Here are 20 great literature quotes about sadness
[Gathered by Regina Kenney]
“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer
“I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that’s really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
“They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don’t think it’s possible for you to miss me as much as I’m missing you right now”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
― Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War
“Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“Tonight I can write the saddest lines
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
“The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”
― Nikolai Gogol
“Tears are words that need to be written.”
― Paulo Coelho
“There are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
“The worst type of crying wasn’t the kind everyone could see–the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived. For people like me and Echo, our souls contained more scar tissue than life.”
― Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits
“I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Dry
“Don’t be ashamed to weep; ’tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.”
― Brian Jacques, Taggerung
“Ho! Ho! Ho! To the bottle I go
To heal my heart and drown my woe
Rain may fall, and wind may blow
And many miles be still to go
But under a tall tree will I lie
And let the clouds go sailing by”
― J.R.R. Tolkien
“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
“I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.”
― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper
“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
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