130 Loss And Grief Quotes

Navigating the tumultuous waters of loss and grief can be an overwhelming and isolating journey. During such times, the right words have the power to offer comfort, understanding, and a sense of companionship. Whether you are looking for solace in your time of need or seeking to support a grieving loved one, our curated collection of the top 130 loss and grief quotes is designed to provide a beacon of hope and a touchstone of empathy. These quotes capture the profound spectrum of emotions that accompany loss, offering reflections from poets, philosophers, and writers who have walked through the valleys of sorrow and emerged with wisdom to share. Let's explore these heartfelt expressions and find a bit of light in the shadows of grief.

1. “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.” - Ernest Hemingway

2. “If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?” - Jodi Picoult

3. “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

4. “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.” - Marilynne Robinson

5. “When You Are Old"WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” - W.B. Yeats

6. “He knows that the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.” - Michael Ondaatje

7. “Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.” - Steve Almond

8. “There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there's loss. Everything involves loss; every relationship ends in one way or another.” - Charlie Kaufman

9. “We had a kettle; we let it leak:Our not repairing made it worse.We haven't had any tea for a week...The bottom is out of the Universe.” - Rudyard Kipling

10. “Fly me up to where you are beyond the distant star. I wish upon tonight to see you smile, if only for a while to know you're there. A breath away's not far to where you are.” - Josh Groban

11. “I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.” - Edward Gibbon

12. “Niggard prefers mistake rather than loss.” - Toba Beta

13. “Oh, sometimes I think it is of no use to make friends. They only go out of your life after awhile and leave a hurt that is worse than the emptiness before they came.” - L.M. Montgomery

14. “Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,Silence the pianos and with muffled drumBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.Let aeroplanes circle moaning overheadScribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;For nothing now can ever come to any good.” - W.H. Auden

15. “Edward knew what it was like to say over and over again the names of those you had left behind. He knew what it was like to miss someone. And so he listened. And in his listening, his heart opened wide and then wider still. (page 103)” - kate dicamillo

16. “That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I’d lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that --I didn't let it-- and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn't sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

17. “It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.” - Gabrielle Zevin

18. “With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.” - George Santayana

19. “You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” - Thomas Wolfe

20. “Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.” - Meghan O'Rourke

21. “It's hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It's hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you've had him for long enough.” - Joe Abercrombie

22. “Loss alone is but the wounding of a heart; it is memory that makes it our ruin.” - Brian Ruckley

23. “And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.” - Richard Ford

24. “Well, if you live long enough, you lose a lot. Just as long as you don't throw them away. Whatever you loose, you'll find again, but what you throw away you never get back.-Oibore (Enishi's dad) to Yahiko and Misao” - Watsuki Nobuhiro

25. “The lost glove is happy.” - Vladimir Nabokov

26. “Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.” - Andrew Solomon

27. “[That wall] might be breached sometime in the future, but for now the only real conversation between them was the roots that had already grown low and deep, under the wall, where they could not be broken.The most terrible thing, though, was the fear that the wall could never be breached, that in his heart Alai was glad of the separation, and was ready to be Ender's enemy. For now that they could not be together, they must be infinitely apart, and what had been sure and unshakable was now fragile and insubstantial; from the moment we are not together, Alai is a stranger, for he has a life now that will be no part of mine, and that means that when I see him we will not know each other.” - Orson Scott Card

28. “Sjel, vær trofast til det siste!Seirens seir er alt å miste.Tapets alt din vinning skapte; -evig eies kun det tapte.” - Henrik Ibsen

29. “...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

30. “What is first seen as a loss is now seen as a gain. For he finds solitude, not in far off, quite places; he creates it out of himself, spreads it around him, wherever he may be, because he loves it and slowly he ripens in this tranquility. For the inner process is beginning to unfold, stillness is extraordinarily important.” - Janwillem van de Wetering

31. “I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.” - Gail Caldwell

32. “Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.” - Gail Caldwell

33. “Price of peace could only be valued by people who had suffered loss in the war.” - Toba Beta

34. “This time, there are no tears. This time, there is only emptiness and I feel it set in the straight line of my mouth. I am not strong enough for this. I want an earthquake, a hurricane, anything - even a devil, the one with the cloven hoof - Mrs. Leed's unfortunate 13th child - to rush out and stomp on me, break me into little pieces and hurl me to the stars, let me go back with those people I love. Please.” - Kathleen DeMarco

35. “You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.” - Douglas Coupland

36. “There's a bit of magic in everythingAnd then some loss to even things out.” - Lou Reed

37. “Happiness and beauty are the worst things you can have in a life, because you never forget them. They go on and on ambushing you, presumably until you die.” - M. John Harrison

38. “I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.” - Barbara Kingsolver

39. “It sucks that we miss people like that. You think you've accepted that someone is out of your life, that you've grieved and it's over, and then bam. One little thing, and you feel like you've lost that person all over again.” - Rachel Hawkins

40. “With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion--like the phantom pain of an amputee.” - Khaled Hosseini

41. “There is nothing to save, now all is lost,but a tiny core of stillness in the heartlike the eye of a violet.” - D.H. Lawrence

42. “Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee Save Me, save only Me?All which I took from thee I did but take, Not for thy harms.But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms. All which thy child's mistakeFancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home; Rise, clasp My hand, and come!” - Francis Thompson

43. “One by one, drops fell from her eyes like they were on an assembly line - gather, fall, slide...gather, fall, slide...each one commemorating something she had lost. Hope. Faith. Confidence. Pride. Security. Trust. Independence. Joy. Beauty. Freedom. Innocence.” - Lisi Harrison

44. “We can only lose what we have first claimed.” - Richard Paul Evans

45. “it is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.” - Lemony Snicket

46. “I sit quietly and think about my mom. It's funny how memory erodes, If all I had to work from were my childhood memories, my knowledge of my mother would be faded and soft, with a few sharp memories standing out.” - Audrey Niffenegger

47. “one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.” - Audrey Niffenegger

48. “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

49. “The search for Jesus is about reconciling loss and tragedy to God and us.” - W. Scott Lineberry

50. “Whatever the response to loss and tragedy, the experience seems to boil down to one journey--searching for Jesus.” - W. Scott Lineberry

51. “When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?” - kiran desai

52. “I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life” - Roland Barthes

53. “From Orient PointThe art of living isn't hard to muster:Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.When someone makes you promises, don't trust herunless they're in the here and now, and just herwilling largesse free-handed to a friend.The art of living isn't hard to muster:groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end.When someone makes you promises, don't trust herto know she can afford what they will cost herto keep until they're kept. Till then, pretendthe art of living isn't hard to muster.Cooking, eating and drinking are a clusterof pleasures. Next time, don't go round the bendwhen someone makes you promises. Don't trust herpast where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust herwords to mean more to you than she'd intend.The art of living isn't hard to muster.You never had her, so you haven't lost herlike spare house keys. Whatever she opens,when someone makes you promises, don't. Trust yourart; go on living: that's not hard to muster.” - Marilyn Hacker

54. “Sometimes the opposite of loss is loss.” - Penelope Scambly Schott

55. “Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.” - Ann Voskamp

56. “She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.” - Jean Rhys

57. “His name was Theo.” - Cinda Williams Chima

58. “I stopped in St. Bernadette's Cemetery one of my favorite places... The trunks of six giant oaks rise like columns supporting a ceiling formed by their interlocking crowns. In the quiet space below, is laid out an aisle similar to those in any library. The gravestones are like rows of books bearing the names of those whose names have been blotted from the pages of life; who have been forgotten elsewhere but are remembered here.” - Dean Koontz

59. “Love doesn't always curl your toes sometimes it takes a bite right out of your soul.” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

60. “Love may precede respect but it cannot survive the loss of it.” - Joe L. Wheeler

61. “Nowadays he doesn't think of his wife, though he knows he can turn around and evoke every move of her, describe any aspect of her, the weigh of her wrist on his heart during the night.” - Michael Ondaatje

62. “A lot of things are inherent in life -change, birth, death, aging, illness, accidents, calamities, and losses of all kinds- but these events don't have to be the cause of ongoing suffering. Yes, these events cause grief and sadness, but grief and sadness pass, like everything else, and are replaced with other experiences. The ego, however, clings to negative thoughts and feelings and, as a result, magnifies, intensifies, and sustains those emotions while the ego overlooks the subtle feelings of joy, gratitude, excitement, adventure, love, and peace that come from Essence. If we dwelt on these positive states as much as we generally dwell on our negative thoughts and painful emotions, our lives would be transformed.” - Gina Lake

63. “A man walks fast along the forecourt of the station towards a gate, moving towards a train that's about to leave. I get shivery all over as I watch the back of his head, which is about Yuan's height, with hair and a neckline just like his. My eyes tell me what my mind knows cannot be true. I follow him along seeking the one thing that would confirm him as someone else. The man turns his head slightly to talk to a train official. I can see his nose in profile. My eyes sting.” - Dayo Forster

64. “That what?" "That I knew i misjudged you. That you love him. I'm not saying In what way. Maybe you don't know yourself. But anyone paying attention could see how much you care about him," he says gently.” - Suzanne Collins

65. “Anyone? On Snow's visit before the Victory Tour, he challenged me to erase any doubts of my love for Peeta. "Convince me," Snow said. It seems, under that hot pink sky with Peeta's life in limbo, I finally did. And In doing so, I gave him the weapon he needed to break me.” - Suzanne Collins

66. “Tonight I want to stand on the side of a cliff and look down, dare the wind to gust and knock me off. Everyone thinks that falling to your death is the worst thing that can happen. But that’s a lie. The worst thing is to be alive for no reason.” - Tammara Webber

67. “Because I feel no anger toward my mother. Only loss, and loss is a feeling you can’t fight your way out of as easily.” - Ally Condie

68. “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.” - C.S. Lewis

69. “I see now that my faith was becoming an ally rather than an enemy because I could vent anger freely, even toward God, without fearing retribution.” - Jerry Sittser

70. “Suffering invites us to place our hurts in larger hands. In Christ we see God suffering – for us. And calling us to share in God’s suffering love for a hurting world. The small and even overpowering pains of our lives are intimately connected with the greater pains of Christ. Our daily sorrows are anchored in a greater sorrow and therefore a larger hope.” - Henri Nouwen

71. “You see, because [Norfolk is] stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.'Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up.Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

72. “She always used to suspect that the price for happiness, the price for enjoying the company of a person you loved, was the steadily increasing risk of losing them, and at times, when she considered the possibility that she might lose Isabel or Clancy or, in the early days, Todd, Bernice didn't think she could stand it, didn't think she could go on living in a universe whose laws forced her to submit to such a terrible fear. Now she sees what a small price it is to pay, what staggering joy she received in return. You should be willing to pay that price for as little as a few days or hours with a person you love, she thinks, rubbing her fingers across a patch of linoleum the years have worn down to a cloudy smear.” - Stephen Lovely

73. “All four of us were young and undaunted and our smiles were so strong that it made me smile even then on the couch, with a kind of loss.” - Markus Zusak

74. “Long before we even lose our lives, we lose our souls. Tragic but true. Some carry on—willing to make the sacrifices, putting what is perceived as important before anything else. Some tread into the dark—wasting moments of grace, letting themselves suffer from their own decisions or the other’s domination. Some continue to love, give too much, and not leave even a little love for themselves.” - Joanne Crisner

75. “Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.” - José N. Harris

76. “What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood.” - Ron Rash

77. “Remembering. Forgetting. I'm not sure which is worse.” - Kelley Armstrong

78. “When love dies, the heart's ashes do not leave on the wind—they rest on the mantelpiece of the soul, darkening the sunrise we once saw to be beautiful.” - A. M. Hudson

79. “Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving--Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home.” - John Irving

80. “But that's just it; I can either focus on what I have lost, or what I have gained, and I choose the latter.” - Angie Smith

81. “If you love someone, they leave you. But if you don't love someone, they leave you, too. So your choice isn't between loving and losing but only between loving and not loving.” - Steve Rasnic Tem

82. “You were standing in the wake of devastation And you were waiting on the edge of the unknown And with the cataclysm raining down Insides crying "Save me now" You were there, impossibly alone” - Linkin Park

83. “What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?” - Amy Reed

84. “She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It’s all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.” - colum mccann

85. “How is it possible that a boyfriend ceases to exist from one day to another?” - Gayle Forman

86. “We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.” - John Banville

87. “My life is now divided into two periods: With June and After June. I can't wrap my mind around the idea of it.” - Hannah Harrington

88. “The house is eerily quiet. All this time I thought silence would be a welcome reprieve, but it's less comforting than I imagined. The house feels so much bigger and colder than it ever has.” - Hannah Harrington

89. “Listen, Harper. I realize how hard this is for you."A flash of anger heats up in my chest. She doesn't understand. She can't. If she did, she'd leave me alone instead of trying to force me to talk about this.” - Hannah Harrington

90. “En effet: je mourais déjà. Je venais d'apprendre cette nouvelle horrible que tout humain apprend un jour ou l'autre: ce que tu aimes, tu vas le perdre. "Ce qui t'a été donné te sera repris." Face à la découverte de cette spoliation future, il y a deux attitudes possibles: soit on décide de ne pas s'attacher aux êtres et aux choses, afin de rendre l'amputation moins douloureuse; soit on décide, au contraire, d'aimer d'autant plus les êtres et les choses, d'y mettre le paquet - "puisque nous n'aurons pas beaucoup de temps ensemble, je vais te donner en un an tout l'amour que j'aurais pu te donner en une vie.” - Amélie Nothomb

91. “And then there's the truth beyond that, sitting like an old rock under green creek water: none of these things matter. Right now, in this moment, we have love. We have it in the sound of my daughter's laugher, in Mom's and Georgia's locked fingers, in the warm pressure of J.T.'s hand. It will leave, and it will come again, and when it does I'll give up everything and take it. Just like an addict. Like dry grass in new rain. It's not something I'm proud of necessarily. Then again, maybe I am.” - Katie Crouch

92. “And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.” - Emma Donoghue

93. “...real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.” - Emma Donoghue

94. “You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.” - Barbara Kingsolver

95. “Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

96. “Death was silence, loss, guilt. And anger. But life led that way, anyway. From birth, it was a slow, long march to the grave. Who said that? She couldn’t remember now. But it was true. They were born dying. If they were very lucky, the dying was called aging. They reached toward if as if they were satellites in unstable orbits. And then when they got there, they were just dead. One moment in time separated the living from the ghosts.” - Michelle Sagara West

97. “No - no - no!" someone was shouting. "No! Fred! No!"And Percy was shaking his brother, and Ron was kneeling beside them, and Fred's eyes stared without seeing, the ghost of his last laugh still etched upon his face.” - J.K. Rowling

98. “Why love what you will lose?There is nothing else to love.” - Louise Gluck

99. “You just know something is amiss, when you look at someone and long for something that is not yours or you cannot have. It's an absence--a loss of a heartbeat.” - Nadège Richards

100. “Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free. So often sleep brought dreams of him.” - Bernard Taylor

101. “I could feel my insides sink. My knees too. So I sat on the ground, against the wall, letting it support me. I thought I knew what heartbreak felt like. I thought heartbreak was me, standing alone at the prom. That was nothing. This, this was heartbreak. The pain in your chest, the ache behind your eyes. The knowing that things will never be the same again. It’s all relative, I suppose. You think you know love, you think you know real pain, but you don’t. You don’t know anything.” - Jenny Han

102. “The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.” - Mitch Albom

103. “I think a person permeates a spot, and a lost presence makes the environment timeless to me, keeps an area alive. It pulsates because of that.” - Andrew Wyeth

104. “Mother (fragment)...You asked me if I would be sad when it happenedand I am sad. But the iris I moved from your housenow hold in the dusty dry fists of their rootsgreen knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.Were it not for the way you taught me to lookat the world, to see the life at play in everything, I would have to be lonely forever.” - Ted Kooser

105. “In other words, I was a moderately happy penguin who was occasionally attacked by sadness.” - Takuji Ichikawa

106. “Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.” - Roland Barthes

107. “And gradually his memory slipped a little, as memories do, even those with so much love attached to them; as if there is an unconscious healing process within the mind which mends up in spite of our desperate determination never to forget.” - Colleen McCullough

108. “Yes, it's worth it. The pain of sorrow is terrible and hard to bear, but the joy of love makes it worthwhile. p123” - Kate Sherwood

109. “Death is only final when you know you're not going to see them again!” - Evinda Lepins

110. “Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever.” - Jack Kerouac

111. “If she lives, she shall be my wedded wife. If she dies--mother, I can't speak of what I shall feel if she dies." His voice was choked in his throat.” - Elizabeth Gaskell

112. “You can't know how much a mother loves.” - Jessica Fortunato

113. “A lesson for all of us is that for every loss, there is victory, for every sadness, there is joy, and when you think you’ve lost everything, there is hope.” - Geraldine Solon

114. “Suffering is one of life's great teachers.” - Bryant McGill

115. “Anything that lights your world leaves it dark once it's gone.” - Ashly Lorenzana

116. “I still want to feel you against me.” Her gaze dropped to his hands. “I want you to stay with me. Hold me. Just tonight. If I lose you again tomorrow then it will still be worth it. I will lose you a hundred times, if you would but hold me in your arms each time before my loss.” She saw his eyes water, but no tears emerged...” - B.C. Morin

117. “Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinigar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favourite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone.” - Salman Rushdie

118. “There is no place for innocence on the battlefield.” - Jocelyn Murray

119. “the reverse side of love is unbearable loss.” - Susan Abulhawa

120. “Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.” - Alice Walker

121. “ما قد يبدو لك خسارة قد يكون هو بالتحديد الشيء الذي سبصبح فيما بعد مسؤولا عن إتمام أعظم إنجازات حياتك” - أحلام مستغانمي - الأسود يليق بك

122. “For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.” - Charles Dickens

123. “He passed through her with his soul caressing hers goodbye. And in that final hour he was with her one last time.” - Donna Lynn Hope

124. “Jack sprung to his feet out of reach. "I'd prefer to finish this intact. " "My apologies,” Cabal said, grinning viciously. "l keep forgetting, you're only human." His smile softened to full amusement as Jack raised his sword in challenge."Human or not," Jack said as he slowly approached him. "I carry the advantage of unworldly knowledge. "" Is that what you're doing?" Cabal laughed; "Something unworldly?""I have a vast library of knowledge inside my head from my homeland.""What knowledge could your world offer that would be useful here?""How about a toilet?" Jack winked at Nicole.“Perhaps you should build one and leave us all in awe.” Cabal declared.“People could call them ‘Jacks’ for short.” Nicole added to the conversation.” - Alaina Stanford

125. “Now he understood. After a while, pain simply stopped. It was as though your mind was able to create a firewall beyond which it would not let you venture. You had to have a break from your anguish, or you'd go crazy. It was the psychological equivalent to fainting when physical pain became overbearing.” - Elizabeth Berg

126. “Paco, we are all so much more than our faults, aren’t we?” - R. Elizabeth Carpenter

127. “I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think—no, you will realize—that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.” - Mary Oliver

128. “And finallythe glass that contains and spills this stuff continuallywhile the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathersup empties, gives back the drinker's own face. Who knows what it looks like;who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger towardthe bathroom, some man or woman or even lostangel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether,the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human?” - Kim Addonizio

129. “You can, for just a moment, fuse grief like a bone, but the memory of the ability to bend lingers inside, like an itch running in the blood, just beneath the skin: relief is always only temporary. Grief, we understood, would now hijack a part of our day for the rest of our lives, sneaking in, making the world momentarily stop, every day, forever.” - Emily Rapp

130. “I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you.” - Kellie Elmore