16 Quotes on Grieving & Loss to Help us Feel Less Alone. Via Aimee-Claire Smith

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Sometimes, pain simply needs to be acknowledged and honored. Sometimes, we need understanding more than we need hope.

1. “My longing for you is such that it presses on my breast like tears that cannot be wept.”  ~ Franz Kafka

2. “The night I lost you, I lost something inside me. Or perhaps several things. Something central to my existence, the very support for who I am as a person.” ~ Haruki Murakami

3. “Since I was shot, everything seems like such a dream to me. Like I don’t know whether I’m alive or whether I died.” ~ Andy Warhol

4. “This is how I am without you, now. I stand in my kitchen, leaning against the sink, for an hour, my eyes seeing memories. But you are gone.” ~ Waylon Lewis 

5. “I don’t understand how the sun keeps rising every morning, or how the moon and stars still glow every night. Sometimes I wish they wouldn’t, sometimes I wish the universe would just stop and mourn your loss till nothing but dust is left.” ~ Kaila Cunha

6. “I want her back. I want everything back, the way it was. But there’s no point to it, this wanting.” ~ Margret Atwood

7. “And my heart aches, in hopeless pain / Exhausted with repinings vain / That I shall greet her ne’er again!” ~ Emily Bronte

8. “You think the grief will make you smaller and sad, like your heart will collapse in on itself—but it doesn’t. I feel spaces opening up inside of me, like a building with rooms I’ve never explored.” ~ Lisa Joy

9. “Should I tear my eyes out now? Everything I see returns to you somehow. Should I tear my heart out now? Everything I feel returns to you somehow.” ~ Sufjan Stevens

10. “I long for you like a ship for the harbour. Every thought of you sinks my heart.” ~ Unknown

11. “The pain of loss is insurmountable and everlasting, fading and heightening to the tumultuous waves of time. In the moment it fades, we continue living, caught up in the regular motions of life. And in the moment it hits us strong, we’re enraged at life because it doesn’t stop; it just goes on no matter the pain, no matter the loss.” ~ Jihad Mahmoud

12. “The day you lose someone isn’t the worst—it’s all the days they stay dead.” ~ Steven Moffat

13. “The times that were the most fun always seemed to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realised how utterly, totally gone she was.” ~ John Green

14. “I miss you like the cloudless night sky would miss the stars if they were stolen.” ~ C.T. O’Connel

15. “One minute I want to remember. The next minute I want to live in the land of forgetting. One minute I want to feel. The next minute I never want to feel again.” ~ Benjamin Saenz 

and, lastly, these timeless verses from a poem by Edward Hirsch:

16. “I did not know that the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night…

…Look closely and you will see
Almost everyone carrying bags
Of cement on their shoulders.”

~

Author: Aimee-Claire Smith 
Image: Annie Spratt/Unsplash 
Editor: Sara Kärpänen
Copy Editor: Travis May