Thirteen Quotes About Love and Death

The pain of loving someone and losing them is a universal and emotionally wrenching experience. Whether that person is a lover, a child, a parent or a friend, their absence throws us into a state of grief that can be challenging to navigate. Poets and authors, often in the process of trying to heal their own emotional wounds, have explored that grief and expressed it frankly, or in a context that leads to acceptance and peace. A common thread among the quotes below is that the ones we’ve loved and lost remain a part of us, and our grief is simply the toll we pay for having been blessed with their company.

1. “It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”

– Anais Nin

 

2. “So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”

– E.A. Bucchianeri

 

3. “When your heart is broken, the world sounds different.”

– Angie Cartwright

4. “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks: your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.”

– John Keats

 

5. “Death leaves a heartache no one can heal. Love leaves a memory no one can steal.”

– Irish Tombstone

 

6. “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

7. “If love would die along with death this life wouldn’t be so hard.”

– Andrew Vachss

 

8.
 “When it comes down to it, that’s what life is all about: showing up for the people you love, again and again, until you can’t show up anymore.”

– Rebecca Walker

 


9.
 “I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”

– Pablo Neruda

10. “Though lovers be lost love shall not; and death shall have no dominion.”

– Dylan Thomas

 

11. “Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”

– Kahlil Gibran

 

12. “My wife is as handsome as when she was a girl, and I fell in love with her; and what is more, I have never fallen out.”

– Abraham Lincoln

13. “Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.”

– Emily Dickinson