Lisa Bryant > Lisa's Quotes

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
― Anne Lamott

“Time Does Not Bring Relief

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“When I dream, I dream of him. For several nights now he’s come to me, waving from a distant shore as if he’s been waiting patiently for me to arrive. He doesn’t utter a word, but his smile says everything: I’ve missed you.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing

“Can I say something?'
'Go on'
'I'm a little drunk'
'Me too. That's okay.'
'Just....I missed you, you know.'
'I missed you too.'
'But so, so much, Dexter. There were so many things I wanted to talk to you about, and you weren't there-'
'same here.'
'I tell you what it is. It's.....When I didn't see you, I thought about you every day, I mean EVERY DAY in some way or another-'
'same here.'
'-Even if it was just "I wish Dexter could see this" or "Where's Dexter now?" or "Christ that Dexter, what an idiot", you know what I mean, and seeing you today, well, I thought I'd got you back - my BEST friend. And now all this, the wedding, the baby- I'm so happy for you, Dex, but it feels like I've lost you again.'-

-'You know what happens you have a family, your responsibilities change, you lose touch with people'
'It won't be like that, I promise.'
'Do you?'
'Absolutely'
'You swear? No more disappearing?'
'I won't if you won't.'
Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of glorious confusion.”
― David Nicholls, One Day

“I miss you', he admitted.
'I'm here', she said.
'That's when I miss you most. When you're here. When you aren't here, when you're just a ghost of the past or a dream from another life, it's easier then.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures. Wearing slippers and watching the Miss Universe contest. Eating a brownie with vanilla ice cream. Getting to level seven in Dragon Master and knowing there were twenty more levels to go.

Maybe happiness was just a matter of the little upticks- the traffic signal that said "Walk" the second you go there- and downticks- the itch tag at the back of your collar- that happened to every person in the course of the day. Maybe everybody had the same allotted measure of happiness within each day.

maybe it didn't matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn't matter if your friend was possibly dying.

Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.”
― Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

“A mighty pain to love it is,
And 't is a pain that pain to miss;
But of all pains, the greatest pain
It is to love, but love in vain.”
― Abraham Cowley, The Poems of Abraham Cowley

“She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.”
― Julia Quinn, The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever

“My life is four walls of missed opportunities poured in concrete molds.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.”
― W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957

“You can't love anything more than something you miss.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“You can decorate absence however you want- but your still gonna feel what’s missing.”
― Siobhan Vivian, Same Difference

“I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.”
― Maurice Sendak

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“Because what’s worse than knowing you want something, besides knowing you can never have it?”
― James Patterson, The Angel Experiment

“Because, if you could love someone, and keep loving them, without being loved back . . . then that love had to be real. It hurt too much to be anything else.”
― Sarah Cross, Kill Me Softly

“If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

“Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Unrequited love is the infinite curse of a lonely heart.”
― Christina Westover

“A person doesn't know true hurt and suffering until they've felt the pain of falling in love with someone whose affections lie elsewhere.”
― Rose Gordon, Her Imperfect Groom

“I had discovered that there was something more painful than falling in love with someone who hasn't fallen for you; hurting that person-hurting him and not being able to do anything about it.”
― Elizabeth Chandler, Dark Secrets 1

“Shut up…let me tell you, LET ME. Every time I look at your face or even remember it, it wrecks me. And the way you are with me and you’re just fun and you shit all over me and you make fun of me and you’re real. I don’t have enough time in any day to think about you enough...I don’t even think about women anymore. I think about you.”
― Louis C.K.

“The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“True regret is knowing you missed your only opportunity to be simply a good friend to someone that was exactly like you.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Soul connections are not often found and are worth every bit of fight left in you to keep.”
― Shannon Alder

“If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! (p. 225)”
― André Aciman

“Oh why rebuke you him that loves you so? / Lay breath so bitter on your bitter foe.”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically--to those who hardly think about us in return.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch