"When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground."
— Oscar Wilde

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good."
— W.H. Auden (Selected Poems)

"... joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come and when one sits alone with you . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair."
— Chinese proverb

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

"Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason."
— Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)

"It's a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life."
— George W. Bush

""Nothing is ever truly gone...
Not for me, nor for any human being. We can only go forward, unless we are guests in some enchantment that is not is ours. We are condemned to an endless present, and we can never go back-the source of all our joy, and all our sorrow."
-Hem at Zelika's grave "
— Alison Croggon (The Crow: The Third Book of Pellinor)

"Even when a river of tears courses through this body, the flame of love cannot be quenched."
— Izumi Shikibu

"The sorrow grows bigger when the sorrow's denied"
— Eddie Vedder

"It's funny, how one can look back on a sorrow one thought one might well die of at the time, and know that one had not yet reckoned the tenth part of true grief."
— Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel's Dart)

"Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain."
— Henry James

"Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone. Or set me on an airplane traveling west, crossing the date line again and again, losing this day, then that, until the day of loss still lies ahead, and you are here instead of sorrow."
— Nessa Rapoport

"It is my observations, though, that happiness limits the amount of suffering one is willing to inflict upon others"
— Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel's Dart)

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

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
— Henri Nouwen

"For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God."
— Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)

"Although not a very old man, I have yet lived a great deal in my life, and I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too keen to allow me to become either cast down or elated for more than a very brief period over any success or defeat."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge the more grief."
— Ecclesiastes 1:18

"It’s not that we have to quit this life one day, it’s how many things we have to quit all at once: holding hands, hotel rooms, music, the physics of falling leaves, vanilla and jasmine, poppies, smiling, anthills, the color of the sky, coffee and cashmere, literature, sparks and subway trains... If only one could leave this life slowly!"
— Roman Payne (Hope and Despair)

"The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination."
— Joseph Campbell

""Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good."
— W.H. Auden (Selected Poems)
tags: death, grief, poem, sorrow "
— W.H. Auden

"It would be the last unicorn that came to Molly Grue. It's all right, I forgive you."
— Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn)

"Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face."
— Gregory Maguire (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West)

"She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow."
— Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses)

"She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord . . . I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse."
— Marilynne Robinson (Home: A Novel)

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."
— Henri Nouwen

"Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak, binds up the human heart and bids it break"
— Shakespeare

"If for instance the sentiment possessing for the moment the empire of our mind is sorrow, will not the genius sharpen the sorrow and the sorrow purify the genius? Together, will they not be like a cut diamond for which language is only the wax on which they stamp their imprint? I believe that genius, thus awakened, has no need to seek out details, that it scarcely pauses to reflect, that it never thinks of unity: I believe that the details come naturally without search by the poet, that inspiration takes the place of reflection and as for unity, I think there is no unity so perfect as that which results from a heart filled with a single idea...The nature of genius is related to that of instinct; it's operation is both simple and marvelous."
— Charlotte Brontë

"Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks."
— John Burnham Schwartz (The Commoner: A Novel)

"I, answering in the end, began: 'Alas,
how many yearning thoughts, what great desire,
have lead them through such sorrow to their fate?'"
— Dante Alighieri

"Voy a hacer un rompeolas
con mi alegria pequena. No quiero que sepa el mar que por mi pecho van penas."
— Julia de Burgos

"The all-victorious Christ is like a great rock in a weary land, to whose shelter we may flee in every time of sorrow or trial, finding quiet refuge and peace in him."
— J.R. Miller

"Isn't it time that these most ancient
sorrows of ours
grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly
loosed ourselves
from the loved one, and, unsteadily,
survived:
the way the arrow, suddenly all vector,
survives the string
to be more than itself. For abiding is
nowhere."
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)

"We kept walking, our shadows moving in shifting blobs over the ground. The sound of river rocks rattled under our feet. We turned along a bend in the stream and a curtain of poplar trees came into view, shivering in the distance, showing the white backsides of their leaves. I watched them for a while until an ancient, aching sorrow rose up in my chest. It was a familiar feeling. Something in the mute, unconscious trees resonated inside me, something so deep and fundamental it failed to remember its own source anymore. I watched the poplars flickering against the hard blue of the sky. What is sorrow? I thought. What is sorrow but old, worn out joy?"
— Jon Raymond (Livability: Stories)

"There was an end to weeping. Mourning, however, ebbed and surged but never ceased flowing."
— Julius Lester (The Autobiography of God: A Novel)

"Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure."
— Sebastian Faulks

"Though the last glimpse of Erin with sorrow I see,
Yet wherever thou art shall seem Erin to me;
In exile thy bosom shall still be my home,
And thine eyes make my climate wherever we roam."
— Thomas Moore

"I don't think she's ever coming back."
— V.C. Andrews