Introduction
When someone dies, are they truly gone? They linger around us in the form of memories. Even when the soul has left for the afterlife, the memories we share with them will not leave us till the day we die. Grief is a tricky road, but remembering them is to keep them alive in our hearts. With these quotes, learn how you can express “gone but never forgotten” to a person you cherish.
Quotes About a Life Well-Lived
- “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” — Pierre Auguste Renoir
- “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
- “There are no goodbyes for us. Wherever you are, you will always be in my heart.” — Mahatma Gandhi
- “What you remember saves you.” — W. S. Merwin
- “The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God!” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “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
- “It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.” — Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy
- “Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.” — Alphonse de Lamartine
- “What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” — Helen Keller
- “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
- “You can’t truly heal from a loss until you allow yourself to really feel the loss.” — Mandy Hale
- “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
- “So it’s true when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.” — E.A. Bucchianeri
- “Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in the time of sorrow.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
- “Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.” — Pablo Neruda
- “Our joys will be greater, our love will be deeper, our life will be fuller because we shared your moment.” — Unknown
- “When someone you love becomes a memory, that memory becomes a treasure.” — Unknown
- “Those we love and lose are always connected by heartstrings into infinity.” — Terri Guillemets
- “Those we love don’t go away, they walk beside us every day… unseen, unheard, but always near, still loved, still missed, and very dear.” — Unknown
- “When wasteful war shall statues overturn / And broils root out the work of masonry, / Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn / The living record of your memory. / ‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity / Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find a room / Even in the eyes of all posterity …” — William Shakespeare
- “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
- “All things grow with time, except grief.” — Jewish Proverb
- “I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.” — Vladimir Nabokov
- “To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” — Thomas Campbell
- “You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.” — Jane Austen
- “Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, / Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “Wherever a beautiful soul has been there is a trail of beautiful memories.” — Ronald Reagan
- “Someone mentioned your name today, took me down memory lane, to a time very much younger, a time more pure, more sane.” — Adiela Akoo
- “To bring the dead to life / Is no great magic. / Few are wholly dead; / Blow on a dead man’s embers / And a live flame will start.” — Robert Graves
- “The sorrow we feel when we lose a loved one is the price we pay to have had them in our lives.” — Rob Liano
- “If it were possible to heal sorrow by weeping and to raise the dead with tears, gold was less prized than grief.” — Sophocles
- “When it is darkest, we can see the stars.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “An eternal memory… until we meet again: Those special memories will always bring a smile if only I could have you back for just a little while. Then we could sit and talk again just like we used to do, you always meant so very much and always will do too. The fact that you’re no longer here will always cause me pain, but you’re forever in my heart until we meet again.” — Unknown
- “I should know enough about the loss to realize that you never really stop missing someone—you just learn to live around the huge gaping hole of their absence.” — Alyson Noel
- “Grief changes shape, but it never ends.” — Keanu Reeves
Conclusion
Grief is a long and excruciating process. Sometimes the memories are what keep us sane.