look up in the sky and see the stars shining so brightly. I'm one of those stars and I'm winking at you and smiling with delight. For never forget, you're the apple of my eye."

- Mary M Green

"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."

- A.A. Milne

"People touch our lives if only for a moment, And yet we're not the same from that moment on, The time is not important, The moment is forever."

- Fern Bork

"There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief."

- Aeschylus

"You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present."

- Jan Gildwell

"Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile."

- Julie Burchill

"Grief is itself a medicine."

- William Cowper

"No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear."

- C.S Lewis

"Nothing that grieves us can be called little; by the external laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size."

- Mark Twain, 'Which Was The Dream?'

"Let no one weep for me, or celebrate my funeral with mourning; for I still live, as I pass to and fro through the mouths of men."

- Quintus Ennius

"Tears are the silent language of grief."

- Voltaire

"Given a choice between grief and nothing, I'd choose grief."

- William Faulkner

"If you've got to my age, you've probably had your heart broken many times. So it's not that difficult to unpack a bit of grief from some little corner of your heart and cry over it."

- Emma Thompson

"You don't go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be."

- Nigella Lawson

"Grief changes shape, but it never ends."

- Keanu Reeves

"Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys."

- Alphonse de Lamartine

"Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose."

- from The Wonder Years

"There's a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out."

- Lou Reed, 'Magic And Loss'

"These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger he will plunge through."

- David Nicholls 'One Day'

"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'

"I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."

- Agatha Christie

"The grave itself is but a covered bridge, Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!"

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 'The Golden Legend'

"Perhaps they are not stars in the sky, but rather openings where our loved ones shine down to let us know they are happy."

- Eskimo legend

"Forgiveness is healing ... especially forgiving yourself."

- Alyson Noel 'Evermore'

"While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it."

- Samuel Johnson

"Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome."

- Isaac Asimov

"Grief is what I feel when someone passes away, Grief is what I feel when I am concerned, Grief is what I feel when I have done wrong, Grief is what I feel when some accident happens, Grief is something that all people have gone through."

- Brandi Reissig

"Honest listening is one of the best medicines we can offer the dying and the bereaved."

- Jean Cameron

"Some people come in your life as blessings. Some come in your life as lessons."

- Mother Teresa

"What is lovely never dies, But passes into other loveliness."

- Thomas Bailey Aldrich

"When I am lonely, I think of you and all that you brought to my life. Your memory rests gently on my soul."

- Cindy Adkins

"After you have wept and grieved for your physical losses, cherish the functions and life you have left."

- Morrie Schwartz

"Don’t be dismayed at goodbyes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends."

- Richard Bach

"Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well."

- Buddhist saying

"We need never be afraid of our tears."

- Charles Dickens

"The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal."

- C.S. Lewis

"All things grow with time, except grief."

- Jewish Proverb

"What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul."

- Jewish proverb

"Time heals old pain, while it creates new ones."

- Proverb

"A life with love will have some thorns, but a life without love will have no roses."

- Anonymous

"Every heart has its secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Of all Sad Words of Tongue or Pen, the Saddest are these, "It Might Have Been.""

- George Ade 'More Fables'

"Those things that hurt instruct."

- Benjamin Franklin

"We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey."

- Kenji Miyazawa

"All you need is one safe anchor to keep you grounded when the rest of your life spins out of control."

- Katie Kacvinsky

"There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery."

- Dante Alighieri

"It’s sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew."

- Henry Rollins

"Flowers grow out of dark moments."

- Corita Kent

"The only cure for grief is action."

- George Henry Lewes

"It is not length of life, but depth of life."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."

- Marcel Proust

"You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair."

- Chinese Proverb

"Sorrow is so easy to express and yet so hard to tell."

- Joni Mitchell

"Tears water our growth."

- William Shakespeare

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people live."

- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

"I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss."

- Rita Mae Brown

"There are three needs of the griever: To find the words for the loss, to say the words aloud and to know that the words have been heard."

- Victoria Alexander

"As long as I can I will look at this world for both of us. As long as I can I will laugh with the birds, I will sing with the flowers, I will pray to the stars, for both of us."

- Sascha

"Although it's difficult today to see beyond the sorrow, May looking back in memory help comfort you tomorrow."

- Author unknown

"If tears could build a stairway,and memories a lane, I'd walk right up to Heaven and bring you home again."

- Author unknown

"The song is ended but the melody lingers on."

"If tears could build a stairway, and memories a lane, I'd walk right up to heaven and bring you home again."

"Although it's difficult today to see beyond the sorrow, may looking back in memory help comfort you tomorrow."

"When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure."

"Grief is not a disorder, a disease, or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical, and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure to grief is to grieve."

"Grieving is a necessary passage and a difficult transition to finally letting go of sorrow – it is not a permanent rest stop."

"Those whom we love and lose are no longer where they were before. They are now wherever we are."

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference."

"Grief is like the ocean. It comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim."

"Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest."

"Why does it take a minute to say hello and forever to say goodbye?"