Quotes About Sorrow

Having a conscience now is a grief-soaked proposition

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

It was all so beautiful, so quiet, and yet with such a full and thrilling sweep from time into eternity that my sorrow was stilled and I could wail no monody. My desolate hour must wait.

Are you a storyteller, Thomas Covenant?" Absently he replied, "I was, once." "And you gave it up? Ah, that is as sad a tale in three words as any you might have told me. But a life without a tale is like a sea without salt. How do you live?" ... Unconsciously, he clenched his fist over his ring. "I live." "Another?" Foamfollower returned. "In two words, a story sadder than the first. Say no more -- with one word you will make me weep.

I will weep no more for the lost, asleep in their water graves.

I took him by the arm to steady him. He opened his eyes slowly, the bright golden gleam now darkened with pain and sorrow. "Morgian!' he uttered, his voice strangled with grief. "It was Morgian. . .

I remember days Or at least I try But as years go by They're sort of haze And the bluest ink Isn't really sky And at times I think I would gladly die For a day of sky

Him I delight in accepts joy as joy; He is richened by sorrow as a river by its bends

Like a fossil tree From which we gather no flowers Sad has been my life Fated no fruit to produce.» Death poem composed by Minamoto Yorimasa immediately before his act of seppuku in the Byodo-in temple of Uji.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

You have taken my heart from me, sea-born eyes. You have taken it, yes, but I do not know. There are too many roads where I must go. There are too many beds where I have slept For a night unweeping, to quit unwept, And it needs a king to marry the sea.

Vonnegut had seen the worst of human conduct and refused to lie about the sort of trouble we were in, but who had not allowed his doubt to curdle into cynicism, who, for all his dark prognostication, was a figure of tremendous hope. The evidence was in his books, which performed the greatest feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter by means of courageous imagination. Like any decent parent, he had made the astonishing sorrow of the examined life bearable.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows that the war is over Everybody knows that the good guys lost —LEONARD COHEN, "Everybody Knows," 1988

See confusion as confusion. Acknowledge suffering as suffering. Feel pain and sorrow and divisiveness. Experience anger or fear or shock for what they are. But you don't have to think of them as evil - as intrinsically bad, as needing to be destroyed or driven from our midst. On the contrary, they need to be absorbed, healed, made whole. (15)

I love you still, but with your death I succumbed to a kind of infatuation. I convinced myself that what you and I had, so very briefly, was of far vaster and deeper import than it truly was. Of all the weapons we chose to turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one's own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.

It' s easy to weep when staying far away, doing nothing.

Wisdom did not belong to mortals, and those whom others called wise were only those who, through grim experience, had touched the very edges of unwelcome truths. For the wise, even joy was tinged with sorrow.

The saddest face I ever saw on Martin Luther King was at the funeral of the four little girls slain in Birmingham, Alabama.

I've seen so many women in my family, so many mothers, that have lost children in the war in such absurd ways. I wonder how they do it. How do they keep living? How do they keep smiling?

So many people that I've wanted to work with have died. I was so crazy in love with Amy Winehouse. When she died, I felt like I lost my sister all over again. I couldn't stop crying for weeks and weeks! It was horrible! She was so wonderful and so talented.

I'll wave no more flags for home. No tears for Mother. Nobody ever died for apple pie.

The television set groaned and wept blood when they turned it on.

Il n'est rien qui tente mes larmes que les larmes.

Light griefs can speak: deep sorrows are dumb.      —Seneca, Hippolytus, act ii. scene 3.] A