Sorrow Quotes

You could concentrate much more deeply when you were alone with agony.

~ William Goldman

Whenever one speaks of lonely people one takes too much for granted. One thinks people all know what they're dealing with. No, they do not. They've never seen a lonely person, they've simply hated him without knowing him. They've been his neighbours who've used him up, they were the voices in the next room who tempted him. They roused things up against him, getting them to make a din and drown him out. Children ganged up against him when he was a tender child, and at every stage of his growing up he grew hostile to grown-ups . They tracked him to his hiding-place like an animal of chase and throughout his long youth there was no closed season. And when he didn't allow himself to be worn out so that he got away they yelled about what came forth from him and called it ugly and were suspicious of it. And as he didn't stop they grew more obvious and gobbled up his food and breathed up his air and spat into his poverty so that he himself became disgusted at it. They brought him into disrepute as if he were a contagion and threw stones at him to speed his departure. And they were right to follow their age-old instinct: because he really was their enemy. But then when he didn't look up they had second thoughts. They suspected that in all of this they had acted as he had willed them to act; they had strengthened him in his solitude and had helped him separate himself from them for ever.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Sorrow and strife comes to all persons. Mature people expect hardships and setbacks and patiently and determinedly work to accomplish their goals. Immature people lash out in anger and frustration when circumstances conspire to blunt their short-term objectives.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Patience is sorrow's salve.

~ Winston Churchill

Hard by the church stood the public house; so often the two are closely conjoined, honorably sharing both joys and sorrows.

~ Jeremias Gotthelf

Everything takes place at a right time. It’s your anxiety to achieve everything before time or grab things more than you required, add misery to your life.

~ Roshan Sharma

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

~ Michel De Montaigne

In cities where peace and the arts flourish, men are more consumed by jealousy, worry, and anxiety than they are in cities under the blight of a besieging army. Private sorrows are more bitter than public suffering.

~ Voltaire

Hong Kong became so materialistic that it must be one of the rarest places in the world where family members need to make an appointment to have dinner together, and people speculate upon their own home where their own children are growing up.

~ Tim I. Gurung

Then, only then would she realize that the life that she created will extinguish with nothing to offer but the sorrow that she harvested in our souls and the holes that she dug in our hearts.

~ A.p. Sweet

To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently abeast!

~ William Shakespeare

Unanswered? I would've answered any question, Hannah. But you never asked.

~ Jay Asher

Maybe I could use a little metal on the inside, I thought. If I'd kept my heart better armored, where would I be now?Easy—I’d be at home, medicating myself into a monotone. Drowning my sorrows in video games. Working shifts at Smart Aid. Dying inside, day by day, from regret.

~ Ransom Riggs

We only understand the true love of our lives when we bound ourself within the boundries of right and wrong.

~ Jitendra Bhardwaj

In my dream, people apologized for things that were about to happen, and lit candles by inhaling.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Until you have stood in another woman’s stilettos, you will never begin to know the year of pain she felt breaking them in.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.

~ Charles Dickens

We need never be ashamed of our tears.

~ Charles Dickens

Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Deep in earth my love is lyingAnd I must weep alone.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.

~ Fredrik Backman

Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.

~ John Green

Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.

~ Gregory Maguire

Even when a river of tears courses through this body, the flame of love cannot be quenched.

~ Izumi Shikibu

A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.

~ Françoise Sagan

I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.

~ Anaïs Nin

One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

~ Aldous Huxley

We were talking the other evening about the phrases one uses when trying to comfort someone who is in distress. I told him that in English we sometimes say, 'I've been there.' This was unclear to him at first-I've been where? But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific loacation, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.'So sadness is a place?' Giovanni asked.'Sometimes people live there for years,' I said.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Yes Said Gandalf; for it will be better to ride back three together than one alone. Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of out fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

True sorrow is as rare as true love.

~ Stephen King

I hadn't said goodbye. It had been easier, like always, to just disappear, sparing myself the messy details of another farewell. Now, my fingers hovered over my track pad, moving the cursor down to his comment section before I stopped myself. What was the point? Anything I said now would only be an afterthought.Elizabeth who goes by her middle name

~ Sarah Dessen

I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.

~ Vernor Vinge

What was the point in crying when there was no one to comfort you? And what was worse, when you couldn't even comfort yourself?

~ Cassandra Clare

She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.

~ Cormac Mccarthy

Again and again, however we know the landscape of loveand the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the othersfall: again and again the two of us walk out togetherunder the ancient trees, lie down again and againamong the flowers, face to face with the sky.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I wanted to cry, but the tears did not come.

~ Tatiana De Rosnay

Every bond is a bond to sorrow.

~ James Joyce

Now he saw another elephant emerge from the place where it had stood hidden in the trees. Very slowly it walked to the mutilated body and looked down. With its sinuous trunk it struck the huge corpse; then it reached up, broke some leafy branches with a snap, and draped them over the mass of torn thick flesh. Finally it tilted its massive head, raised its trunk, and roared into the empty landscape.

~ Lois Lowry

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.

~ George Eliot