Top 90 Megan Devine Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”

— Megan Devine

2. “Grief is not a sign that you’re unwell or unevolved. It’s a sign that love has been part of your life, and that you want love to continue, even here.”

— Megan Devine

3. “While it may not always be this acutely heavy, your grief, like your love, will always be part of you. Life can be, and even likely will be, beautiful again. But that is a life built alongside loss, informed by beauty and grace as much as by devastation, not one that seeks to erase it.”

— Megan Devine

4. “Grief is not a problem to be solved; it’s an experience to be carried.”

— Megan Devine

5. “There are losses that rearrange the world. Deaths that change the way you see everything, grief that tears everything down. Pain that transports you to an entirely different universe, even while everyone else thinks nothing has really changed.”

— Megan Devine

6. “If you can’t tell your story to another human, find another way: journal, paint, make your grief into a graphic novel with a very dark storyline. Or go out to the woods and tell the trees. It is an immense relief to be able to tell your story without someone trying to fix it. The trees will not ask, “How are you really?” and the wind doesn’t care if you cry.”

— Megan Devine

7. “To feel truly comforted by someone, you need to feel heard in your pain. You need the reality of your loss reflected back to you – not diminished, not diluted. It seems counterintuitive, but true comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away.”

— Megan Devine

8. “Finding that middle ground is the real work of grief – my work, and yours. Each of us, each one of us, has to find our way into that middle ground. A place that doesn’t ask us to deny our grief and doesn’t doom us forever. A place that honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love.”

— Megan Devine

9. “There is not a reason for everything. Not every loss can be transformed into something useful. Things happen that do not have a silver lining.”

— Megan Devine

10. “When someone you love dies, you don’t just lose them in the present or in the past. You lose the future you should have had, and might have had, with them. They are missing from all the life that was to be.”

— Megan Devine

11. “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

12. “Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.”

— Megan Devine

13. “It seems counterintuitive, but the way to truly be helpful to someone in pain is to let them have their pain. Let them share the reality of how much this hurts, how hard this is, without jumping in to clean it up, make it smaller, or make it go away.”

— Megan Devine

14. “The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is pain in this world that you can’t be cheered out of. You don’t need solutions. 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

15. “Grief can be incredibly lonely. Even when people show up and love you as best they can, they aren’t really with you in this. They can’t be. It so very much sucks that, in large part, you are in this alone. And also, you can’t do this alone.”

— Megan Devine

16. “True comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward.”

— Megan Devine

17. “All those encouragements from others about having so much to live for, that there’s still goodness to come in your life – they feel irrelevant. They kind of are irrelevant. You can’t cheerlead yourself out of the depths of grief.”

— Megan Devine

18. “Disasters and deaths bring out a level of emotional empathy that asks you to go there, to acknowledge that this could happen to you or someone you love, no matter how safe you try to be. We hate to see evidence of the fact that there is very little in this life over which we have control.”

— Megan Devine

19. “The Gift of Presence, the Perils of Advice,” author and educator Parker Palmer writes, “The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed – to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.”1 We.”

— Megan Devine

20. “The cult of positivity we have does everyone a disservice. It leads us to believe we’re more in charge of the world than we are, and holds us responsible for every pain and heartbreak we endure. It sets up a one-false-move world, in which we must be careful not to upset the gods, or karma, or our bodies with our thoughts and intentions.”

— Megan Devine

21. “If the people in your life can handle, even appreciate, you staying true to your own heart, then they’ll make it through with you. If they can’t, let them go: gracefully, clearly, and with love.”

— Megan Devine

22. “When you choose to find meaning or growth inside your loss, that’s an act of personal sovereignty and self-knowledge. When someone else ascribes growth or meaning to your loss, it diminishes your power, gives subtle shaming or judgment to who you were before, and tells you that you needed this somehow. No wonder it feels so bad.”

— Megan Devine

23. “Acknowledgment – being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one’s own life – is the only real medicine of grief.”

— Megan Devine

24. “You are alone in your grief. You alone carry the knowledge of how your grief lives in you. You alone know all the details, the subtlety and nuance of what’s happened and what’s been lost. You alone know how deeply your life has been changed. You alone have to face this, inside your own heart. No one can do this with you.”

— Megan Devine

25. “Think of it like this: your grieving person spoke a language that only one other person in the world spoke, and that person died. It’s tempting to ask the grieving person to teach you that language so that you can speak it to them.”

— Megan Devine

26. “Love with open hands, with an open heart, knowing that what is given to you will die. It will change. Love anyway. You witness incredible pain in this life. Love anyway.”

— Megan Devine

27. “Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing, loss to become whoever they are “meant” to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen.”

— Megan Devine

28. “There are people who don’t care one bit about your pain, and people who are far more concerned with being seen as helpful and important than they are in actually being helpful.”

— Megan Devine

29. “Grief is part of love. Love for life, love for self, love for others. What you are living, painful as it is, is love. And love is really hard. Excruciating at times.”

— Megan Devine

30. “Evidence that they were here, that they lived, that they were part of you is important.”

— Megan Devine

31. “They want the “old” you back, not understanding that that old you can’t come back. That self is gone.”

— Megan Devine

32. “Grief is not a problem. It doesn’t need solutions. Seeing grief as an experience that needs support, rather than solutions, changes everything.”

— Megan Devine

33. “There is nothing wrong with grief. It’s a natural extension of love. It’s a healthy and sane response to loss. That grief feels bad doesn’t make it bad; that you feel crazy doesn’t mean you are crazy.”

— Megan Devine

34. “The whole idea of getting better – or even integrating your loss – can feel offensive, especially in early grief. Getting better might mean that the person you lost, or the life you no longer get to live, isn’t as important anymore.”

— Megan Devine

35. “Because of the way grief impacts the mind and cognitive processes, you’ve probably also lost interest in things you used to enjoy, your intellectual faculties may have changed, and your memory and attention span may be virtually nonexistent.”

— Megan Devine

36. “That hole torn in the universe will not just close back up so that you can go back to normal. No matter what happens next in your life, it will never be adequate compensation. The life you lost can’t come back. That loss can’t be regained.”

— Megan Devine

37. “Grief is already a lonely experience. It rearranges your address book: people you thought would stay beside you through anything have either disappeared or they’ve behaved so badly, you cut them out yourself. Even those who truly love you, who want more than anything to stay beside you, fall short of joining you here. It can feel like you lost the entire world right along with the person who died.”

— Megan Devine

38. “We need to know how to live here, where life as we know it can change, forever at anytime.”

— Megan Devine

39. “Grief never really stops. It is something you carry with you in different ways.”

— Megan Devine

40. “Let your pain stretch out, take up all the space it needs. When so many others tell you that your grief has to be cleaned up or contained, hearing that it has enough room to spread out, to unfurl, it’s healing. It’s a relief. The more you open to your pain, the more you can just be with it. The more you can give yourself the tenderness and care to survive this. Your pain needs space; room to unfold.”

— Megan Devine

41. “Feeling like you’d rather not wake up in the morning is normal in grief, and it doesn’t mean you’re suicidal. Not wanting to be alive is not the same thing as wanting to be dead. It’s hard to tell non-grieving people that, though, as people understandably get worried about your safety. And because people tend to get upset when we talk about not wanting to be alive, we just stop talking about it altogether.”

— Megan Devine

42. “He had a great life, and you were lucky to have him for as long as you did. Be grateful, and move on.” As though a great life lived makes it OK that that great life is now over.”

— Megan Devine

43. “Feeling less than psyched about being alive is normal. It’s important to have at least one person in your life to whom you can be honest about your disinterest in survival. Telling the truth can take some of that pressure off. And no matter how intense it gets, practice safety first.”

— Megan Devine

44. “There is pain in this world that you can’t be cheered out of. You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it.”

— Megan Devine

45. “What has happened cannot be made right. What is lost cannot be restored. There is no beauty here, inside this central fact.”

— Megan Devine

46. “Your mind cannot stop replaying the events, hoping for a different outcome.”

— Megan Devine

47. “We tell the story again and again because the story needs to be told – we’re looking for some way this makes sense, even if it never can.”

— Megan Devine

48. “To do grief well depends solely on individual experience. It means listening to your own reality. It means acknowledging pain and love and loss. It means allowing the truth of these things the space to exist without any artificial tethers or stages or requirements.”

— Megan Devine

49. “Like many grieving people, we stopped talking about our pain to friends and family. It was easier to pretend everything was fine than to continually defend and explain our grief to those who couldn’t understand. We turned to other grieving people because they were the only ones who knew what grief was really like.”

— Megan Devine

50. “The love you knew, the love you dreamed of, the love you grew and created together, that is what will get you through. It’s a vast, wide raft that can’t be broken or depleted. You might forget it’s there sometimes, but you can always come back to it.”

— Megan Devine