Words of encouragement for after loss (53+)

Words of encouragement for after loss

• “What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”–Helen Keller
• “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, A Prayer for Owen Meany
• “You will lose someone 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
• “Anyone who has lost something they thought was theirs forever finally comes to realize that nothing really belongs to them.” ― Paulo Coelho, Author of The Alchemist
• “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 round it.” ― Rachel Joyce
• “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
•  “Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That’s the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what’s left, that’s the part you have to make up as you go.” ― Katharine Weber, The Music Lesson
• It is as if the intensity of grief fused the distance between you and the dead. Or perhaps, in reality, part of one dies. Like Orpheus, one tries to follow the dead on the beginning of their journey. But one cannot, like Orpheus, go all the way, and after a long journey, one comes back. If one is lucky, one is reborn.– Anne Morrow Lindbergh
• “Grief can destroy you –or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone. OR you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see that it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life.” ― Dean Koontz, Odd Hours
• I know that we live in the lives of those we touch.I have felt in me the living presence of many I have loved and who have loved me.I experience my daughter’s presence with me daily.And I know that this.
• “Real grief is not healed by time…If time does anything, it deepens our grief. 
• The longer we live, the more fully we become aware of who she was for us, and the more intimately we experience what her love meant for us. Real, deep love is, as you know, very unobtrusive, seemingly easy and obvious, and so obvious that we take it for granted. 
• Therefore, it is often only in retrospect – or better, in memory, that we fully realize its power and depth. Yes, indeed, love often makes itself visible in pain.”– Henri Nouwen
• “The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
• “Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.” – Rumi
•  “Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
• “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
• “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, The Sky Is Everywhere
• “Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” ― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
• I don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.ANNE FRANK (more Anne Frank quotes)
• What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, For all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.HELEN KELLER (more Helen Keller quotes)
• Grief can be the garden of compassion. If you keep your heart open through everything, your pain can become your greatest ally in your life’s search for love and wisdom.RUMI (more Rumi quotes)
• The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you’ll learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS
• Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.ALBERT CAMUS
• It is as if the intensity of grief fused the distance between you and the dead. Or perhaps, in reality, part of one dies. Like Orpheus, one tries to follow the dead on the beginning of their journey. But one cannot, like Orpheus, go all the way, and after a long journey, one comes back. If one is lucky, one is reborn.ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
• All you need is one safe anchor to keep you grounded when the rest of your life spins out of control.KATIE KACVINSKY
• God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.J.M. BARRIE
• If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart, I’ll stay there forever.WINNIE THE POOH (more Winnie the Pooh quotes)
• Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time. It tell us to tell each other right now that we love each other.LEO BUSCAGLIA
• It takes strength to make your way through grief, to grab hold of life and let it pull you forward.PATTI DAVIS
• This is not goodbye, my darling, this is a thank you. Thank you for coming into my life and giving me joy.NICHOLAS SPARKS
• Although it’s natural to forget your power after you lose a loved one, the truth is that after a breakup, divorce, or death, there remains an ability within you to create a new reality.LOUISE HAY AND DAVID KESSLER
• Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.LEO TOLSTOY (more Leo Tolstoy quotes)
• Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms.PAULO COELHO (more Paulo Coleho quotes)
• 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 round it.RACHEL JOYCE
• Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That’s the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what’s left, that’s the part you have to make up as you go.KATHARINE WEBER
• While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.SAMUEL JOHNSON
• Grief can destroy you or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you alone.DEAN KOONTZ
• We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.KENJI MIYAZAWA
• Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.MARCEL PROUST
• The darker the night, the brighter the stars,/ The deeper the grief, the closer is God!FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
• Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature’s delight.MARCUS AURELIUS
• To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.J.K. ROWLING (more J. K. Rowling quotes)
• Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.MEGAN DEVINE
• Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.JOSÉ N. HARRIS
• Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.HARUKI MURAKAMI
• The pain passes, but the beauty remains.PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR
• My mom has experienced a lot of loss in her life and she told me at one point, there is an empowerment that comes with grief—at some point you find it. It’s very hard but you will find it, and I think at a certain point you can choose to sort of fall from this or you can choose to rise. And that’s what I’m just trying to do my best for him, because I know that that’s what he would have. LEA MICHELE
• And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. MAYA ANGELOU (more Maya Angelou quotes)
• Kahlil Gibran”Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”
• Arthur Golden”Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less, and one day we wonder what has become of it.”
• John Irving”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.”
• Helen Keller”We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world—the company of those who have known suffering.”
• Elizabeth Kübler-Ross”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. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”
• Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) was a pioneer in near-death studies and the author of the groundbreaking book “On Death and Dying,” where she discussed her theory of the five stages of grief, also known as the Kübler-Ross model.
• C.S. Lewis”I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.”
• Abraham Lincoln”In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You cannot now realize that you will ever feel better.
• “And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say, and you need only to believe it to feel better at once.”
• Anne Morrow Lindbergh”Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It’s like an amputation. I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before.”
• Matthew 5:4″Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
• William Penn”For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.”
• Edna St. Vincent Millay”Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.”
• John Steinbeck”It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”
• Clover Stroud”Grief, I now understand, is a sort of madness, in the same way, that falling in love is madness.”
• William Shakespeare”To weep is to make less the depth of grief.”
• Nicholas Sparks”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.”
• Patrick Swayz”When those you love die, the best you can do is honor their spirit for as long as you live. You make a commitment that you’re going to take whatever lesson that person or animal was trying to teach you, and you make it true in your own life. It’s a positive way to keep their spirit alive in the world by keeping it alive in yourself.”
• Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
• After a loved one passes, be encouraged by their passing and legacy. Instead of crying, live…
• Memories… let them fill your mind, warm your heart, and lead you through.
• Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.
• Relationships can be strengthened through the veil with people we know and love. That is…
• Friends are the pillars on your porch. Sometimes they hold you up, sometimes they lean on…
• No person is every truly alone. Those who live no more, whom we loved, Echo still within our…
• Autumn wins you best by this, its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
• What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness.
• With sympathy, thinking of you at this sad time and sending love.
• A loss to us is a gain to our God so let’s rejoice to those who will see Him after this life.
•  I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but…
• Perhaps they are not the stars, but rather openings in Heaven where the love of our lost…
• Words, however kind, can’t mend your heartache, but those who care and share your loss…
• We thought of you in love today, but that is nothing new. We thought about you yesterday…
• What we have once enjoyed we can never lose; all that we deeply love becomes a part of us.
• Those we love and lose are always connected by heartstrings into infinity.
• Your life was a blessing, your memory a treasure. You are loved beyond words and missed…
• Sympathy does not think. It acts. It acts to remove the ceaseless sufferings of the world.
• Those we love don’t go away, they walk beside us everyday.
• Your friend can never be replaced, but will always be remembered.
• “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”– Leo Tolstoy
• “If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.”– Winnie the Pooh
• “A great soul serves everyone all the time. A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.”– Maya Angelou
• “There is no expiration date on the love between a father and his child.”– Jennifer Williamson
• “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”– John Steinbeck
• “When a great man dies, for years the light he leaves behind him, lies on the paths of men.”– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• “Say not in grief ‘he is no more’ but in thankfulness that he was.”– Hebrew Proverb
• “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 heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature.”– Antoine Francois Prevost
• “Love has no age, no limit; and no death.”– John Galsworthy
• “A pet is never truly forgotten until it is no longer remembered.”Lacie Petitt
• “Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.”John Galsworthy
• “I guess you don’t really own a dog, you rent them, and you have to be thankful that you had a long lease.”Joe Garagiola
• “Sometimes losing a pet is more painful than losing a human because in the case of the pet, you were not pretending to love it.”Amy Sedaris
• “If there is a heaven, it’s certain our animals are to be there. Their lives become so interwoven with our own, it would take more than an archangel to detangle them.”Pam Brown
• “Grief is so painfully real, regardless of its origin. The love of, and attachment to, an animal friend can equal that of human relationships. Likewise, the loss of an animal can be just as devastating.”Rev. Joel L. Morgan
• “Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains un-awakened.”Anatole France
• “If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.”James Herriot
•  “All deaths are sudden, no matter how gradual the dying may be.”― Michael McDowell
•  “Those we love never truly leave us. There are things that death cannot touch.” ― Jack Thorne
•  “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose; all that we deeply love becomes a part of us.” – Helen Keller
• “Remember that people are only guests in your story – the same way you are only a guest in theirs – so make the chapters worth reading.” ― Lauren Klarfeld
•  “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” ― Thomas Campbell
• “When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure.” – Unknown
• “We understand death only after it has placed its hands on someone we love.”– Anne L. de Stael
• “For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.”– Kalil Gibran
•  “Death – the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening.”– Sir Walter Scott
• “The sorrow we feel when we lose a loved one is the price we pay to have had them in our lives.” ― Rob Liano
• “We never truly get over a loss, but we can move forward and evolve from it.”—Elizabeth Berrien
• “When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.” ― Madeline Miller
•  “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” –Dr. Seuss
• “Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure.” —Sue Grafton
• “They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it.For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity.Death cannot kill what never dies.” – William Penn
• “Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean.” – David Searls
• “The only way to get over a death is by seeing it as a life completed, instead of a life interrupted.” ― Anonymous
• “The death of a beloved is an amputation.”—C. S. Lewis
• “The dead never truly die. They simply change form.” ― Suzy Kassem
• “Death is tough for the people left behind on earth.” ― Prateeksha Malik
• “I love you every day. And now I will miss you every day.” ― Mitch Albom

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