"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."
— Dr. Seuss

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it...always."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now"
— Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"'...any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.'
-Grandpappy O'Donnell"
— Clive Barker (Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War)

"Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy."
— Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"...there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone."
— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (The Gay Science with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)

"Ho! Ho! Ho! To the bottle I go
To heal my heart and drown my woe
Rain may fall, and wind may blow
And many miles be still to go
But under a tall tree will i lie
And let the clouds go sailing by"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn't made my life wonderful, its made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify "book" by peeling open my hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Ester asked why people are sad.
"That’s simple," says the old man. "They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams."
— Paulo Coelho (The Zahir)

"'Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.'"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Perhaps our eyes need to be washed by our tears once in a while, so that we can see life with a clearer view again."
— Alex Tan

"When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling."
— Yann Martel (Life of Pi: A novel)

"...And sometime when I wasn't looking, I got a new life"
— Linda Della Donna

"She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

"I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.

Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on."
— Ray Bradbury (Green Shadows, White Whale: A Novel of Ray Bradbury's Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland)

"Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day. "
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depths of some devine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

". . . owning a dog always ended with this sadness because dogs just don't live as long as people do."
— John Grogan (Marley & Me: Love and Life with the World's Worst Dog)

"The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.
"
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

"If you can't get what you want, you end up doing something else, just to get some relief. Just to keep from going crazy. Because when you're sad enough, you look for ways to fill you up."
— Laura Pritchett (Sky Bridge: A Novel)

"I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again."
— C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

"Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so,
But let them go,
And be you blith and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.

Sing no more ditties, sing no mo
Of dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
Since summer first was leavy.
Then sigh not so,
But let them go,
And be you blith and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny."
— William Shakespeare (Much Ado about Nothing)

"onen i-estel edain, u-chebin estel anim
(I give hope to men. I keep none for myself.)"
— J.R.R. Tolkien

"I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints."
— Billy Joel

"SADNESS OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [sic]; Humor sadness; Sadness of love wit[hou]t release; Sadne[ss of be]ing smart; Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]; Sadness of having options; Sadness of wanting sadness; Sadness of confusion; Sadness of domes[tic]ated birds, Sadness of fini[shi]ng a book; Sadness of remembering; Sadness of forgetting; Anxiety sadness..."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel)

"The older I get, the more I see there are these crevices in life where things fall in and you just can't reach them to pull them back out. So you can sit next to them and weep or you can get up and move forward. You have to stop worrying about who's not here and start worrying about who is.
"
— Alex Witchel (The Spare Wife: A novel)

"I'll never wake up in a good mood again.
I'm tired of these stinky boots"
— Jim Morrison (Jim Morrison's an American Prayer)

"Dahulu dia selalu katakan apa yang dia pikirkan, tangiskan, apa yang ditanggungkan, teriakan ria kesukaan di dalam hati remaja. Kini dia harus diam- tak ada kuping sudi suaranya."
— Pramoedya Ananta Toer

"فعلى قدر ما يغوص الحزن في أعماقكم يزيد ما تستوعبون من فرح، أليست الكأس التي تحمل خمركم هي هي الكأس التي احترقت في اتون الفخارى؟ و أليست القيثارة التي تسكن إليها نفوسكم هي هي قطعه الخشب التي حفرتها السكين"
— Kahlil Gibrán

"...the sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart...converted it into a tomb..."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"Sadness is a vice."
— Gustave Flaubert

"876026
I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again."
— C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

"Halfway home, the sky goes from dark gray to almost black and a loud thunder snap accompanies the first few raindrops that fall. Heavy, warm, big drops, they drench me in seconds, like an overturned bucket from the sky dumping just on my head. I reach my hands up and out, as if that can stop my getting wetter, and open my mouth, trying to swallow the downpour, till it finally hits me how funny it is, my trying to stop the rain.

This is so funny to me, I laugh and laugh, as loud and free as I want. Instead of hurrying to higher ground, I jump lower, down off the curb, splashing through the puddles, playing and laughing all the way home. In all my life till now, rain has meant staying inside and not being able to go out to play. But now for the first time I realize that rain doesn't have to be bad. And what's more, I understand, sadness doesn't have to be bad, either. Come to think of it, I figure you need sadness, just as you need the rain.

Thoughts and ideas pour through my awareness. It feels to me that happiness is almost scary, like how I imagine being drunk might feel - real silly and not caring what anybody else says. Plus, that happy feeling always leaves so fast, and you know it's going to go before it even does. Sadness lasts longer, making it more familiar, and more comfortable. But maybe, I wonder, there's a way to find some happiness in the sadness. After all, it's like the rain, something you can't avoid. And so, it seems to me, if you're caught in it, you might as well try to make the best of it.

Getting caught in the warm, wet deluge that particular day in that terrible summer full of wars and fires that made no sense was a wonderful thing to have happen. It taught me to understand rain, not to dread it. There were going to be days, I knew, when it would pour without warning, days when I'd find myself without an umbrella. But my understanding would act as my all-purpose slicker and rubber boots. It was preparing me for stormy weather, arming me with the knowledge that no matter how hard it seemed, it couldn't rain forever. At some point, I knew, it would come to an end."
— Antwone Quenton Fisher (Finding Fish: A Memoir)

"We have talked about Suzy and about her last days, but it's as if our lives stopped then and there. If I say anything to him about feeling lonesome, he goes outside and does some little chore. I can't tell if he is secretly blaming me, or himself, or just too full of pain to talk. That was the one thing we could always do together. I wish for the old days. I wish for the struggling days and the days of Geronimo, and the days of birthing Charlie with no one but Jack to help me. How happy and in love we were then. I want to be in love again, but all I feel is darkness and shadows. Everything is changed and different (p. 364)."
— Nancy E. Turner (These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 : A Novel)

"He was fifteen and could not remember ever crying before, not as a child when his father had died so brutally; not in bond when his mother slipped away so quietly in her sleep; not when Likkarn had tormented him with the memory of his father's death under the feral claws. He sobbed-- for this lost chance, for the death of Blood Brother, for the aching sores on his back, and even with the remembered pain of his parents' loss (45)"
— Jane Yolen (Dragon's Blood)

""Now my wife and children dream of gifts beneath the tree, while I place in the manger a baby Jesus figurine; sipping Christmas whiskey, wondering if I still believe. Oh tidings of comfort and joy.""
— D. Bazan (sort of)