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Quotes About Sorrow

Gloria laughed at them and said that she'd overtaken grief a long time ago, that she was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.
~ Colum McCann
Another day, another dolor.
~ Colum McCann
It was Vietnam that brought me to my knees. In she came and took all three of my boys from right under my nose. She picked them up out of their beds, shook the sheets, and said, These ones are mine.
~ Colum McCann
The mark of man is tragedy and the world must know this.
~ Vikram Chandra
Woe to him who, when the day of his dreams finally came, found it so different from all he had longed for! Perhaps he boarded a trolley, traveled out to the home which he had seen for years in his mind, and only in his mind, and pressed the bell, just as he has longed to do in thousands of dreams, only to find that the person who should open the door was not there, and would never be there again.
~ Viktor E. Frankl
A long time elapsed, and the parents had not mentioned the name of their dead child. They never spoke of the little girl they had lost; their sorrow would have become doubly heavy if it had been brought out into clear daylight, and its power acknowledged. Now they tried to push it away, not let it penetrate beyond thought. As long as words didn't help, why use them? Exchanged between two mourning people, they were only a dissonant sound, disturbing the bitter consolation of silence.
~ Vilhelm Moberg
Rosalia. Rosa e lia. Rosa che ha inebriato, rosa che ha confuso, rosa che ha sventato, rosa che ha rá½¹so, il mio cervello s'è mangiato.
~ Vincenzo Consolo
Tu as mis au monde un fleuve de larmes, ma mère. J'ai pris le voile, ma mère.
~ Violette Leduc
I dragged on my ruined life in darkness and grief, wrathful in my heart...
~ Virgil
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem
~ Virgil
Tum vero exarsit iuveni dolor ossibus ingens, nec lacrimis caruere genae, segnemque Menoeten, oblitus decorisque sui sociumque salutis, in mare praecipitem puppi deturbat ab alta; ipse gubernaclo rector subit, ipse magister
~ Virgil
non et vario noctem sermone trahebat infelix Dido, longumque bibebat amorem, multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa; nunc quibus Aurorae venisset filius armis, nunc quales Diomedis equi, nunc quantus Achilles.
~ Virgil
How fortunate were you, thrice fortunate and more, whose luck it was to die under the high walls of Troy before your parents' eyes!
~ Virgil
Love cares for no one. The bees never seem to have enough of clover, The goats never seem to have enough of leaves, The meadows never enough of freshening water; Love never seems to have enough of tears.
~ Virgil
if so great be thy yearning to know of our sorrows
~ Virgil
Sometimes the hardest goodbyes are the ones never said, the ones that always just hang there in the back of the mind like a dark cloud. There's so much to say but no one to say it to because the person you want most to hear it is already gone. That's how he felt. Sorrow, regret, a wound so deep it didn't even bleed. Like a puncture wound, an ache that didn't heal but just hurt. He didn't know if he wanted it to heal. That'd be too much like a final goodbye.
~ Virginia Brown
My dear daughter—I have for some time had hope of seeing you once more in this world, but now that hope is entirely gone forever," wrote Phebe Brownrigg to her free daughter Amy Nixon, shortly before her owner took her from North Carolina to Mississippi in 1835. One of the rare letters written by a western-bound slave on her own behalf, it concluded, "May we all meet around our Father's throne in heaven, never no more to depart.
~ Virginia Postrel
Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall
~ Virginia Woolf
Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.
~ Virginia Woolf
I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.
~ Virginia Woolf
But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.
~ Virginia Woolf
The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.
~ Virginia Woolf
So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying 'that is all' more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too 'that is all'. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.
~ Virginia Woolf
His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.
~ Virginia Woolf