Losing someone you love is hard. It can feel like your world has stopped turning. But you’re not alone in your grief. That’s why I compiled these losing a loved one quotes.
Many people have walked this difficult path before. They’ve found words to express their pain and hope.
These words come from all sorts of people. Some are famous writers or thinkers. Others are everyday folks who’ve faced loss. All of them understand what you’re going through.
In this collection, you’ll find comfort and understanding. You’ll see that it’s okay to feel sad, angry, or confused. These feelings are all part of healing.
We hope these quotes help you in your journey. They might not take away the pain, but they can remind you that you’re not alone. And that, with time, you can find peace and even joy again.
111 Losing a Loved One Quotes
- “When someone you love becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure.” – Unknown
- “Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.” – Emily Dickinson
- “If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them.” – James O’Barr
- “Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.” – Isaac Asimov
- “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
- “We understand death only after it has placed its hands on someone we love.” – Anne L. de Stael
- “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
- “There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “There is no footprint too small to leave an imprint on this world.” – Unknown
- “Just as it is impossible to explain childbirth to a woman who has never given birth, it is impossible to explain child loss to a person who has never lost a child.” – Lynda Cheldlin Fell
- “We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world — the company of those who have known suffering.” – Helen Keller
- “We never truly get over a loss, but we can move forward and evolve from it.” – Elizabeth Berrien
- “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” – C.S. Lewis
- “In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.” – Jodi Picoult
- “When our children die, we drop them into the unknown, shuddering with fear. We know that they go out from us, and we stand, and pity, and wonder.” – Henry Ward Beecher
- “Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.” – Unknown
- “Just because we lost a life, doesn’t mean we have to lose ourselves.” – Tamara Gabriel
- “The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you’re faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.” – James Patterson
- “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” – C.S. Lewis
- “No matter what age… I’ll always need you mom.” – Unknown
- “When death takes your mother, it steals that word forever.” – Mitch Albom
- “I never truly learned what the words ‘I miss you’ were until I reached for my mom’s hand and it wasn’t there.” – Unknown
- “My mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart—a heart so large that everybody’s joys found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation.” – Mark Twain
- “Wherever a beautiful soul has been there is a trail of beautiful memories.” – Unknown
- “A mom’s hug lasts long after she lets go.” – Unknown
- “Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.” – Jamie Anderson
- “Hold dear to your parents for it is a scary and confusing world without them.” – Emily Dickinson
- “Love is a bond that death cannot part. Gone from my arms, but still held in my heart.” – John Mark Green
- “Old as she was, she still missed her Daddy sometimes.” – Unknown
- “Your absence walks through the door every single day.” – Helen Lyon
- “Dads are the most ordinary men turned by love into heroes, adventurers story-tellers, and singers of song.” – Pam Brown
- “A father’s love is forever imprinted on his child’s heart.” – Jennifer Williamson
- “But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going into every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.” – Mitch Albom
- “Dad, wherever you are, you are done but you will never be forgotten.” – Conrad Hall
- “The loss of my father was the most traumatic event in my life – I can’t forget the pain.” – Frank Lowry
- “Say not in grief ‘he is no more’ but in thankfulness that he was.” – Hebrew Proverb
- “My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived and let me watch him do it.” – Clarence Budington Kellan
- “The years may pass but you will stay… as near and dear as yesterday” – Unknown
- “There’s no buddy like a brother. I miss you.” – Unknown
- “Your life was a blessing, your memory a treasure. You are loved beyond words and missed beyond measure.” – Renee Wood
- I still don’t know how to look at my life without an inescapable absence of you.” – Chloe Frayne
- “Like my strong body would miss my heart beating loud, I miss you Brother.” – Michele Melleen
- “Sometimes memories sneak out of my eyes and roll down my cheeks.” – Unknown
- “Because brothers don’t let each other wander in the dark alone.” – Jolene Perry
- “Everything I am, you helped me be.” – Unknown
- “Because I have a brother, I’ll always have a friend.” – Unknown
- “Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?” – Terry Pratchett
- “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.” – Jandy Nelson
- “Not always eye to eye, but always heart to heart.” – Unknown
- “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
- “A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost.” – Marion C. Garretty
- “She was a beautiful person, she was my sister, and I’m just as proud of her as I can be.” – Mary Porter
- “My sister may not always be at my side, but she is always in my heart.” – Unknown
- “There’s something God has given us, that’s more than family; He’s placed a love for you, my Sister, deep down in the heart of me.” – Allison Chambers Coxsey
- “If you see a sunset, it’s me, smiling from behind it. If I go away far, and you see a star, if you find it, I’m inside it.” – Anna Williams
- “I’ll be seeing you, in all the old familiar places, that this heart of mine embraces, all day through.” – Billie Holiday
- “No one compares to you, but there’s no you, except in my dreams tonight.” – Lana Del Rey
- “Though lovers be lost, love shall not; And death shall have no dominion.” – Dylan Thomas
- “Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds its way back to you.” – Ranata Suzuki
- “I think about you. But I don’t say it anymore.” – Marguerite Duras
- “At times in life you have to leave people where they left you.” – Angel Moreira
- “It’s terrible that one doesn’t love people forever.” – Iris Murdoch
- “Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” – Kahlil Gibran
- “You can love someone so much…But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.” – John Green
- “And he hated himself and hated her, too, for the ruin they’d made of each other.” – Dennis Lehane
- “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” – Alfred Lord Tennyson
- “What the heart has once owned and had, it shall never lose.” – Henry Ward Beecher
- “To lose a friend is the greatest of all losses.” – Unknown
- “Friendship is delicate as a glass, once broken it can be fixed but there will always be cracks.” – Waqar Ahmed
- “The worst pain in the world goes beyond the physical. Even further beyond any other emotional pain one can feel. It is the betrayal of a friend.” – Heather Brewer
- “You meet people who forget you. You forget people you meet. But sometimes you meet those people you can’t forget. Those are your friends.” – Unknown
- “It is far better to be alone, than to be in bad company.” – George Washington
- “Friendship is like a glass ornament, once it is broken, it can rarely be put back together in exactly the same way.” – Charles Kingsley
- “The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.” – Sir Francis Bacon
- “We can’t feel the loss of a friend until they are apart from us.” – Debolina
- “Some people aren’t loyal to you. They are loyal to their needs of you. Once their needs change, so does their loyalty.” – Unknown
- “Don’t feel sad over someone who gave up on you, feel sorry for them because they gave up on someone who would have never given up on them.” – Frank Ocean
- “It hurt because it mattered.” – John Green
- “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.” – Henry Wordsworth
- “Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.” – Anatole France
- “Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.” – Mark Twain
- “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
- “Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.” – Roger Caras
- “If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” – Will Rogers
- “No heaven will not ever Heaven be. Unless my cats are there to welcome me.” – Unknown
- “The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man’s.” – Mark Twain
- “Dogs…do not ruin their sleep worrying about how to keep the objects they have, and to obtain the objects they have not. There is nothing of value they have to bequeath except their love and their faith.” – Eugene O’Neill
- “A pet is never truly forgotten until it is no longer remembered.” – Lacie Petitto
- “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.” – Unknown
- “If I have any beliefs about immortality it is that certain dogs I know will go to heaven, and very very few people.” – James Thurber
- “Grief is the price we pay for love.” – Queen Elizabeth II
- “Perhaps they are not the stars, but rather openings in Heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.” – Unknown
- “If tears could build a stairway, and memories a lane, I’d walk right up to Heaven and bring you home again.” – Unknown
- “Although it’s difficult today to see beyond the sorrow, May looking back in memory help comfort you tomorrow.” – Unknown
- “Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.” – The Wonder Years
- “The risk of love is loss, and the price of loss is grief – But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love.” – Hillary Stanton Zunin
- “You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.” – Old Chinese proverb
- “Nothing that grieves us can be called little; by the external laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.” – Mark Twain
- “There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.” – Lou Reed
- “There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.” – Washington Irving
- “There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.” – Aeschylus
- “Tears are the silent language of grief.” – Voltaire
- “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” – Marcel Proust
- “There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “Grief can’t be shared. Everyone carries it alone; his own burden in his own way.” – Anne Morrow Lindbergh
- “Given a choice between grief and nothing, I’d choose grief.” – William Faulkner
- “Grief changes shape, but it never ends.” – Keanu Reeves
Final Thoughts
Grief is a journey. It’s different for everyone. These quotes show that there’s no “right” way to mourn.
Remember, it’s okay to feel pain. It’s okay to miss your loved one. These feelings show how much you cared. Take your time to heal. Some days will be harder than others. That’s normal.
Keep your loved one’s memory alive. Talk about them. Share stories. It can help ease the pain.
These quotes remind us that love doesn’t end with death. It lives on in our hearts and memories. If you’re struggling, reach out for help. Talk to friends, family, or a counselor. You don’t have to face this alone.
We hope these words have brought you some comfort. May they remind you that even in dark times, there is hope. Your loved one may be gone, but their impact on your life remains forever.
Jeff Campbell is a father, martial artist, budget-master, Disney-addict, musician, and recovering foodie having spent over 2 decades as a leader for Whole Foods Market. Click Here to learn more about me. Click Here to learn more about my site. Editorial Policies.
Latest posts by Jeff Campbell (see all)
- Disorganized Attachment Style – Complete Relationship Guide - September 23, 2024
- Secure Attachment Style – Why It Matters and How to Get It - September 22, 2024
- Anxious Attachment Style: Causes and Relationship Strategies - September 20, 2024