Last Updated on September 6, 2024
Losing someone you love is the most painful thing that could happen to anyone. People who are grieving due to the loss of a loved one need much comfort and support from friends and family.
But how do you provide that?
There are times when finding the right words to say can be a heavy load to carry. We don’t want to say the wrong words to people who are in most need of strength and sympathy.
Sending flowers and gifts to those who have just experienced loss is much easier than giving a sympathy note. It sometimes feels like there are no words to help people move on when we know that they are still suffering from their loss.
What to Say
Offering our condolences is a simple but thoughtful gesture to show our sympathy and support to someone who is grieving.
However, expressing your feelings appropriately can be difficult. When you feel like nothing you say can alleviate the pain they have, you can borrow the words of people who have more eloquently expressed your sentiments.
These quotes can be used together with the sympathy card you want to send. Words are powerful, and inspirational and kind words might lessen the burden of those left behind by the departed.
It can help them move forward and be able to cope with the loneliness they are feeling right now.
When to Say It
There is no precise time to offer our condolences.
Whether it’s now or later, remember that your purpose is not only to say that you are sorry for their loss but also to pay your respects and honor the memory of the person who passed away. In this case, you should offer your condolences the first chance you find to do so.
Tell the grieving family or friend that you are there and that they can count on you in their time of grief. Don’t wait too long before you show them your support. What you say, no matter how simple, could be exactly what they need to hear.
More than condolences and sympathies, knowing that there are people around whom they can lean on might lighten their heavy load.
How to Say It
We can never know what someone is going through when there’s been a death in the family. If you are sincere in expressing your heartfelt condolences, they will feel it.
And knowing that they are not alone in their pain can help ease their sadness even just temporarily. Likewise, sharing good memories of the person who passed away can lighten the atmosphere while honoring the person at the same time.
Try to express your concern coming from a place of love and compassion. This way, you might be able to understand the overwhelming loneliness of those who are mourning.
Even though it can be difficult to express our sympathies, we still need to do it. You may never find the perfect thing to say, but what matters is that you showed your support and offered some comfort to the ones who needed them the most.
Here are # heartfelt words of sympathy for family and friends who need comfort and support in times of grief.
Quotes about Grief and Loss
- “…we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.” – Michelle Moran, Madame Tussaud
- “Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.” – David Mitchell, Slade House
- “It’s difficult for me to imagine the rest of my life without you. But I suppose I don’t have to imagine it… I just have to live it.” – Ranata Suzuki
- “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
- “Grief, no matter how you try to cater to its wail, has a way of fading away.” – C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic
- “In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old.” – Craig D. Lounsbrough
- “Journey becomes difficult when we know the destination but not aware of the right path, may be the supreme power testing your moral and physical stamina.” – Durgesh Satpathy, Equating the Equations of Insanity
- “Heaven is a place where all the dogs you’ve ever loved come to greet you.” – Oliver Gaspirtz, Pet Humor!
- “Grief’s only ever as deep as the love it’s replaced.” – Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls
- “Mrs. Sussex said Byron’s loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub: he didn’t want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she’d never been there.” – Rachel Joyce, Perfect
- “Every wonderful quality “in” someone is waiting to be recognized in all of life’s great symphony.” – Donna Goddard
- “People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem.” – Fredrik Backman, Beartown
- “What was closure if not a clock? Not an end as everyone imagined, but a beginning.” – Celeste Chaney, In Absence of Fear
- “When you love someone, they’re a poignant daily part of your life. When you lose them, you are separated from that relationship. Moving forward doesn’t mean you leave that person behind; it means weaving them into the narrative of your life.” – Christina Zampitella
- “That’s what death is like, though. You can’t only cry for two weeks straight. You cry, and then you get tired of crying, and then someone says something, and then you’re all laughing, and it feels bad to be laughing, but it also feels so good. Without the laughter, we’d all be dying too.” – Chelsea Handler, Life Will Be the Death of Me
- “When people you care for die, something inside changes, and you become a different person. Some say that you take on a part of them yourself, that everything you loved about them is enveloped within you, that you have a responsibility to keep them alive in your heart, whatever it takes.” – Jennifer Ryan, The Spies of Schilling Lane
- “Death is a muscle memory that one never forgets.” – Greg O’Brien
- “But there isn’t a single word in the universe that you can think of that would describe the way you feel right now.” – Kathleen Glasgow, How to Make Friends with the Dark
- “There is one thing I can say for certain about grief: it will change you. Whether you choose to defeat grief or be defeated, you will be changed.” – Glenn Cameron, When Will It Stop Hurting?
- “Loss of a relationship is painful, but if you lose yourself in a relationship, when it ends, it’s devastating, because you are lost.” – Darlene Lancer
- “Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’ In one sense, that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable.” – S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
- “For his mourners will be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.” – Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
- “From a spiritual perspective, what is it that we must learn from loss? When we think deeply we realize that loss is an opening through which we can question our superficial existence and move towards something better.” – Pulkit Sharma, When the Soul Heals – Explorations in Spiritual Psychology
- “It’s imperative that you are honest about the pain that you are going through. Rather than trying harder and keeping it to yourself, it’s important that you grieve your loss and come to terms with your reality.” – Dave Furman, Being There
- “Not everyone deserves to hear your grief. Not everyone is capable of hearing it. Just because someone is thoughtful enough to ask doesn’t mean you are obliged to answer.” – Megan Devine, It’s OK That You’re Not OK
- “In the end, only three things matter: How much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” – Buddha
- “Life has to go on even when you don’t want it to or when you feel unable to participate. The world doesn’t stop turning for anyone.” – Stewart Stafford
- “It turns out that it’s possible, if you are careful, to feel all the feelings that come with having and caring for a black hole, but to still not be consumed by it. I was, I realized, no longer afraid – not of this darkness, or any other.” – Michelle Cuevas, The Care and Feeding of a Pet Black Hole
- “Grief is the price we pay for love.” – Queen Elizabeth II
- “We cannot analyze ourselves out of grief. We must create our way out of grief.” – Angie Corbett-Kuiper
- “The privilege of living a long life comes at a price -the increasing loss of those we know and love around us.” – Stewart Stafford
- “Rather than help us rise above being human, teachings in any true tradition help us become more human: more connected, not less attached.” – Megan Devine, It’s OK That You’re Not OK
- “A writer is not what one does, but what one is. It is a compulsion, a need, a gift. It is part of one’s psyche when all those thoughts that circle and swirl in the middle of the night clamor for attention as your mind opens to the universe.” – Ann P. Bennett-Cookson, Secrets
- “…when people wonder how I survived being accused of killing my mother, none of them realizes that watching her die was many, many times worse. And knowing I could have killed her was nothing compared to knowing I could not save her. And know I’d almost missed knowing her was far more frightening than Ed Best and his little army of shrunken suits.” – Anna Quindlen, One True Thing
- “An experience most deeply felt is the most difficult to convey in words. Remembering brings the emptiness, the acutely painful awareness of irreparable loss….Every time I see the grave, I get that empty feeling where something was, and isn’t anymore, and will never be again.” – William S. Burroughs
- “Grief isn’t wrong, but it can paralyze. It can thwart a life. A person can choose to let time stand still, and while they hold the pieces of the past, the hope of their future passes them by.” – Jaime Jo Wright, Echoes Among the Stones
- “Grief at its peak has a terrible beauty to it, a blinding fission of every emotion. The world is charged with significance, with meaning, and the world around you, normally so solid and implacable, suddenly looks thin, translucent.” – Jayson Greene, Once More We Saw Stars
- “Do not weep for those who have found Death’s embrace early, for they weep for us that linger on in this mortal world of pain.” – Stewart Stafford
- “Patience is the thread of healing.” – Brenna Thummler, Sheets
- “For those struggling with grief, there’s no timetable. It can last months, years, or longer. There is no rush. Give yourself permission to take however long it may be to fully heal from your loss.” – Dana Arcuri, Sacred Wandering
- “No matter how much time passes, or how many times you cry about it, losing a dog is almost as hard as living without him would have been.” – Beth Hading-Yostlot, The Path of Leashed Resistance
- “Death is not the villain of the piece. It is the next phase of life in unfamiliar clothing.” – Stewart Stafford
- “In the scheme of a life, it is not the duration of something but its impact that is important.” – Elizabeth Fremantle, Sisters of Treason
- “Nothing has the power to hold you in the state of pain except your own self.” – Huma Zuellah Ahmed, 37 Lessons on How to Gain from Loss
- “A person whom encounters disproportionate grief is likely to either capitulate to madness or ascend to a higher level of cognitive awareness.” – Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
- “We all tried to pretend that there was nothing wrong and that everything was normal, but nothing was normal.” – Bernadette Sutherland, Dear Mum in Heaven
- “The spiritual messages for mum kept coming to me in meditation. I never questioned them, I just passed them on.” – Bernadette Sutherland, Dear Mum in Heaven
- “I knew he was always doing the very best he could with the pain he felt at any given moment. And this, however tragic, had been the best he could do.” – Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
- “Grief can have its own weight age. What is worse? The loss of a parent or one’s own child?” – Anita Nair, Lessons in Forgetting
- “When I awoke on Wednesday afternoon, I understood how an amputee must feel.” – Jerry Lewis, Dean and Me
- “She felt like someone had carved her heart out of her chest and then turned her loose to stumble through a dark forest on a frigid night.” – Laura van den Berg, The Third Hotel
- “When we pay attention to our breathing, our in-breath and out-breath become peaceful and relaxed. When we walk with attention and we just walk without thinking or being carried away by anything, we already begin to heal.” – Thich Nhat Hanh, Reconciliation
- “We bonded over grief and ill-placed guilt. I guess it’s good to have someone understand how I feel without having to explain all the time.” – G. Angel, The Tragedy Of Us
- “A moment of hope makes grief even more difficult to bear.” – Kesia Lupo, We Are Blood and Thunder
- “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places that this heart of mine embraces all day through.” – Billie Holiday
- “For no soul can ever be replaced, and death claims a beauty and a magnificence that will always be missed.” – Jocelyn Soriano, In Your Hour Of Grief
- “Grief brings many false dawns, but a solicitude of normality will undoubtedly return.” – Kevin Ansbro
- “The dealing with grief cannot be bypassed. It is a road you must walk, a race you must finish and no one else can do it for you. If you try to sneak through it without it seeing you, it will seep into your life when you least expect it. Grief will not let you go until you satisfy what it came to teach you.” – Kate McGahan, Only Gone From Your Sight
- “To alter the amnesia of our times, we must be willing to look into the face of the loss and keep it nearby. In this way, we may be able to honor the losses and live our lives as carriers of their unfinished stories. This is an ancient thought – how we tend the dead is as important as how we tend the living.” – Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow
- “You understand that this pain is endless. And that in and of itself is a kind of comfort, because you have found your own eternity.” – Katrina Leno, Everything All at Once
- “Met by the sweet scent of freshly picked strawberries, she indulges in happier memories. However, it is these beautiful memories which hurt the most, and time is no great healer.” – Mary Crowley, A Sweet Smell of Strawberries
- “Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.” – Denise Levertov
- “Somewhere deep within the emptiness of her eyes was a glint of grief, of rage.” – Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem
- “If you sense the tide of grief welling up in you, treat it like the sacred emotion it is, and honor it. Give yourself time to sink into it, allow it to immobilize you with its weight, and trust that it will flow through you and out – if you let it. Grief truly felt never lasts forever – only grief avoided does.” – Jessica Moore
- “Below the zelkova tree time had stopped. At the foot of a little pine tree in its shadow, the most important of gems lay sleeping. Perhaps a window with a distant view of that place would allow us to yield to the natural process of forgetting.” – Takashi Hiraide, The Guest Cat
- “I can live with something meaningless…As long as I have something else in my life that is meaningful.” – Pauline Boss
- “Aunt-Sister would’ve said, ‘Let her go, it’s past the time,’ but I wanted the pain of mauma’s face and hands more than the peace of being without them.” – Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings
- “It takes strength to face our sadness and to grieve and to let our grief and our anger flow in tears when they need to. It takes strength to talk about our feelings and to reach out for help and comfort when we need it.” – Rogers
- “For many people, the love or the loss of an animal often becomes a gateway into a deeper spiritual journey. The most pragmatic of men will begin to question the fundamental nature of being when he is visited by an apparition of his deceased cat or dog companion.” – Elizabeth Eiler, Other Nations
- “Before the crisis, my life moved along like a well-planned play. I showed up and acted my part while the script directed the flow. The devastation demanded I grieve while the play of my life continued around me. I wished I could stop the spinning stage long enough to catch my breath.” – Shauna L. Hoey
- “People kept giving me space, all of us hoping my grief had a half-life, but I didn’t need space. I needed people to say Miles’s name out loud. I needed them not to flinch when I said it. Weren’t they curious about the color of his eyes? I needed them to acknowledge not just that he had died but that he had lived.” – Artis Henderson, Unremarried Widow
- “When they sat beside me, my hand in their hands, my own suffering began to feel like it had revealed to me the suffering of others, a world of those who, like me, are stumbling in the debris of dreams they thought they were entitled to and plans they didn’t realize they had made.” – Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason
- “She wept as we will all weep when the world splits in two and the end has finally arrived. Because love is the saddest thing when it goes away. Because love is unfathomable when one is wounded so deeply. Because in such moments love does not even truly exist.” – Javier Pedro Zabala, The Mad Patagonian
- “Cry me a river, build a bridge, and get over it.” – Justin Timberlake
- “Though sympathy alone can’t alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula
- “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
- “Walk with me for a while, my friend—you in my shoes, I in yours—and then let us talk.” – Richelle E. Goodrich, Smile Anyway
- “The mark of man is initiative, but the mark of woman is cooperation. Man talks about freedom; woman about sympathy, love, sacrifice. Man cooperates with nature; woman cooperates with God. Man was called to till the earth, to “rule over the earth”; woman to be the bearer of a life that comes from God.” – Fulton J. Sheen, The World’s First Love
- “Reserved people often really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive.” – Charlotte Brontë
- “Such actions are beyond praise: it is the perfume of such sweet and noble human sympathy that makes this wild beasts’ cage a world habitable for men.” – Frank Harris
