There was just something about her dying that I had understood but not really understood, if you know what I mean. I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn't really hit you.
—Jesse Andrews in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
I can't pretend to know what it feels like to lose a child, but I assume it's the worst pain I've ever felt times a thousand, or times a hundred thousand.
—Elin Hilderbrand in The Identicals
If you haven't already, you will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart.
—Anne Lamott in Plan B
One of the hardest things to accept when someone you love dies is that life goes on.
—Linda Castillo in Long Lost
Perhaps it is the greater grief to be left on earth when another is gone.
—Madeline Miller in The Song of Achilles
Maybe if you thought about them, people never really disappeared. It sounded so corny, but there was a scientific explanation for it, too. If you believed that thoughts were energy and energy is matter and matter never disappears, then a person can never truly leave you unless you stop thinking about them. Everything you shared with a person is still there swirling around in the universe.
—Wendy Wunder in The Probability of Miracles
It's strange that I could have laughed so hard under those circumstances, during that very dark moment in my life. But I've decided sorrow can make things funnier. Endure enough hardship, and you start really needing a good laugh.
—Katherine Center in How to Walk Away
Anything was possible. Everything was uncertain. But I knew one thing for sure: I'd bounced back before, and I would do it again and again and again. Because that's the only choice there is. And as many things as I still had to lose, I had just as many more left to find.
—Katherine Center in The Lost Husband
Grief is an unfillable hole in your body. It should be weightless, but it's heavy. Should be cold, but it burns. Should, over time, close up, but instead it deepens.
—Emily Henry in A Million Junes
Time healed, they said, but it wasn't true, or not completely. The first raw wound of loss had closed and silvered over, yes, but the scar it had left would never heal. It would always be there, aching and tender.
—Ruth Ware in The Death of Mrs. Westaway
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
—Samuel Butler
No matter how hard it feels, you don't need to be afraid to move on. There's always more to see and feel.
—Emily Henry in The Love That Split the World
Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.
—Steve Jobs