Quotes About Sorrow

They weren't penitent over what they'd attempted; their sorrow reached to the limits of their bodies and no further, all their anguish was in their skin.

Dead and still in the world was worse than dead and in the ground. Dead in the ground at least gave you the hope of heaven.

Not for the first time, it occurred to me that sorrow could be purified into song the same way a piece of coal is purified into a diamond.

El toro impávido ante la lengua de los muertos / la muerte derramada bajo los cascos implacables / la impiedad del caballo entre el dolor de las lámparas / y el amor mío por el sueño / deslumbrado de pronto / por el remordimiento. (Descubrimiento del Guernica)

Hablo de ese dolor que es tan grande que ni siquiera parece que te nace de dentro, sino que es como si hubieras sido sepultada por un alud. Y así estás. Tan enterrada bajo esas pedregosas toneladas de pena que no puedes ni hablar.

There was sadness in everything—in the room, in the ringing bird-calls from the garden, in the lit, golden lawn beyond the window, with its single miraculous cherry-tree breaking in immaculate blossom and tossing long foamy sprays against the sky. She was sad to the verge of tears, and yet the sorrow was rich—a suffocating joy.

Grief was like a terrible burden, but at least you could lay it down by the side of the road and walk away from it. Antonia had come only a few paces, but already she could turn and look back and not weep. It wasn't anything to do with forgetting. It was just accepting. Nothing was ever so bad once you had accepted it.

It was always what my father called the last leg of the journey. But we did not stop this time. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.

thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

The Death of the Heart

There is very little said about how repetitious grief is.

there was no place as unknown as grief.

to poison his spirit, drowned it methodically, savagely, choked it off. Alcohol had been the tool. He thought back to when he took the first drink of his first real dirty drunk and remembered how he'd wept into the amber flame deep in the cup and how his sorrow had been answered with a spreading warmth and a forgetting.

After weeping, he often fell into the sweetest dreams.

Her playing was of the utmost sincerity. And Chopin, played simply, devastates the heart. Sometimes a pause between the piercing sorrows of minor notes made a sister scrubbing the floor weep into the bucket where she dipped her rag so that the convent's boards, washed in tears, seemed to creak now in a human tongue. The air of the house thickened with sighs.

I will always be haunted by what I did too... and so we sat there. Two haunted women.

They sat on chairs made of air and fanned their faces with transparent leaves. They spoke in both languages. We love you, don't cry. Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.

The sobs were wrecking her, tossing her like a storm. They built up and died down and built up again. Her father sat listening to the waves, almost reverent, his head bowed as though he were attentive to a sermon

She took detailed notes and dispatched a servant to the Indian missions to procure fine lace produced by young women whose mothers had once worked the quills of porcupines and dyed hairs of moose together into intricate clawed flowers and strict emblems before they died of measles, cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and left their daughters dexterous and lonely to the talents of nuns.

C'est peut-être ça qu'on cherche à travers les vie, rien que cela, le plus grand chagrin possible pour devenir soi-même avant de mourir.

In my room I'd barely closed my eyes when the blonde from the movie house came along and sang her whole song of sorrow just for me. I helped her put me to sleep, so to speak, and succeeded pretty well... I wasn't entirely alone... It's not possible to sleep alone...

That street was like a dismal gash, endless, with us at the bottom of it, filling it from side to side, advancing from sorrow to sorrow, toward an end that is never in sight, the end of all the streets in the world.

La tristeza del mundo se apodera de los seres como puede, pero parece lograrlo casi siempre.

C'est peut-être ça qu'on cherche à travers la vie, rien que cela, le plus grand chagrin possible pour devenir soi-même avant de mourir.