c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Hand, nobody told me about the weight. Why didn't our parents tell us about the weight?—What weight?—The fucking weight, Hand. How does the woman Ingres live? The one from Marrakesh? If we're vessels, and we are, then we, you and I, are overfull, and that means she's at the bottom of a deep cold lake. How can she stand the hissing of all that water?—We are not vessels; we are missiles.—We're static and we're empty. We are overfull and leaden.—We are airtight and we are missiles and all-powerful.
— Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
The boy and the man must be raised to see the possibility of self worth, then meet a few others who provide the vision of a road toward it, then spend a lifetime pursing that worth through action and relationship. One of the great tragedies in human life is to be born a male and not be guided toward the value of a man.
— Michael Gurian, The Good Son: Shaping the Moral Development of Our Boys and Young Men
We are not sure what we will become, only what we want to and don’t want to. We often become what we never thought we could, then we become fine with that.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
What’s so beautiful about girls?” I would implore.And the secret society of adults would reply with a smirk and wink as if I was merely a boy who couldn’t possibly have the mental maturity to comprehend such grown-up concepts as love and bleeding vaginas; “You’ll understand someday, James.
— Jake Vander-Ark, The Accidental Siren
Life is brief, young maiden, fall in love; before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, before the tides of passion cool within your hips, for those of you who know no tomorrow. (Gondola no Uta)
— Kouhei Kadono, Boogiepop Doesn't Laugh Vol 1
Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.
— Charles de Lint, Dharma
Growing up changes morethan playground gamesand body shapes.
— Emma Cameron, Cinnamon Rain
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
— Amanda Hocking, Hollowland
That time when past begins to look longer than the future
— Whipplesnaith, The Night Climbers Of Cambridge
She's growing up," Sister Evangeline said.And I wanted to tell her no, I'm not. Everything is exactly the same.
— Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars
There is no night porter wandering about in King's. The authorities pay you the compliment, ugly gate-crasher, of treating you as a grown-up. And since we are not grown-up you and I, we will perform our midnight frolics as the inmates burn the midnight oil.
— Whipplesnaith
What must I do now?” Mrs. Muller considered her silently for a while. “You are still a child. You must go where you are told and do as you are told. But it won’t always be so. Soon you will be in charge of yourself. Until that time: Be aware. Listen. Look. Touch. Smell. And remember. But for now, you must go home.
— Masha du Toit, Strange Neighbours
And then I know I'm being a man, not just some kid who's upset and wants it his way.
— Angela Johnson, The First Part Last
A lot of childhood effort, worry, and whispering goes into cracking the codes of adult life. Children have to be accomplished spies.
— Vera B. Williams
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, Great Expectations
We need never be ashamed of our tears.
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Deep in earth my love is lyingAnd I must weep alone.
— Edgar Allan Poe
I remember watching the mascara tears flood the ivories and I thought, "It's OK to be sad." I've been trained to love my darkness.
— Lady Gaga
Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.
— Henry James
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, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either
— Golda Meir
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, The Return of the King
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, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
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, Bonjour tristesse
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, Island
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, Eat, Pray, Love
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, The Return of the King
True sorrow is as rare as true love.
— Stephen King, Carrie
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, What Happened to Goodbye
I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.
— Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
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, City of Glass
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, All the Pretty Horses
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, Sarah's Key
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, The Giver
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, The Mill on the Floss
I don't think she's ever coming back.
— V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic
I’ve noticed in my life that the people who act as my angels are not some strange angelic creatures that seem almost untouchable, but are more real than that. They are people who have tasted sorrow, who have felt pain, and in a way, that makes them capable of being an angel. In their darkest moments they have become strong.
— The Hippie, Snowflake Obsidian: Memoir of a Cutter
Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow.
— Anne Fortier, Juliet
Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see,Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me;In exile thy bosom shall still be my home,And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam.
— Thomas   Moore
Tears never were worth the effort of crying them.
— Mary Balogh, The Devil's Web
The shadow of my sorrow. Let's see, 'tis very true. My griefs lie all within and these external manners of laments are mere shadows to the unseen grief which swells with silence in the tortured soul.There lies the substance.
— William Shakespeare, Richard II
I am alone. I am here. No one is watching me. In these hours of silence that I cherish, I talk to myself and reflect. That past, entrenched in time, motionless and infinite, has vanished onto thin air. None of it remains. Why, therefore, am I hurting so much? Why did I bring back with me this nameless pain? I followed the path I set for myself, and I have forgiven. I do not want to be chained to hatred or resentment. I want to have the right to live in peace.
— Ingrid Betancourt, Even Silence Has an End: My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle
You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair.
— Eva Ibbotson, The Dragonfly Pool
It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over decades; the games I would never play with rules I would never fully understand. And perhaps that was key: they were such a natural group that they made me feel remarkably singular by comparison. To watch them together was to know strongly, painfully, all that I'd been missing.
— Kate Morton, The Distant Hours
Shall we mourn here deedless forever a shadow-folk mist-haunting dropping vain tears in the thankless sea
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
…in silence learned the sweet solace which affection administers to sorrow.
— Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Question me now about all other matters, but do not ask who I am, for fear you may increase in my heart it's burden of sorrow as I think back; I am very full of grief, and I should not sit in the house of somebody else with my lamentation and wailing. It is not good to go on mourning forever.
— Homer
He'd always known that shit rolled downhill, but he never knew tears did the same thing.
— Amy Lane, Talker
The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world’s sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.
— Oscar Wilde, A House of Pomegranates
This was the first of the sorrows of Turin.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin
There was an end to weeping. Mourning, however, ebbed and surged but never ceased flowing.
— Julius Lester, The Autobiography of God
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."But I say unto you, they are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed. Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Middle children weep longer than their brothers and sisters. Over her mother’s shoulder, stilling her pains and her injured pride, Jackie Lacon watched the party leave. First, two men she had not seen before: one tall, one short and dark. They drove off in a small green van. No one waved to them, she noticed, or even said goodbye. Next, her father left in his own car; lastly a blond, good-looking man and a short fat one in an enormous overcoat like a pony blanket made their way to a sports car parked under the beech trees. For a moment she really thought there must be something wrong with the fat one, he followed so slowly and so painfully. Then, seeing the handsome man hold the car door for him, he seemed to wake, and hurried forward with a lumpy skip. Unaccountably, this gesture upset her afresh. A storm of sorrow seized her and her mother could not console her.
— John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Visitors offering their condolences, thinking to comfort me, said "Life goes on." What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn't. It's death that goes on; Ian is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and next year and forever. There's no end to that. But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it.
— Mary Ann Shaffer
Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty - forty - forty years ago! - ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before - and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul - when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey - more a demon than a man! - aye, aye! what a forty years' fool - fool - old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! - crack my heart! - stave my brain! - mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! - lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!
— Herman Melville
SakeThe jewel which brightly shines at nightIs precious, but cannot measure up To the delights of drinking sake,Drowning one's troubles in the cup. Otomo no Tabito
— Reiko Chiba, Hiroshige's Tokaido in Prints and Poetry
We shall enjoy itAs for him who findsfault, may sillinessand sorrow take him!
— Sappho, Sappho: A New Translation
Happiness leaves such slender records
—  it is the dark days that are so voluminously documented.
Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon.She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow.Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face?
— Dylan Thomas
If a man can't learn from sorrow he can't learn from anything.
— Jonathan Heatt
If he ever wanted vengeance on me for all I did, he has it now. This is the worst thing he could do to me. Now I know how it feels to be left behind. As I left him.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Fate
As if he hadn't always known he was loved the best. That he was the Beloved.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Fate
His face was so ravaged, it was like looking at death itself. Except for the smooth, silvered part of it. By creeping degrees, his human hand lifted. He turned it over, showing a bloody palm. His cracked lips moved. Beloved.He could not say the word, but I knew it. So did his Fool.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Fate
His face was so ravaged, it was like looking at death itself. Except for the smooth, silvered part of it. By creeping degrees, his human hand lifted. He turned it over, showing a bloody palm. His cracked lips moved. 'Beloved.'He could not say the word, but I knew it. So did his Fool.
— Robin Hobb, Assassin's Fate
I could not make it right, but I could make someone pay for how wrong it had been.
— Robin Hobb, Fool's Quest
In times of sorrow, be still.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Sorrow teaches more lessons than laughter.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Sorrow is a heavy burden
—  it must not be carried for a long time!
It was a terrible thing, to love and not know whether you were loved in return, it led to the worst sensations--jealousy, rage, self-loathing--to all these lesser states.
— Katie Kitamura, A Separation
Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things
— Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
No one can share in your sorrow.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga The-the, the Killer of Flowers Moon. I will wade across the river of the blackfish, the otter, the beaver. I will climb the bank where the willow never dies.
— David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
Mammy's heart was like a pallid beach where Laila's footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
This was misery that could not yield, for he sorrowed for a time he could not return to, and a self he would never again be.
— Robin Hobb, Fool's Quest
A faint tear wet Meiko's eye, so slight a bit of moisture that it passed unseen by Yasuko. Yet all the anguish of which she never spoke was compressed into that single drop
— Fumiko Enchi, Masks
Yet Theo had become engrossed in his own tale, transporting himself back to the night of which he spoke. In the distance, he could again see the faces he had encountered on that fateful night, the twisted bodies and pained expressions of the men who no longer walked the realms of men, but those of the underworld gods.
— A.H. Septimius, Crowns Of Amara: The Return Of The Oracle
Sorrow is dangerous.
— Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank the Moon
She has an eye for tragedy and sorrow. Show her a rose and she'll see only the wasp in the center of the bloom.
— Alice Hoffman, Faithful
Am I kin to Sorrow,That so oftFalls the knocker of my door—Neither loud nor soft,But as long accustomed—Under Sorrow’s hand?
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems
Sorrow like a ceaseless rainBeats upon my heart.People twist and scream in pain,—Dawn will find them still again;This has neither wax nor wane,Neither stop nor start.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems
And the tiresome part of sorrows is that they do not hurt in proportion to their validity and excusability. If we are to be sympathetic, we can remember always that silly suffering hurts just as much as sensible suffering.
— Menie Muriel Dowie, Gallia
And what if you could go back in time and take all those hours of sorrow and insanity and replace them with something better?
— Rebecca McNutt, Mandy and Alecto: The Collected Smog City Book Series
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.
— Kyung-Sook Shin, I'll Be Right There
There are so many beautiful lives with wrong 'colors'!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.
— T.E. Hulme
It is always some consolation in sorrow to feel that it is shared, and any burden laid on several is carried more lightly or removed.
— Heloise, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Who am I to claim such boundless sorrow? This heartache, acute and true as it may be, is slight compared to all of this world. Five miscarriages, two stillborn, three live births, and Mrs. Connor is one of our fortunate. She is not disemboweled in the snow. Her hands have committed no atrocities. She believes in God. It is remarkable how we go on. All that we come to know and witness and endure, yet our hearts keep beating, our faith persists.
— Eowyn Ivey, To The Bright Edge of the World
Life kisses our faces every morning. Yet, between morning and evening, she laughs at our sorrows.
— Kahlil Gibran
As the bell rang he would look back at the departing year. He always found it a moving experience. Sometimes he was racked by sorrow and regret. Even when the sentimentality of the announcers repelled him, the tolling of the bells echoed in his heart.
— Yasanuri Kawabata
Do you remember your first real teacher? Your first real teacher is your first sorrow, your first crying!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Your sorrow will become smaller, like a star in the daylight that you can't even see. It's there, shining, but there is also a vast expanse of blue sky.
— Alice Hoffman, Survival Lessons
Just when she was about to reemerge from the depths of her sorrows, someone shook her again. This wasn't the jolt that usually awakens the senses. This was what it takes to finally rise over all that is petty about this world. Jealousy, insecurity and of course, betrayal. Awakening the senses was meant for another day, another time.
— Anushka Bhartiya
Many a month of gloomy unconsciousness rolled over me, without date or notice. One thousand waves may welter over a sunk wreck, and be felt as one.
— Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer
oh, how bitterhow bitter silentthe bewildered sorrowof a texture too thickto be brought outthrough the eyes.
— Anna Jae
red rain is coming downred rain is pouring downred rain is coming down all over meI'm bathing in itred rain coming downred rain is coming downred rain is coming down all over meI'm begging youred rain coming downred rain coming downred rain coming downred rain coming downover me in the red red seaover meover mered rain
— Peter Gabriel
Most people think it's normal to have a nameless sorrow at the bottom of your soul.
— Diane Duane, Deep Wizardry
Sorrow (A Song)To me this world's a dreary blank,All hopes in life are gone and fled,My high strung energies are sank,And all my blissful hopes lie dead.--The world once smiling to my view, Showed scenes of endless bliss and joy;The world I then but little knew,Ah! little knew how pleasures cloy;All then was jocund, all was gay,No thought beyond the present hour,I danced in pleasure’s fading ray,Fading alas! as drooping flower.Nor do the heedless in the throng,One thought beyond the morrow give,They court the feast, the dance, the song, Nor think how short their time to live.The heart that bears deep sorrow’s trace,What earthly comfort can console,It drags a dull and lengthened pace,'Till friendly death its woes enroll.--The sunken cheek, the humid eyes,E’en better than the tongue can tell;In whose sad breast deep sorrow lies,Where memory's rankling traces dwell.--The rising tear, the stifled sigh, A mind but ill at ease display,Like blackening clouds in stormy sky,Where fiercely vivid lightnings play.Thus when souls' energy is dead,When sorrow dims each earthly view, When every fairy hope is fled,We bid ungrateful world adieu.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems
I am being adult day by day but the first sorrow of my life is still fresh as warm ash.
— Agha Kousar
Waqt masiha haeh, har gham ko samaa lega, Lekin waqt haeh, waqt lega. (Time is a messiah, every sorrow it shall contain. But time it is and time it shall take.)
— Nilesh Rathod, Destiny of Shattered Dreams
I, too, am among those unable to step outside the realm of worldly distinctions. I hide my excesses of joy and sorrow beneath a robe of false contentment and drown in a pool of tears unseen by others. How I envy those naive enough to covet the glory of others. Do they not realize that tears fall not only on the sleeves of worn and tattered kimonos? The jewels that spill, glittering, onto my brocade are the very water of life, but they are mistaken for mere ornament. Although no one notices, my heart is shattered into a thousand pieces.
— Shikin Shimizu
But after much thought, I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more difficult in this world than to surrender completely. This is one of man's greatest sorrows.
— Clarice Lispector, Selected Crônicas
The sun tried to shine through the clouds but its light was dimmed even in us; high noon approached. I looked outside through the tinted windows at the people promenading down Madison. Couples held hands, bankers squeezed through crowds of window shoppers late for their daily thieving but all of them, even the poor, seemed content with existence, some even seemed happy. Nearly everyone’s outer shell was delicate and gracious that at the end of it all, on the border of nonexistence, each and everyone was happy to be alive. Everyone carried their heads with a radiance past the space they occupied and glided through time like flamenco dancers in a studio as big as the planet. Everyone wore masks that hid their sorrow (either that or they were sincerely happy) or wore armor that lightened the burden on their shoulders. Worst of all, I could not detect ever a flicker of thought; brains mired behind viral images and videos of people making even greater fools of themselves than they already were. And as the greatest fool of them all, I walked among them, never having learned to don the mask of happiness.
— Bruce Crown, How Dim the Promised Land
Dealing with pain for surviving on this thirsty concrete
— Kjiva
We weep as we witness the dead of a loved one.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
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.
— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
Feyre," he said--softly enough that I faced him again. "Why?" He tilted his head to the side. "You dislike our kind on a good day. And after Andras . . ." Even in the darkened hallway, his usual bright eyes were shadowed. "So why?"I took a step closer to him, my blood-covered feet sticking to the rug. I glanced down the stairs to where I could still see the prone form of the faerie and the stumps of his wings."Because I wouldn't want to die alone," I said, and my voice wobbled as I looked at Tamlin again, forcing myself to meet his stare. "Because I'd want someone to hold my hand until the end, and awhile after that. That's something everyone deserves, human or faerie." I swallowed hard, my throat painfully tight. "I regret what I did to Andras," I said, the words so strangled they were no more than a whisper. "I regret that there was . . . such hate in my heart. I wish I could undo it--and . . . I'm sorry. So very sorry.
— Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses
You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confrontmuch sorrow and disappointment.He gazed at me with increasing frankness.I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence.
— Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night
Mourn with those are sorrowful.Be happy with those who are joyful.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Sometimes I could cope with the sullen despair that overwhelmed me: but sometimes the whirlwind passions of my soul drove me to seek, by bodily exercise and by change of place, some relief from my intolerable sensations. It was during an access of this kind that I suddenly left my home, and bending my steps towards the near Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity of such scenes, to forget myself and my ephemeral, because human, sorrows.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
Yet this thou art alive, but if ye soar,My poor frail heart will have beat out its cryAnd sadly miss thy sweet form all the moreWhile helplessly I stand and watch you die.
— Timothy Salter
Words of sorrow in head, painting love faith and trust pitch black; aching breaking cutting heart, blood-red!
but above all, i wish for you happiness, even though I'm aware you require my absence to find it.
— Johanna Carroll, My Greatest Love, My Greatest Sorrow
When you confront, you save yourself a lot of sorrow.
— Sunday Adelaja
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.
Welcome to Sex Media, Where Fantasy Becomes Reality!
— Carla H. Krueger, Sex Media
Names can hide so much.
— Carla H. Krueger, Sex Media
This is no place for limits.
— Carla H. Krueger, Sex Media
It is not fiction. It is history. And both their histories match now.
— Carla H. Krueger, Sex Media
This is a landscape of dreams cemented in the past, of hopes gone cold, of girls and boys for rent in officially empty tower blocks, where none is truly so.
— Carla H. Krueger, Sex Media
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.
The loudest silence is camera silence.
— Carla H. Krueger, Sex Media
Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, all that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannon be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.
— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Ithink we all experience the same thing. We resent thethought that anything can please us when someone we loveis no longer here to share the pleasure with us, and we almostfeel as if we were unfaithful to our sorrow when wefind our interest in life returning to us.
— L.M. Montgomery
Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It’s what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you’re bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.
— Stephen King, Carrie
This world is all vanity. It is a tempest hurling us from one sorrow to another.
— Jocelyn  Murray, The Roman General: A Novel
Some people come into your life at the right time for the most intense reasons and then some leave your life at the perfect time for the most saddest of reasons, time decides who you meet & you decide who stays.
— Nikki Rowe
To thee, to thee, my fire! Thou hast been burning in my heart all these futile years. If my life were a piece of gold it would come out of its trial brighter, but it is a trodden turf of grass, and nothing remains of it but this handful of ashes.
— Rabindranath Tagore, The Hungry Stones and Other Stories
No one likes a person that "should of" all over the place.
— Shannon L. Alder
When sorrow knocks at your door, tell it you're busy finding happiness.
— Saru Singhal
There 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.
— Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead
Putting into words what exactly was off is not easy. I myself don’t even understand it. It was like a replica of my best friend was sitting in front of me, saying well-rehearsed lines at the wrong cues whilst I struggled to remember my dialogues. It was as if you had talked to me in some other language, a vernacular I used to be fluent in; but now, although the words sounded familiar, I really had no idea what you meant.
— Jane Finn
I look back at the glimpse of light in the center of Magdalene, near her heart, and remember the beauty to be found even in sorrow--beauty as a result of transformation, an admission of weakness, and a total dependence on the Creator. Even in the darkest hour, our hearts can allow us to see the light.
— Erika Robuck, The House of Hawthorne
I heard sad choirs in my mind. There was nothing left of Rachel in the world. He cherished what he'd shown me, and now it was gone. Eureka.
— Scott Kelly, [sic]
She kissed him but he didn't seem to recognize it.
— Naomi Wood, Mrs. Hemingway
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.
— Joy Williams
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.
— Emmie White, Captive
It depends on you whether you want wrinkles or dimples on your face.
— Raaz Ojha
Someday,” she said in a voice as serene as a high mountain lake, “I’m going to break your neck. Then I’m going to saw it off with a hacksaw so I can take my time.” Venom’s grin creased his cheeks.“I knew you had it in you, kitty.”(Venom & Sorrow)
— Nalini Singh, Archangel's Blade
Too much of anything is not good. But I love her too much.
— Raaz Ojha
Tears ache in my throat and each time his lips caress mine I’m closer to the dam within me bursting open. He’s undoing me, tearing out my demons with burning strokes of his lips and the salty taste of his mouth. In his arms, I’m changing, becoming anew.
— Sarah Noffke, Stunned
The jewels of sorrow last forever
— James Thurber
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.
— Jonas Jonasson
He wondered why he wasn't as in love with her as he was with...Hector had only shared enjoyment with (her)...he shared everything, enjoyment and sorrow...but for some time now they'd shared too much frustration, boredom and fatigue.
— François Lelord
Doing this was likewading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement thatyou were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steely devotion—calm above the surface of your life, surviving, though the pain ofthe cold continued to wash into your body.
— Alice Munro
No time for happiness, no time for sorrow. Work is the best of physicians.
— Buddhadeva Bose
Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.
— Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins
Because happiness alone is good for the body
—  whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind.
A true friend is not the one you share laughter with. But the one you share laughter and sorrow with.
— Unarine Ramaru
Raistlin opened his eyes, looking at her without recognition. And in them, she saw deep, undying sorrow--the look of one who has been permitted to enter a realm of deadly, perilous beauty, and who now finds himself, once more, cast down into the grey, rain-swept world.
— Tracy Hickman, War of the Twins
Nothing Is Important, Yet Everything Is Important
— Shon Mehta, A Tale of a Fairy Tale and other stories
Once you have known sorrow, you will appreciate happiness.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
When you are innocently covered by sorrow, It shall be turned into joy.
— Auliq Ice
I'm left with Haymitch in the rubble, wondering if Finnick’s fate would have one day been mine. Why not? Snow could have gotten a really good price for the girl on fire.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
God is willing and able to turn his judgements into joys . . . Don't ever think that the sin of your past means there is no hope for your future.
— John Piper, A Sweet and Bitter Providence: Sex, Race, and the Sovereignty of God
And sorrows return, though we drown them with wine,Since the world can in no way answer our craving,I will loosen my hair tomorrow and take to a fishingboat.
— Li Bai
He stumbled out of his phlegmatic apathy,when she entered his life like an epiphany.
— Neelniki
Everything I touch dies in my hand and the same thing's happening to you. You were vibrant when I met you, and now I've blanched the color from your cheeks and caused you nothing but pain.
— H.M. Ward, The Arrangement 14: The Ferro Family
. . .the sorrows of the heart yearn to be erased, for one final atonementfinite and forgetting and whole—but time in its preservingwill not permit forgetting; destroyingonly when we can no longer begor argue with time to preserve the brief benisonsa few moments longer than our sins
— John Daniel Thieme, paulinskill hours and other poems
Life—life—how cruel it is! Nothing but tears and sorrow and despair! Not a moment of happiness! Not a moment of joy.
— Aimée Dostoyevsky, The Emigrant
I call the right axe Sorrow," she said. "You know what I call the left one?" "Happiness?" "Sorrow. I can't tell them apart.
— Lev Grossman
War takes so many more casualties than just the dead.
— Katherine L. Walker, Otherworlds: The Lost
As much as we don’t want to except it, there is a time limit to the best life God tries to offer you. When you disrespect it, push it away, play games with it, deny it, ignore it, are casually indecisive about it or hold it like a last resort, God gives it away to someone else that will cherish it more.
— Shannon L. Alder
don't just listen to people crying, hear the reasons why they cry
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Distinctive Footprints of Life: Where Are You Heading Towards?
We may have to face God's truth about our pain--it is real, but we must be careful not to get God and life mixed up. God does not cause the pain and sorrow. He suffers with us and desires to comfort us as only he can.
— Jill Briscoe, Faith Enough To Finish
Sorrow is allowed, sorrow is advised; all we have to do is let go, all we have to do is love.
— Grégoire Delacourt, The List of my Desires
During times of disaster sorrow brings people together in a spirit of friendship, and influences man to recognize the blessings of becoming his brother's keeper.
— Napoleon Hill, You Can Work Your Own Miracles
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.
— Moira Young
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.
— Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley
When Death, or adverse Fortune's ruthless gale,Tears our best hopes away, the wounded HeartExhausted, leans on all that can impartThe charm of Sympathy; her mutual wailHow soothing! never can her warm tears failTo balm our bleeding grief's severest smart;Nor wholly vain feign'd Pity's solemn art,Tho' we should penetrate her sable veil.Concern, e'en known to be assum'd, our painsRespecting, kinder welcome far acquiresThan cold Neglect, or Mirth that Grief profanes.Thus each faint Glow-worm of the Night conspires,Gleaming along the moss'd and darken'd lanes,To cheer the Gloom with her unreal fires.
— Anna Seward, Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace
There is a certain kind of man who is forever searching. He wanders from place to place, he looks hard into the eyes of women and men in every town, maybe he scratches the earth or wields a gun, remedies illnesses or writes books, and there is always a vague emptiness within him. It is the emptiness that drives him and he does not know even how to name that thing that might fill it. No idea of home or love or peace comes to him. He does not know, so he cannot stop. On and on he moves. and the emptiness blinds him and pulls at him and he is like a newborn baby searching for the teat, knowing it is there, but where?And sometimes such a man is handed a gift. A gift of direction. A path that is marked for him and there, yes, this will ease your suffering, it is sure. This will cure you, it will fill you up, at least for a time. There will be a home, and love, there will no longer be the sorrow when you look at a cold night sky, the sorrow as the sun rises and the mist burns away.
— Tara Conklin, The House Girl
And what does he feel?""He feels uneasy. A little afaid. Angry. Oddly, a hint of pride.""Good," Henry said. "ANd where are you?""Backstage."Henry shook his head gravely. "THere's no such thing as backstage. The play begins, and there's only the world it dramatizes. Now, where are you?""With my father, the president. In his chambers.""Right. With me. Your father. And now--this is important--do you love me?"Nelson considered this; or rather, Nelson, as Alejo, considered this."Yes," he said after a moment. "I do.""Good. Remember that. In every scene--even when you hate me, you also love me. That's why it hurts. Got it?"Nelson said that he did."Are you sure?""Yes.""Good. Because it does hurt," Henry said. "DOn't forget that. It's supposed to. Always.
— Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles
But even of him I can think of with sorrow, now at this moment.Those times, those people...have gone. How can there be fury felt for things that are gone to dust.
— Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley
Yellowdog, where does sorrow go?”He held his heart. “Lives here, in each of us.
— Trebor Healey, A Horse Named Sorrow
Pain is like love
—  indescribable
moments of something this good, this unexpected and off his usual path, they always dredged up old shit, like somehow happiness came with sorrow as its anchor.
— Heidi Cullinan, Love Lessons
I may no explain you much about myself but we both have one thing in common & its tears.
— Srinivas Shenoy
She might have wept then, had not the sky begun to do it for her.
— George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords
What a tale he's told, what a bitter bowl of war he's drunk to the dregs.
— Virgil, The Aeneid
Death says a million words that the heart can't pen.
— Shannon L. Alder
A fool I was to sleep at noon,  And wake when night is chilly Beneath the comfortless cold moon; A fool to pluck my rose too soon,  A fool to snap my lily. My garden-plot I have not kept;  Faded and all-forsaken,I weep as I have never wept: Oh it was summer when I slept,  It's winter now I waken. Talk what you please of future spring  And sun-warm'd sweet to-orrow: Stripp'd bare of hope and everything, No more to laugh, no more to sing,  I sit alone with sorrow.
— Christina Rossetti
One of the hardest things you will ever have to go through is the death of a child. The second hardest thing you will ever have to go through is having a child die at Christmas time. The third hardest thing you will ever have to go through is telling your child that their friend and family member has passed away. The bittersweet moment that pulls you through it all is when your child says, "Mom don't cry. They're okay because they are with God now and they promise not to leave until they help you get through this.
— Shannon L. Alder
It is time to end a story that began in sorrow and ordeal and has ended in a deep and lasting happiness. May it be so for others.
— Anne McCaffrey, Nerilka's Story
Weep hard as much as you need
—  but do not let your tears pursue the sorrow for the rest of your life.
Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.
— Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives
Sorrow is God's plowshare that turns up and subsoils the depths of the soul, that it may yield richer harvests. If we had never fallen, or were in a glorified state, then the strong torrents of Divine joy would be the normal force to open up all our souls' capacities; but in a fallen world, sorrow, with despair taken out of it, is the chosen power to reveal ourselves to ourselves. Hence it is sorrow that makes us think deeply, long, and soberly.
— Lettie B. Cowman
In a little while they were kissing. In a little while longer, they made their slow sweet love.The iron bed sounded like a pine forest in an ice storm, like a switch track in a Memphis trainyard, like the sweet electrical thunder of habitual love and the tragical history of the constant heart. Auntee finished first, and then Uncle soon after, and their lips were touching lightly as they did.The rain was still falling and the scritch owl was still asleep and the dragonflies were hidden like jewels somewhere in deep brown wet grasses, nobody knew where.Uncle rolled away from his wife and held onto her hand, never let it go, old friend, old partner, passionate wife.
— Lewis Nordan, Wolf Whistle
The only thing to do with one's old sorrows is to tuck them up neatly in their shroud and turn one's face away from their grave towards what is coming next.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, In the Mountains
Every sorrow and every pain is a good reminding to us to be serious because we are living in a dangerous universe!
— Mehmet Murat ildan