Top 90 Megan Devine Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Megan Devine

52. “The people I love, the ones I will go to again and again, are the ones who do not in any way try to “solve” this for me, or fix it, or fix me. They do not make any attempt to cheer me up, or shame me into feeling thankful that I had as much love as I did, and so should be happy with that. They do not tell me things will be better “later,” and that I have so much to live for. They do not remind me I am part of the cycle of life. As though that matters, all that pandering, condescending crap.”

— Megan Devine

53. “With enough room to breathe, to expand, to be itself, pain softens. No longer confined and cramped, it can stop thrashing at the bars of its cage, can stop defending itself against its right to exist.”

— Megan Devine

54. “Grieving people are met with impatience precisely because they are failing the cultural storyline of overcoming adversity. If you don’t “transform,” if you don’t find something beautiful inside this, you’ve failed. And if you don’t do it quickly, following that narrative arc from incident to transformation within our collective attention span, you’re not living the right story.”

— Megan Devine

55. “All those mental circuits that used to fire so clearly are trying their best to relate to this entirely changed world.”

— Megan Devine

56. “Being brave is staying present to your own heart when that heart is shattered into a million different pieces and can never be made right.”

— Megan Devine

57. “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

58. “And one more thing about the grocery store: many people get overwhelmed with all the things they no longer need to buy for the person they lost – there is no need for their favorite cookies or their morning tea.”

— Megan Devine

59. “The world has been split open. Things “ordinary,” non-grieving people do as a matter of course will not always make sense, or feel meaningful, to you.”

— Megan Devine

60. “Grief itself won’t make sense, loss itself will not rearrange into something orderly and sensible, but your mind, and your heart, will adapt. This loss will be absorbed and integrated.”

— Megan Devine

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Just because someone is thoughtful enough to ask doesn’t mean you are obliged to answer.”

— Megan Devine

64. “Every loss is valid. And every loss is not the same. You can’t flatten the landscape of grief and say that everything is equal. It isn’t.”

— Megan Devine

65. “When you try to take someone’s pain away from them, you don’t make it better. You just tell them it’s not OK to talk about their pain.”

— Megan Devine

66. “What we all share in common – the real reason for this book – is a desire to love better. To love ourselves in the midst of great pain, and to love another when the pain of this life grows too large for one person to hold. This book offers the skills needed to make that kind of love a reality.”

— Megan Devine

67. “Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing loss to become who 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. On the contrary: life is call-and-response. Things happen, and we absorb and adapt. We respond to what we experience, and that is neither good nor bad. It simply is.”

— Megan Devine

68. “What we need to remember – as a working practice – is to honor all griefs. Honor all losses, small and not small. Life changing and moment changing. And then, not to compare them. That all people experience pain is not medicine for anything.”

— Megan Devine

69. “If we want to care for one another better, we have to rehumanize grief. We have to talk about it. We have to understand it as a natural, normal process, rather than something to be shunned, rushed, or maligned. We have to start talking about the real skills needed to face the reality of living a life entirely changed by loss.”

— Megan Devine

70. “Virgil tells him, “You have no choice. It is the fire that will burn but not consume.” Dante is still afraid. Sensing this, Virgil puts his hand on his shoulder and repeats, “You have no choice.” Dante then summons his courage and enters.”

— Megan Devine

71. “It’s kind of a dorky statement, but it is true that grief rearranges your address book. It’s amazing how many people drop out of your life in the wake of catastrophic loss. People who have been with you through thick and thin suddenly disappear, or turn dismissive, shaming, strange. Random strangers become your biggest, deepest source of comfort, if even only for a few moments.”

— Megan Devine

72. “Here’s the thing: no matter what your anxiety tells you, rehearsing disaster will not make you safe. Repeatedly checking in with people to be sure they’re still safe will never create a lasting sense of safety.”

— Megan Devine

73. “Real safety is in entering each other’s pain, recognizing ourselves inside it. As one of my oldest teachers used to say, poignancy is kinship. It’s evidence of connection. That we hurt for each other shows our relatedness.”

— Megan Devine

74. “No matter what the deeper reasons are, the loss of friends you thought would stand by you through thick and thin is an added heartbreak. The injustice of these second losses makes grief itself that much more difficult.”

— Megan Devine

75. “I’ve been the person howling on the floor, unable to eat or to sleep, unable to tolerate leaving the house for more than a few minutes at a time.”

— Megan Devine

76. “Our culture sees grief as a kind of malady: a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible. As a result, we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like. We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support.”

— Megan Devine

77. “We don’t lie to ourselves well. Unaddressed and unacknowledged pain doesn’t go away. It attempts to be heard in any way it can, often manifesting in substance addiction, anxiety and depression, and social isolation.”

— Megan Devine

78. “As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there are things that can’t be fixed. As a culture, we don’t want to hear that there is some pain that never gets redeemed. Some things we learn to live with, and that’s not the same as everything working out in the end. No matter how many rainbows and butterflies you stick into the narrative, some stories just don’t work out.”

— Megan Devine

79. “The real cutting edge of growth and development is in hurting with each other. It’s in companionship, not correction. Acknowledgment – being seen and heard and witnessed inside the truth about one’s own life – is the only real medicine of grief.”

— Megan Devine

80. “Spiritual practices in any tradition, including mindfulness in its many forms, are meant to help you live what is yours to live, not make you rise above it. These tools are meant to help you feel companioned inside your grief. They’re meant to give you a tiny bit of breathing room inside what is wholly unbearable. That’s not at all the same thing as making your pain go away.”

— Megan Devine

81. “I wrote to make connection inside grief easier to find. I created things – books, blog posts, courses, workshops – because if I could do anything to make this load lighter and less lonely for anyone, one person or a thousand – I had to. What else could I possibly do?”

— Megan Devine

82. “We’re not here to fix our pain, but to tend to it.” The truth is that those who suffer carry a wisdom that the rest of us need. And given that we live in a society that is afraid to feel, it’s important to open each other to the depth of the human journey, which can only be known through the life of our feelings.”

— Megan Devine

83. “Everything is different now. The life you expected to unfold disappears: vaporized. The world splits open, and nothing makes sense. Your life was normal, and now, suddenly, it’s anything but normal. Otherwise intelligent people have started spouting slogans and platitudes, trying to cheer you up. Trying to take away your pain.”

— Megan Devine

84. “The important thing to remember is that your grief, like your love, belongs to you, No one has the right to dictate, judge, or dismiss what is yours to live.”

— Megan Devine

85. “Again, we return to the idea of tending your physical organism: care for yourself as best you can, and know that the fog of daily time loss will eventually clear. Allowing the lost time, yielding to it, rather than fighting it, can make it all a little easier.”

— Megan Devine

86. “Using this example, irritation was a sign that I needed to step back from arbitrary stressors in my life. It meant I probably needed more sleep, more food, and less contact with humans.”

— Megan Devine

87. “We need to find ways to share in the shattering experience of loss – in our own lives and in the larger world.”

— Megan Devine

88. “We have to stop other-izing one another as a ward against loss. We have.”

— Megan Devine

89. “Grief is as individual as love. That someone has experienced a loss – even one similar to yours – does not mean they understand you.”

— Megan Devine

90. “It’s like we just can’t reconcile the fact that someone could be alive and well at breakfast and dead by lunch.”

— Megan Devine

91. “Be sure to note what things gave you even the tiniest bit more peace of being or calm. Especially in very early grief, nothing is going to feel amazing. The weight of immoveable pain is simply too much.”

— Megan Devine

92. “Especially when the loss is unusual, violent, or accidental, the backlash of blame is intense: we immediately point out what someone else did wrong.”

— Megan Devine

93. “Platitudes and simplistic, reductionist renderings didn’t work for me before Matt died, and they were intolerable after. As an artistic, self-reflective, extra-smart, completely dorky person in what amounted to a small town, I’d often felt I didn’t fit the larger world. But once Matt died? I didn’t belong anywhere.”

— Megan Devine

94. “Here is what grieving people want you to know: We love you. We still love you, even if our lives have gone completely dark, and you can’t seem to reach us. Please stay.”

— Megan Devine

95. “The real path here, the real way forward, is not in denying that irredeemable pain exists, but by acknowledging that it does.”

— Megan Devine

96. “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.”

— Megan Devine