Quotes About Sorrow

The inner self is "purified" by the acknowledgment of sin, not precisely because the inner self is the seat of sin, but because both our sinfulness and our interiority tend to be rejected in one and the same movement by the exterior self and relegated to the same darkness, so that when the inner self is brought back to light, sin emerges and is liquidated by the assuming of responsibility and by sorrow.

All sorrow, hardship, difficulty, struggle, pain, unhappiness, and ultimately death itself can be traced to rebellion against God's love for us.

For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories, and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence.

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

Take what I've got. You've been good. Phil, at that moment in that place that smelled of years felt in his throat what he'd felt once before and dear God knows never expected nor wanted to feel again, for the loss of it breaks your heart.

LONG, long before Mrs. Lewis cooked for the Burbanks, a tree fell on Mr. Lewis in the woods and killed him in his "prime." Mrs. Lewis hoped to be one with him again in what she called their eternal home, but the suspended relationship left her with a mixed bag of acid sayings, bitter observations and chilly maxims.

Depuis, elle pleurait des baignoires.

My heart is heavy, she thought. It's not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.

can begin tending to the soft spots of your own tender heart, causing a bittersweet breakthrough in your ability to love yourself even when someone else refuses to. When you use the sheer force of your sorrow to crack open your heart, it promises to drop you down into a deeper capacity for compassion and care for all living beings. You become initiated into your own humanity

It's time for you to give yourself the love, attention, loyalty, and care you've been trying to get from others your whole life. Grief has you gripped tightly by the ankles, and she may not let you go too soon. There's nowhere to go but home to yourself. This simple gesture of giving yourself your full attention when sorrow is shaking you to the bone promises to carve depth and kindness into the core of who you are—more than anything else I know.

THERE IS NOTHING lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road.

For trees, who see so much sorrow, so much anger, so much desperation, know love for the rare wonder of it, so they are champions of it and will do whatever they can to help it along its way.

Disaster calls us to action. They call us to levels of compassion and courage we did know we could reach. They smash us with sorrow and lift us with determination and moral resolved, the way a wave both makes and lifts us in the same wild movement. Disaster transforms sorrowful love into a force strong enough to change the trajectory of history….Dear Mary Oliver, do you think this might now be how we do the work of loving a weary, reeling world? And don't we have to try?

I don't know what despair is, if it's something or nothing, a kind of filling up or an emptying out. I don't know what sorrow does to the world, what it adds or takes away. What I think I do know now is that sorrow is part of the Earth's great cycles, flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course. To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the Earth, the surge from living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist.

Maybe this is why the Earth has the power over time to wash sorrow into a deeper pool, cold and shadowed. And maybe this is why, even though sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of wonder and solace. I don't know. And I don't know what gladness is or where it comes from that feels like a splitting open of the self. It takes me by surprise.

I was happy then, standing in the surge with lines of moonlight catching on my rubber boots. This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The Earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

This time, there are no tears. This time, there is only emptiness and I feel it set in the straight line of my mouth. I am not strong enough for this. I want an earthquake, a hurricane, anything - even a devil, the one with the cloven hoof - Mrs. Leed's unfortunate 13th child - to rush out and stomp on me, break me into little pieces and hurl me to the stars, let me go back with those people I love. Please.

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

Not this or that But all is amiss, That I have done, And I have seen Sin and sorrow Befoul the world - Release me, death, Forgive, remove From place and time The trace of all That I have been.

There is not one part of me that won't shrink and die without you. There is not one moment when I will not regret the very air I breathe. I am inadequate, a complete failure in the very task of loving and yet I love you. I love you. Badly. Stupidly. As clumsily and as greedily and as hopelessly as a child. And I would not, for all the world, have you believe otherwise. I am broken.

That's the trouble. We can't cherry-pick the parts of our story we'd like to keep. Our lives are a melting pot of regrets, triumphs, sorrow and joy. You have to accept it all.

Why did you have to be there? I'm so sorry. I'm so very, very sorry, Bird.

Let me love you, Ysolde. Let this happen. Since I was reborn, I have lived every moment in despair because I lost you. Let me worship you now as I've longed to do all those years." Baltic, Love In The Time of Dragons

My heart sobbed a lament that was hard to ignore.