Treasured Words: Inspirational Quotes for a Dying Friend

"Grief does not change you, it reveals you."

- John Green

"In the night of death, hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing."

- Robert G. Ingersoll

"When 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 fall in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun."

- William Shakespeare

"No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories."

- Haruki Murakami

"Death —the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening."

- Walter Scott

"Death may be the greatest of all human blessings."

- Socrates

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

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

- Thornton Wilder

"What is essential is invisible to the eye."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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

- Dr. Seuss

"Perhaps they are not stars, but openings in Heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy."

- The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Grief is the price we pay for love."

- Queen Elizabeth II

"The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and for deeds left undone."

- Harriet Beecher Stowe

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. The death of a beloved is an amputation."

- C.S. Eliot

"To lose a friend is the greatest of all losses."

- Cicero

"There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"Though nothing can bring back the hour, Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, We will grieve not, rather find, Strength in what remains behind."

- William Wordsworth

"To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die."

- Thomas Campbell

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."

- Norman Cousins

"He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come."

- Rabindranath Tagore

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

- From a headstone in Ireland

"Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it."

- Haruki Murakami

"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."

- Ernest Hemingway

"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."

- Mark Twain

"But fate ordains that dearest friends must part."

- Edward Young

"A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you."

- Elbert Hubbard

"The loss of a friend is the greatest of losses."

- Publilius Syrus

"Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form."

- Rumi

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

- Helen Keller

"The loss of a friend is like that of a limb; time may heal the anguish of the wound, but the loss cannot be repaired."

- Robert Southey

"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

"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'

"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

"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 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

"On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world."

- Henry David Thoreau

"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

"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'

"Grief changes shape, but it never ends."

- Keanu Reeves

"Grief is itself a medicine."

- William Cowper

"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

"Love is the most powerful force in the universe, and for two beings, who love each other, separation is only temporary. By the Laws of Attraction, they will inevitably be drawn back together, like magnets."

- Helene Minto

"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

"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

"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

"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

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

- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"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"

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

- Thomas Lynch

"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

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

- Alyson Noel 'Evermore'

"We need never be afraid of our tears."

- Charles Dickens

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

- Hillary Stanton Zunin

"Nothing was working, and my friend was dead, and I didn't want to look at that."

- Anthony Kiedis

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

- Hebrew Proverb

"Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world."

- Buddhist quote

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

- William Faulkner

"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

"Tears water our growth."

- William Shakespeare

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

- Dr. Seuss

"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

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

- Dodinsky

"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

"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

"Tears are the silent language of grief."

- Voltaire

"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'

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

- Alphonse de Lamartine

"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

"Do you remember when Henry died? Do you remember how it felt when we saw Dad cry for the first time? We were six. We held his hand as Henry's casket was lowered into the ground. And Dad told us, "The death of a man is not the death of his dream." Do you remember that?"

- Ezra Claytan Daniels

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

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 'The Golden Legend'

"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

"Those things that hurt instruct."

- Benjamin Franklin

"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

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

- C.S. Lewis

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

- Aeschylus

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

- Marcel Proust

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

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"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

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

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

"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

"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."

- Sasha

"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

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

- William Shakespeare

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

- Jewish Proverb

"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

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

- Chloe Woodward

"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

"That song is sweetest, bravest, best, Which plucks the thistle-barb of care From a despondent brother's breast, And plants a sprig of heart's-ease there."

- Andrew Downing 'The Sweetest Song'

"Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die, so let us all be thankful."

- Buddhist quote

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment."

- Buddhist quote

"Our grief is as individual as our lives."

- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

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

- Buddhist saying

"Though we are terrorized by death, it's not different from birth, it just happens."

- Bangambiki Habyarimana

"Whenever something scary happens or I want to comment on something, like Joyce and Hopper’s constant bickering, which is getting annoying, I glance toward Adam’s side of the couch. And each and every time I do, the pain of his absence pierces my chest. That’s the thing about losing someone: there’s one major death followed by a million little deaths."

- Alexandra Latos

"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

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

- Proverb

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

- Jan Glidewell

"May all beings everywhere, Seen and unseen, Dwelling far off or nearby, Being or waiting to become, May all be filled with lasting joy."

- Buddhist quote

"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

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

- George Ade 'More Fables'

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

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

- Lou Reed, 'Magic And Loss'

"In my dream, I was drowning my sorrows But my sorrows they'd learned to swim"

- U2 'Until The End Of The World'

"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?'

"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

"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

"The world slides, the world goes, and death makes equal the rich and the poor."

- Bangambiki Habyarimana

"It's a harrowing experience to see death approaching in haste towards you, what is hell but confronting your own mortality."

- Bangambiki Habyarimana

"A ton of regret never makes an ounce of difference."

- Grenville Kleiser 'Dictionary Of Proverbs'

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

- Author Unknown

"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."

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

- Anonymous

"A beautiful colourful rainbow could not exist if it were not for the rain of a grey day - it was born from the very droplets of it."

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

"Grief is a journey that leaves us changed forever. So don't run from it or hide from it. Embrace it and let it change you."

- Unknown

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

"Love is like standing in wet cement, the longer you stay the harder to leave and you can never leave without leaving your marks behind."

"We've shared our lives these many years. You've held my hand; you've held my heart. So many blessings, so few tears - yet for a moment, we must part."

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

"I'll never forget how much I loved you, or the way you make me feel, but I have to move on with my life."

- Unknown

"I think of you with love every day."

- Unknown

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

"No farewell words were spoken, no time to say goodbye, you were gone before we knew it, and only God knows why."

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

"True friends are the ones who never leave your heart, even if they leave your life for a while."

"Goodbyes are not forever. Goodbyes are not the end. They simply mean I’ll miss you until we meet again."

"Friends are forever, you might lose them but you’ll never forget them."

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

"The fact that something has happened to a million other people diminishes neither grief nor joy."

"When you lose someone you love, you gain an angel you know."

- Unknown

"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."