Sadness Quotes

Don't cry. She wouldn't like it. When I missed my father, I used to cry. Mama taught me when I cry, he is sad and will cry, too. I don't want my daddy sad. I'm sure you don't want your daughter sad, too.

~ Cristiane Serruya

Though his death would not fill me with any sense of sadness, I would probably feel the loss. Even enemies are part of one.

~ Jasper Fforde

Dare I tell them that since I came here to danceI have been giving pieces of my body awayTo ridiculous diets,To repeated injuries,To Remington?And that maybeI thinkWith each bit of my bodyI lose a little piece of my soul

~ Stasia Ward Kehoe

How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.

~ Jodi Picoult

I miss you with the very edge of my skin.It winces in absence, a giant muscle contracting.

~ Valentina Cano

Love for the beauty of the soul. I shall love you always. When the flower of life has gone, ever I shall find you. When all is lost and winter comes, I shall be your spring time. And memory fades and wilts then, I shall always find you.... I shall always find you....

~ Laurel A. Rockefeller

I miss your face. That big bright smile. You always had it, in any weather. It's hard for me to find one these days. These cold November days. Except when I think of you.

~ Kellie Elmore

I have cried over myself a hundred times this summer, she thought, I have wept over my big feet and my skinny legs and my nose, I have even cried over my stupid shoes, and now when I have true sadness there are no tears left.

~ Betsy Byars

Pain is pain...Just because one person's problem is less traumatic than another's doesn't mean they're required to hurt less.

~ J.a. Redmerski

She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need.

~ Michelle Latiolais

May you hear my feeble voice! It will tell you that here below there is a heart full of the memory of you.

~ Herculine Barbin

For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.

~ Charles Dickens

She has been surprised by grief, its constancy, its immediacy, its unrelenting physical pain.

~ Michelle Latiolais

I don't dare touch her. Loss is a knowledge I'm sorry to have. Perhaps the only thing worse than experiencing it, is watching it replay anew in someone else--all the awful stages picking up like a chorus that has to be sung.

~ Lauren Destefano

...she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk's bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs, flooding across the rough wooden floor, down the narrow wooden stairs and out into the old soil of the garden. No roses, no, she does not even ask to make roses, just dissolution; most any night she asks just for that.

~ Michelle Latiolais

For all her culture's attention to the physical, it seemingly has little to salve the creatural anguish of losing someone else's body, their touch, their heat, their oceanic heart...she doesn't want another body, she wants the body she loved, the forceps scar across his cheek that she traced with her hand, his penis, its elegant sweep to the side, the preternaturally soft skin. One wants what one has loved, not the idea of love.

~ Michelle Latiolais

In other words, I was a moderately happy penguin who was occasionally attacked by sadness.

~ Takuji Ichikawa

He felt like his own heart might stop beating just from acknowledging the concept. The sadness, the sorrow, and the loss, they were living things, funnily enough.

~ Adam P. Knave

Steven dreamed of you the very secondyou died(So the poem goes)and you may have visited himBut I'm pretty sure you don't believein poems

~ Jon Paul Fiorentino

She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.

~ Sarah Waters

Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.

~ William Shakespeare

Now something so sad has hold of us that the breath leaves and we can't even cry.

~ Charles Bukowski

And when I look around the apartment where I now am,—when I see Charlotte’s apparel lying before me, and Albert’s writings, and all those articles of furniture which are so familiar to me, even to the very inkstand which I am using,—when I think what I am to this family—everything. My friends esteem me; I often contribute to their happiness, and my heart seems as if it could not beat without them; and yet—if I were to die, if I were to be summoned from the midst of this circle, would they feel—or how long would they feel—the void which my loss would make in their existence? How long! Yes, such is the frailty of man, that even there, where he has the greatest consciousness of his own being, where he makes the strongest and most forcible impression, even in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish,—vanish,—and that quickly.I could tear open my bosom with vexation to think how little we are capable of influencing the feelings of each other. No one can communicate to me those sensations of love, joy, rapture, and delight which I do not naturally possess; and though my heart may glow with the most lively affection, I cannot make the happiness of one in whom the same warmth is not inherent.Sometimes I don’t understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her!I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing.One hundred times have I been on the point of embracing her. Heavens! what a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it! And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts. Do not children touch everything they see? And I!Witness, Heaven, how often I lie down in my bed with a wish, and even a hope, that I may never awaken again! And in the morning, when I open my eyes, I behold the sun once more, and am wretched. If I were whimsical, I might blame the weather, or an acquaintance, or some personal disappointment, for my discontented mind; and then this insupportable load of trouble would not rest entirely upon myself. But, alas! I feel it too sadly; I am alone the cause of my own woe, am I not? Truly, my own bosom contains the source of all my pleasure. Am I not the same being who once enjoyed an excess of happiness, who at every step saw paradise open before him, and whose heart was ever expanded towards the whole world? And this heart is now dead; no sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry; and my senses, no more refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life: that active, sacred power which created worlds around me,—it is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills, and behold the morning sun breaking through the mists, and illuminating the country around, which is still wrapped in silence, whilst the soft stream winds gently through the willows, which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are ineffectual to extract one tear of joy from my withered heart,—I feel that in such a moment I stand like a reprobate before heaven, hardened, insensible, and unmoved. Oftentimes do I then bend my knee to the earth, and implore God for the blessing of tears, as the desponding labourer in some scorching climate prays for the dews of heaven to moisten his parched corn.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I do hope that when the day comes, whether in 1, 10, or 100 years, I don’t want you to think of me and feel sad.

~ Esther Earl

[F]or grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have never known, as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed.

~ Pericles

Have I thought long to see this morning’s face,And doth it give me such a sight as this?

~ William Shakespeare

That's the worst of sorrow . . . it's always a vicious circle. It makes one tense and hard and disagreeable, and this means that one repels and antagonises people, and then they dislike and avoid one--and that means more isolation and still more sorrow.

~ Vera Brittain

You are a most effective killer, Michel. Is it true you wept like a child when they killed your sister? That you cried out in agony as if the sword had pierced your own heart? Such compassion. Does your handiwork not bring you to tears as well?

~ P.a. Minyard

Sometimes it's hard not to let other people's misery seep into your own bones.

~ Gilly Macmillan

Darling, no one would ever dream of performing an operation on a child without testing it first. And no one in a thousand years would take a child's daemon away altogether! All that happens is a little cut, and then everything's peaceful. Forever! You see, your daemon's a wonderful friend and com panion when you're young, but at the age we call puberty, the age you're coming to very soon, darling, daemons bring all sort of troublesome thoughts and feelings, and that's what lets Dust in. A quick little operation before that, and you're never troubled again. And your daemon stays with you, only...just not connected. Like a... like a wonderful pet, if you like. The best pet in the world!Wouldn't you like that? (Marisa Coulter)

~ Philip Pullman

My particular grief Is of so flood-gate and o'erbearing nature That it engluts and swallows other sorrows, And it is still itself.

~ William Shakespeare

From watching Silvia, I'd learned that one of the worst things about being ill is that most people find your suffering opaque. With this sadness it was different. I felt that I needed to nurture and protect it from people's understanding. I wanted Susy's sympathy because I wanted comfort and to feel less alone, and yet I also didn't want it—I didn't want my personal grief to be part of something universal right then.

~ Olivia Sudjic

Sorrow is not itself evidence of maladjustment but of the adjustment process itself.

~ Germaine Greer

Brian Doyle about the Irish custom of “taking to the bed.” He says “In Irish culture, taking to the bed with a gray heart is not considered especially odd. People did and do it for understandable reasons—ill health, or the black dog, or, most horrifyingly, to die during An Gorta Mor, the great hunger, when whole families took to their beds to slowly starve…And in our time: I know a woman who took to her bed for a week after September eleventh, and people who have taken to their beds for days on end to recover from shattered love affairs, the death of a child, a physical injury that heals far faster than the psychic wound gaping under it. I’ve done it myself twice, once as a youth and once as a man, to think through a troubled time in my marriage. Something about the rectangularity of the bed, perhaps, or supinity, or silence, or timelessness; for when you are in bed but not asleep there is no time, as lovers and insomniacs know. Yet, anxious, heartsick, we take to the bed, saddled by despair and dissonance and disease, riddled by muddledness and madness, rattled by malaise and misadventure, and in the ancient culture of my forbears this was not so unusual….For from the bed we came and to it we shall return, and our nightly voyages there are nutritious and restorative, and we have taken to our beds for a thousand other reasons, loved and argued and eater and seethed there, and sang and sobbed and suckled, and burned with fevers and visions and lust, and huddled and howled and curled and prayed. As children we all, every one of us, pretended the bed was a boat; so now, when we are so patently and persistently and daily at sea, why not seek a ship? p. 119-20Brian Doyle in The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart, p. 90-91

~ Brian Doyle

My friend lost his mother when we were at college. I spent a lot of nights talking with him. Lot of nights. He pauses. I know what it's like. You don't just get over it. And it doesn't make any difference if you're supposedly a grown-up. And it never goes away

~ Sophie Kinsella

We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep…

~ José Saramago

You are never lost in sorrow, it seems to me, ever. You do know the way. In fact, you don't think there's any other. Sorrow seemed to me to be more like a road would through life, through the days of your life, like the old Roman ruins near the Tuileries or the rue d'Enfer -- underneath this life, but never really apart from it.

~ Alexander Chee

How should they know? I can't revealto a single friend what my soul conceals,whom I'm in love with or what I believe -my dreams, my thoughts - or why I grieve.

~ Hristo Botev

I cried harder. I didn't want to, but I couldn't stop myself.I couldn't stop myself, so I thought about all the bad things and I fed it and fed it until I was crying so hard I had to gasp for breath between sobs.

~ Ransom Riggs