The Best Quotes on Grief, Death & Dying
Are you looking for inspirational or reflective quotes on grief, death and dying? Using these quotes on your end of life services or death doula website can gently set the tone and help visitors feel more at ease with a difficult topic. It creates a moment of pause, inviting people to slow down and connect more deeply with your message.
You'll find lovely spaces to include inspirational quotes on each of my end of life doula website templates.
I hope you find some new favorite quotes here, ranging from thoughtful to funny and everything in between.
5 ways end-of-life professionals can use quotes about grief, death, and dying:
SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS
Pair quotes with a short reflection, photo, or gentle question to spark conversation.
CLIENT RESOURCES
Include quotes in handouts or follow-up emails to comfort and validate clients.
WORKSHOPS OR SUPPORT GROUPS
Use quotes as conversation starters or journal prompts.
WEBSITE COPY
Add meaningful quotes to website pages to convey values and compassion.
MEMORIAL SERVICES
Incorporate quotes into ceremonies, programs, or keepsakes to help honor loved ones.
"When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined."
- Andrea Gibson, Poet
"We understand death only after it has placed its hands on someone we love."
- Anne Louise Germaine de Staël
"Grief is not a problem to be solved; it's an experience to be carried."
- Megan Devine, Author
"The act of truly facing our desires and our deaths without shame is a pathway to being unbridled. If we refuse to believe that we should hate ourselves for wanting, for deviating, for being sick, for needing others: could you even imagine? How much energy would we have to live differently, to create a better world?"
- Kaleigh Trace
"Dying is a wild night and a new road.” – "
- Emily Dickinson
"Let us talk of death, unbosom all freely.
Think of the times you stood at the side of the dying,
Think of the time when your own body will be dying,
Have you supposed it beautiful to be born? I tell you it is just as beautiful to die;
Do you enjoy what life confers? you shall enjoy what death confers;
Has life much purport? Ah, death has the greatest purport."
- Walt Whitman, Poet
“When I realized the storm was inevitable, I made it my medicine.”
- Andrea Gibson, Poet
“Grief is the midwife of your capacity to be immensely grateful for being born.”
- Stephen Jenkinson, Author
“I wish this for you: to find the people you belong with, the ones who will see your pain, companion you, hold you close,
even as the heavy lifting of grief is yours alone. As hard as they may seem to find at times, your community is out there. Look
for them. Collect them. Knit them into a vast flotilla of light that can hold you.”
- Megan Devine, Author
“Our grief is as individual as our lives.”
- Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Author
“Dying is easy; it’s living that scares me to death.”
- Annie Lennox, musician
"My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief."
- Francis Weller, Author
“It’s only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth – and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up – that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.”
- Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Author
“People often say, “I don’t know how you’re doing it.” I tell them that I’m not. I’m not deciding to wake up in the morning. I just do. Then I put one foot in front of the other because there’s nothing else to do. Whether I like it or not, my life is continuing, and I have decided to be part of it.”
- David Kessler, Author
“The reality is that you will grieve forever... Grief is not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith. It is the price of love.”
- Dr. Alan Wolfeltn, Grief Counselor, Author
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
- Haruki Murakami, Author
"Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace."
- Oscar Wilde
"Grief is like a moving river, it's always changing."
- Michelle Williams, ACTRESS
“To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.”
- Mary Oliver, Blackwater Woods
"Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.”
— David Kessler”
- David Kessler, Author
"Today is a very good day to die.
Every living thing is in harmony with me.
Every voice sings a chorus within me.
All beauty has come to rest in my eyes.
All bad thoughts have departed from me.
Today is a very good day to die.
My land is peaceful around me.
My fields have been turned for the last time.
My house is filled with laughter.
My children have come home.
Yes, today is a very good day to die."
- Nancy Wood, Poet
"Every falling leaf is a tiny kite with a string to small to see, held by the part of me in charge of making beauty out of grief."
- Andrea Gibson, Poet
"Death is not a mystery. It is not a medical disaster. It is a bodily process. Like giving birth or like going to the bathroom or coughing. Having an orgasm. Cuz your body knows what to do. Your body knows how to die. How cool is that?"
- Nurse Amy, Dying for Sex
"The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible."
- Francis Weller, Author
"Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of it. By living our lives we nurture death."
- Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
"My next great adventure, aged 90, is going to be dying. There’s either nothing or something. If there’s nothing there’s nothing, that’s it. If there’s something I can’t think of a greater adventure than finding out what it is."
- Jane Goodall
“We’re all just walking each other home.”
- Ram Dass, Writer
"At every step in our path, some possibilities die behind us while others bloom before us, and in every transition, even the joyful ones, there is grief.”
- Alua Arthur, Writer
"To die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.
Nothing can happen more beautiful than death,
The beautiful touch of death, soothing and benumbing a few moments, for reasons -
Soon or late the certain grace,
To set thee free and bear thee home."
- Walt Whitman, Poet
“To die will be an awfully big adventure."
- J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
“Every tattoo is temporary, because we’re all slowly dying.”
- Unknown
"I want to die in gratitude. I've moved fast my entire life, yet I want to saunter into my death like a tipsy woman might walk to a lover across a dark room. I go in surrender."
- Alua Arthur, Writer
"Grief is not a disorder, a disease, or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical, and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve."
- Earl Grollmant, Rabbi & Author
"The only thing in this life we have control over is where we put our attention."
- Andrea Gibson, Poet
“You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one. You’ll learn to live with it.”
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Author
“Life is not promised. We are not promised tomorrow. We are not promised eternity. What we are promised is now. Let us not squander it.”
- Bell Hooks, Author
"Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive?"
- Andrea Gibson, Poet
“Grief is not a feeling it is a capacity. It is not something that disables you, we are not on the receiving end of grief we are on the practising end of grief.”
- Stephen Jenkinson, Author
“You don't need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life. Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”
- Megan Devine, Author
"Some bright morning when this life is over, I'll fly away."
- Allison Krauss and Gillian Welch, Musicians
"There are many ways to die in bed, but the best way is not alone."
- George Burns, Comic
"Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.”
- Francis Weller, Author
"To die will be an awfully big adventure."
- J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
“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
“Your loss is not a test, a lesson, something to handle, a gift, or a blessing. Loss is simply what happens to you in life. Meaning is what you make happen.”
- David Kessler, Author
“Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.”
- Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Author
"I am not suggesting that we live a life preoccupied with sorrow. I am saying that our refusal to welcome the sorrows that come to us, our inability to move through these experiences with true presence and conscious awareness, condemns us to a life shadowed by grief. Welcoming everything that comes to us is the challenge. This is the secret to being fully alive."
- Francis Weller, Author
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
- Isaac Asimov, Author
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in”
- Leonard Cohen, Musician
“Dying is nothing to fear. It can be the most wonderful experience of your life. It all depends on how you’ve lived.”
- Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Author
“You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one. You’ll learn to live with it.”
- Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Author
"The trouble with quotes about death is that 99.9% of them are made by people who are still alive."
- JOSHUA BURNS