Best 1689 quotes in «sorrow quotes» category

Grief is not very different from illness: in the impetus of its fire it does not recognise lords, it does not fear colleagues, it does not respect or spare anyone, not even itself." [First letter to Pope Celestine (1193)]

Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.

Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell puts it, "with one skin-layer missing.

Grief lets you indulge in it, so that it can feed itself.

Grief came in waves, sometimes big, sometimes small, but even on the calmest days, the grief remained. The tide still came ashore.

Grief is times bailiff sent to evict you from your old life. Its black warrant demands of you hard labour. There can be no escape of reprieve. You must toil laying down the foundation stones of acceptance, stone by stone, until you have paved your way to your new life.

Grief rises and falls with every breath, clings to the chambers of the heart and makes each step we take a challenge. It is a dense space, filled with sensations that carry our tears and our palpable aching. We cannot escape these times; we cannot outrun what is intimately entangled in our moment-to-moment world. It is now that our apprenticeship is most called upon. We are asked to stand alongside these difficult and painful visitations, these epiphanies of lamentation.

Had I owned the words I would've told him what my heart intuited - that joy and sorrow often travel the same road and sometimes, whether by grace or misfortune, they meet and become each other's companion.

Happiness and sorrow are two sides of the same coin called life. Whatever befalls you, walk on unattached.

Happiness leaves such slender records; it is the dark days that are so voluminously documented.

Happiness lies in the active life, sorrow in thought.

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

Hard it is to suffer through stupid people. They make you feel sorry for them, and if your sorrow is as great as your hurt, you will allow them to go free of punishment, for their eyes are the eyes of dogs that have done wrong and know it, and are afraid.

Harsh winters precede pleasant springs.

He'd always known that shit rolled downhill, but he never knew tears did the same thing.

He dies at the party where everyone laughs & all you want is to go into the kitchen & make seven omelets before burning down the house.

He did not enjoy the sorrow, but he would not have missed the years that he and Joseph were friends, either. Such joy was worth a little sorrow.

He finally comprehended that the sole impossibility regarding human sorrow is to arrive at some unsurpassable limit to it.

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.

He held out his arms and I ran to embrace him. It wasn’t that I couldn’t feel my sorrows anymore, it was as if they were never there. I felt safe, and loved. There were no words exchanged, we just held each other.

He is polite; the perfect gentleman at first. Yet she knows his kindness is an act he performs for himself to justify what he’s about to do.

He knew, but it was not enough. The sorrow was so large it threatened to tear through my skin. When he died, all things swift and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.

He looked so silly that I could not stop laughing, even as my tears kept flowing. Is the root of laughter also sorrow? As I laughed, I was filled with both joy and sorrow.

Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.

He missed two people: a) the girl she was; b) the person she’d made him feel he might have been. A deep sigh escaped him.

He needs a looser association. He needs something that implies a man who wants the ice shard to remain in his chest, who's learned to love the sensation of being pierced.

He thought perhaps it was a woman's way, to come out of such a storm of emotion and pain as if she were a ship emerging onto calm seas. She had seemed, not at peace, but emptied of sorrow. As if she had run out of that particular emotion and no other one arose to take its place.

Her heart broke. Because of sorrow. Because of guilt. Because of repressed dreams, visions and fantasies. Because almost nothing in her life had gone as she'd hoped.

Her body accepted my brutal seed and took it to swell within, just as the patient earth accepts a falling fruit into its tender soil to cradle and nourish it to grow. Came a time, just springtime last, our infant child pushed through the fragile barrier of her womb. Her legs branched out, just as the wood branches out from these eternal trees around us; but she was not hardy as they. My wife groaned with blood and ceased to breathe. Aye!, a scornful eve that bred the kind of pain only a god can withstand.

Her question was clear- “Father, where does the Loss reside?” In the sighs? Cheeks with tears wiped? A lost appetite? Owning a room confined? Or in the smiles all falsified? Thus, the Father decide, It is no matter to hide, he replied- “I think its deep inside, Probably, In the layers of your soul, Where the body provides it, Ample food to be- Magnified, multiplied, intensified. But once you clarify, That its not to be occupied inside, It starves of supplies, And dies. So child, when there is loss, Make sure you refuse to invite it inward, And absolutely never make it your lifelong parasite.

He stroked her back and kept a fierce grip on her like she’d fade away into one of the thousands of ghosts in this cemetery.

He wanted to crumple her up and toss her from his mind like a scrap piece of paper filled with nonsensical doodles or dissonant words that formed unbalanced rhymes. Yet, he refused throw her away.

He was foolish enough to fall completely in love with someone who didn't think he had a heart.

His shirt is covered in my sorrow and stained with my tears.

His absence is so big it's like he's there.

His strength for your weakness! His wisdom for your folly! His drive for your drift! His grace for your greed! His love for your lust! His peace for your problems! His joy for your sorrow! His plenty for your poverty!

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help, or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.

holding the evening tremblingly close to me i weep into the sun letting the burden of hope lift off my chest i realize this is what it means to be free.

How can there be so much beauty in this world amid so much sorrow? The only solution was to create more beauty.

how can i ever breathe normally again after having been cradled by the kind of sorrow so silent, that it nourishes after having been swept by the kind of joy so absolute, that it wounds.

How could we be sorrow, if there is a song?

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.

How could we be miserable, when there is music?

How could you be sad, when you can sing?

How can you make light of it? I says. What should I do? She says. Cry fer the rest of my life? Molly of the Many Sorrows?...You got battle scars. This is mine, she says. You know what it tells me? I'm a survivor.

How I long for the months gone by, for the days when God watched over me, when his lamp shone on my head and by his light I walked through darkness! Oh, for the days when I was in my prime, when God’s intimate friendship blessed my house, when the Almighty was still with me and my children were around me, when my path was drenched with cream and the rock poured out for me streams of olive oil.

How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?—from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born.

How do you go to your own house when something has gone bad on the inside, when it doesn't seem like your place to live anymore, when you almost cannot recall living there although it was the place you mostly ate and slept for all your grown-up life? Try to remember two or three things about living there. Try to remember cooking one meal.

How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off? How long can I be Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand, Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon? The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow Lap at my back ineluctably. How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

hThere was something shameful about surviving sorrow. You were corrupted. She was corrupted. She was no good anymore. She was inauthentic, apocryphal. She wanted to be a seeker and to travel further and further. But after sorrow, such traveling is not a climbing but a sinking to a depth leached of light at which you are unfit to endure. And yet you endure there.