Search for widow finding love again quotes and you will get thousands of them, laid over photographs of sunsets, almost none carrying a source. Some are misattributed to writers who never wrote them. Some are lifted from anonymous forum posts by people who did not know they were being quoted. A few are genuine and have simply lost their author on the way round the internet.
This page takes the opposite approach. Fewer lines, each with a source you can check, plus an honest account of what we could not verify and why we left it out.
The lines we can source
None of these are about remarriage, and that is itself worth noticing — see the next section. They are the ones widowed people quote most often, and they can be traced.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
C.S. Lewis, the opening line of A Grief Observed, the journal he kept after the death of his wife. He wrote it as a widower, which is part of why it is quoted so heavily by them.
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, written after the sudden death of her husband. The same book opens with the lines people share most: life changes fast, life changes in the instant, you sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
Grief is the price we pay for love.
Queen Elizabeth II, from a message read at a memorial service in New York in September 2001. It is the most-shared sentence on this subject in English and, unusually for such a line, it is genuinely hers.
Three quotations is a thin harvest from an entire literature. That is the honest position, not an editorial choice, and the reason is in the next section.
Why almost nothing exists about loving again
Grief writing is enormous. Writing about the second relationship is nearly absent from it, and it is not hard to see why: the books that get written are written in the year of the loss, by people for whom the question does not yet exist. By the time it does exist, most people are living rather than writing.
There is also a social reason. Saying out loud that you want company again invites judgement — from adult children, from friends, from strangers on the internet who have decided how long is decent. Very few people put that sentence in print under their own name.
The gap is filled by anonymous graphics. That is where “the heart has infinite rooms” and “loving again does not mean loving less” come from: unattributed, endlessly reposted, sometimes comforting, and impossible to credit to anyone. We are not printing them as quotations, because a quotation with no speaker is not a quotation. If you find one that helps you, use it — just do not let anyone tell you a dead author said it.
Lines we deliberately do not print
Some of the most widely shared quotes in this category are the ones widowed people report hating.
- Anything that supplies a reason for the death.
- Anything about time healing, addressed to someone in the first year of it.
- Anything that describes the dead person as being in a better place, said to someone who wanted them in this one.
- Anything that instructs the reader to be grateful.
- The insistence that the person who died “would want you to be happy”. It may be true. It is not a stranger’s line to deliver, and widowed people hear it constantly.
If you are choosing something for a card, the test is simple: does it acknowledge, or does it instruct? Acknowledgement is almost always welcome. Instruction, however kindly meant, is what makes people stop reading condolence cards.
What widowed people actually say
These are not quotations and we are not presenting them as such. They are the recurring sentences that come up again and again in widow communities, paraphrased by us, because the sentiment is common property even where the wording belongs to individuals.
That there is no competition between the person who died and the person who came after — that the second relationship is an addition rather than a replacement.
That the guilt does not arrive when things go badly. It arrives on the evening something goes well.
That falling for someone new brought the grief back rather than settling it, which nobody had warned them about.
That the hardest audience was rarely the friends and almost always the adult children.
That they were not looking for anyone, and that this appears to be the standard preface to the entire story.
How to use a quotation without making it worse
If you are writing to someone widowed, a quotation is a supplement, not a message. The card that lands is the one containing a specific memory: something their husband said, a habit their wife had, the time he fixed your fence badly. That cannot be found on a search engine, which is exactly why it is worth more.
If you are the widowed person and a line is helping you get through a Tuesday, it does not need a source to do that work. The sourcing rules on this page are about what we publish, not about what is allowed to comfort you.
How this page is sourced, and what happens next
Every line above is either quoted from a published book or attributed to a specific occasion, so you can check it yourself. Nothing here is anonymous and nothing has been improved for the sake of a nicer sentence.
We are adding to this page over time, and the additions will be contributed lines from widowed people, published with their names or initials as they prefer and with the date each one was confirmed. Nothing appears in anyone’s name on this site until they have said, in writing, that they said it and that it can be printed. That is why the page is short rather than padded with material we could not stand behind.
Where to go next
For the practical side of this rather than the quotable side, see dating a widow, and for the timing question underneath it, dating after losing a spouse. If what is actually going on is the empty hour rather than the search for a new relationship, widow loneliness is a more useful page than any quotation. Definitions — including what to call yourself after a remarriage — are on widow and widower.