50 Quotes On Coping With Loss

Navigating the turbulent waters of loss is an experience unique to each individual, yet there are universal truths and emotions that many share during such times. In moments of heartache and sorrow, words often become our solace, guiding us through the darkness and offering glimpses of hope and healing. Whether you've lost a loved one, a friendship, or even a way of life, finding comfort in the words of those who have walked a similar path can be profoundly reassuring. This curated collection of the top 50 quotes on coping with loss invites you to explore the wisdom and empathy of poets, philosophers, and thinkers who have captured the essence of grief and the resilience it can kindle within us. May these insights serve as companions on your journey toward acceptance and peace.

1. “Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.” - W.S. Merwin

2. “(Her husband's departure ...) had picked Mildred up by the hair and dropped her down at the doorstep of insanity.From "Butterfly on F street” - Edward P. Jones

3. “You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?” - Jeanette Winterson

4. “I heard of a manwho says words so beautifullythat if he only speaks their namewomen give themselves to him.If I am dumb beside your bodywhile silence blossoms like tumors on our lipsit is because I hear a man climb stairsand clear his throat outside our door.” - Leonard Cohen

5. “O world, world when I was younger I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds. But now you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles…a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope.” - Fernando De Rojas

6. “In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

7. “The ritual of our daily lives permeate our very bodies.” - Banana Yoshimoto

8. “No matter how much he talked, she never answered him, but he knew she was still there. He knew it was like the soldiers he had read about. They would have an arm or a leg blown off, and for days, even weeks after it happened, they could still feel the arm itching, the leg itching, the mother calling.” - Pat Cunningham Devoto

9. “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

10. “WHEN SOMEBODY GOES AWAY THERE'S THINGS YOU WANT TO TELL THEM. WHEN SOMEBODY DIES MAYBE THAT'S THE WORST THING. YOU WANT TO TELL THEM THINGS THAT HAPPEN AFTER.” - Louise Fitzhugh

11. “I would give anything, anything, to be the man to whom this has not happened. I can not accommodate myself to it. In a lifetime of trying, I can not accommodate myself to it.And now I will have to be that person forever.” - Robert Goolrick

12. “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

13. “Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderfulook only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank.” - Jodi Picoult

14. “Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.” - William Trevor

15. “He crosses the front room, which he calls his study, and comes down the staircase. The stairs turn a corner; they are narrow and steep. You can touch both handrails with your elbows, and you have to bend your head, even if, like George, you are only five eight. This is a tightly planned little house. He often feels protected by its smallness; there is hardly room enough here to feel lonely. Nevertheless.” - Christopher Isherwood

16. “Que l'on soit absent dans la pièce voisine, ou sur l'autre versant de la planète, la différence n'est pas essentielle. La présence de l'ami qui en apparence s'est éloigné, peut se faire plus dense qu'une présence réelle.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

17. “His departure gave Catherine the first experimental conviction that a loss may be sometimes a gain.” - Jane Austen

18. “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

19. “The Greatest loss in life is the loss of a mother: The second greatest, the loss of Self.” - Med Saidi

20. “Though sorrow may impede my heart,It is of great love to have known you.” - C. Elizabeth

21. “How many times can a heart be shattered and still be pieced back together? How many times before the damage is irreparable?” - Gwenn Wright

22. “You could lose the ones you loved in the blink of an eye—and he was willing to bet, when it happened, you weren’t thinking about all the reasons that could have kept you apart. You thought of all the reasons that kept you together. And, no doubt, how you wished you’d had more time. Even if you’d had centuries… When you were young, you thought time was a burden, something to be discharged as fast as possible so you could be grown-up. But it was such a bait-n-switch—when you were an adult, you came to realize that minutes and hours were the single most precious thing you had. No one got forever. And it was a fucking crime to waste what you were given.” - J.R. Ward

23. “When you meet an extraordinary person, it’s like they get inside you, under your ribs, and shuffle everything inside you around until they find space for greatness to grow. But extraordinary people always get away. And when they leave, they take that little part of you with them. Suddenly you find yourself with a gap in your chest that you don’t know how to live with. Suddenly you’re frightened of being yourself without them.” - Chloe Rattray

24. “When Summer lies upon the world, and in a noon of gold, Beneath the roof of sleeping leaves the dreams of trees unfold;When woodland halls are green and cool, and wind is in the West, Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is best!” - J.R.R. Tolkien

25. “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?” - Erich Segal

26. “See, that’s the difference,” Mauvin said. “I suffer a loss and people console me. Royce suffers a loss and whole towns evacuate.” - Michael J. Sullivan

27. “Tears stung her eyes. She sank her knees next to the sleeping bench and gently raked strands of golden hair from him forehead."Don't you die. don't you dare. I forbid it." As if Han Alister had ever listened to anything she said.” - Cinda Williams Chima

28. “Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.” - Lionel Shriver

29. “The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.” - Kristina McMorris

30. “the inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him,and until I wake I believeI will die of grief, for I knowthat this boy grew into a manwho was a faithful friendwho died.” - Wendell Berry

31. “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

32. “You have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.” - Jodi Picoult

33. “LXXIXWhen I die, I want your hands on my eyes.I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once more.I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.I want what I love to continue to live,and you whom I love and sang above everything else.to continue to flourish, full-flowered.So that you can reach everything my love directs you to. So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,so that everything can learn the reason for my song.” - Pablo Neruda

34. “A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.” - Jay Neugeboren

35. “There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.” - Ann Patchett

36. “I knew it would be all of those things and so much more to me, but it was his heart I was yanking from his chest with my decision, and that’s what mattered to me. I was giving up a piece of my own as well, but it was a choice. His was just collateral.” - Rachael Wade

37. “Jo claimed that the reason people survived breakups was that within days of the amputation, Mother Nature started reminding you of what you had been doing without, what could have been better, all the samll discontents you had been filing away.” - Emma Donoghue

38. “Reshuffllng of thoughts - facilitates a refreshed perspective to a mental deadlock!” - Deeba Salim Irfan

39. “I was so much in the habit of having Albertine with me, and now I suddenly saw a new aspect of Habit. Hitherto I had regarded it chiefly as an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of one's perceptions; now I saw it as a dread deity, so riveted to one's being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one's heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this deity that one had barely distinguished inflicts on one sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself.” - Marcel Proust

40. “Each guy stamped the passport of my heart. “You’re worthy.” Stamp. “You’re enough.” “You have not failed completely.” Stamp, stamp.” - Kimberly Novosel

41. “I told him I had once lost everything I had, too, and that I think that can be God’s way of building walls around us to force us to look up at Him.” - Kimberly Novosel

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

43. “I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy,why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why.Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my pastwas my life.” - Janet Fitch

44. “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

45. “She wasn’t crying at all. This was what scared him the most. Where had she locked up the things he’d seen her feeling that day when she heard? She wasn’t that big a girl to hold all of it—to hold her brother’s life and his death inside of her. To hold all his long-limbed raging tidal motion and all the loss of that.” - Francesca Lia Block

46. “She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need.” - Michelle Latiolais

47. “I didn't mean to scare you. I'm not suicidal if that's what's freaking you out. I'm not fucked up in the head. I'm not deranged. I'm not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm just a brother who loved his sister more than life itself, so I get a little intense when I think about her.” - Colleen Hoover

48. “I realized, it is not the time that heals, but what we do within that time that creates positive change.” - Diane Dettmann

49. “How can you ricochet from a moment where you are on top of the world to one where you are crawling at rock bottom” - Jodi Picoult

50. “How we take it for granted – those trivial conversations; those mundane moments that we think hold no meaning. We never realise how much we rely on the ordinariness of everyday life. When love is gone – when our entire world is gone – only then do we understand those moments are what we live for.” - Dianna Hardy