When life throws us into the deep end of grief and loss, sometimes the right words can remind us that we’re not alone in this. That’s what we’re looking at here – 30 quotes from books where grief and loss are major themes. Whether you’re looking to understand your own feelings better, or just a moment of connection, these quotes offer a glimpse into the many sides of grief.
1. “When you lose someone, you don’t lose them all at once, and their dying doesn’t stop with their death. You lose them a thousand times in a thousand ways. You say a thousand goodbyes. You hold a thousand funerals.”
― Sara Seager, The Smallest Lights in the Universe
2. “Whoever said that loss gets easier with time was a liar. Here’s what really happens: The spaces between the times you miss them grow longer. Then, when you do remember to miss them again, it’s still with a stabbing pain to the heart. And you have guilt. Guilt because it’s been too long since you missed them last.”
― Kristin O’Donnell Tubb, The 13th Sign
3. “You’re dead, and I’m the worst kind of alive.”
― Adam Silvera, History Is All You Left Me
4. “Grief never goes away. And that’s no bad thing – it’s only the other side of love, after all.”
― Carys Bray, The Museum of You
5. “We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if’.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
6. “The ghosts in the house are ours, and I just want to be with them.”
― Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
7. “When you lose someone, you get used to living day to day without them. But you’ll never get used to the ‘10 second heartbreak’. That’s the time it takes to wake to full consciousness each day and remember…”
― Nina Guilbeau, Too Many Sisters
8. “Heaven would never be heaven without you.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come
9. “Sometimes, there was no getting over it. Sometimes, you lived with the empty place inside of you until you imploded on it, loss as singularity, or until the empty place expanded and hollowed out the rest of you so thoroughly you became the walking dead, a ghost in your own life.”
― Caitlin Kittredge, Bone Gods
10. “Life has to end. Love doesn’t.”
― Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
11. “If you cut out a rectangle of a perfectly blue sky, no clouds, no wind, no birds, frame it with a blue frame, place it faceup on the floor of an empty museum with an open atrium to the sky, that is grief.”
― Victoria Chang, Obit
12. “I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I’d never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies.”
― Anne Tyler, The Beginner’s Goodbye
13. “When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death
14. “Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
15. “You never know when it will be the last time you’ll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there’s always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you’d never stop grieving.”
― Jonathan Tropper, This is Where I Leave You
16. “There are little deaths, because that’s what grief is.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door
17. “In the sea of grief, there were islands of grace, moments in time when one could remember what was left rather than all that had been lost.”
― Kristin Hannah, Night Road
18. “Grief orbits the heart. Some days the circle is greater. Those are the good days. You have room to move and dance and breathe. Some days the circle is tighter. Those are the hard ones.”
― Steven Rowley, The Guncle
19. “Why didn’t I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
20. “Nobody tells you how the first time you laugh after a major bereavement will destroy you. You may not have even registered that you don’t laugh anymore―another point on the itemized list of things grief steals from you.”
― Onyi Nwabineli, Someday, Maybe
21. “The human brain is wired to cope with grief. It knows even as we fall into unfathomably dark places, there will be light again, and if we just keep moving forward in one brave straight line, however slowly, we’ll find our way back again.”
― Josie Silver, The Two Lives of Lydia Bird
22. “People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
23. “Grief was what you owed the dead for the necessary crime of living on without them.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire
24. “Everything else you can live around, but not death. Death you have to live through.”
― Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire
25. “I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It’s like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it’s there and keep falling in. After a while, it’s still there, but you learn to walk around it.”
― Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
26. “From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park
27. “But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
28. “There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.”
― Stephen King, Lisey’s Story
29. “Time may pass, but the memory of the people we’ve loved doesn’t grow old. It is only we who age.”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Phone Box at the Edge of the World
30. “Letting go isn’t about forgetting. It’s balancing moving forward with life, and looking back from time to time, remembering the people in it.”
― Dustin Thao, You’ve Reached Sam
And there you have it, 30 literary takes on grief and loss. Just a reminder though: if grief is getting too heavy or you’re feeling signs of depression, don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional—it’s a smart and brave thing to do.
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