The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows Quotes

“Sonder - n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“Emotions are none of these. As a result, there’s a huge blind spot in the language of emotion, vast holes in the lexicon that we don’t even know we’re missing. We have thousands of words for different types of finches and schooners and historical undergarments, but only a rudimentary vocabulary to capture the delectable subtleties of the human experience.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain

1.    Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.
2.    Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
3.    Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.
4.    Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
5.    Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
6.    Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
7.    Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
8.    Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.
9.    Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.
10.    Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
11.    Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
12.    Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening
13.    Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.
14.    Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.
15.    Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.
16.    Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
17.    Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.
18.    Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
19.    Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
20.    Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.
21.    Liberosis: The desire to care less about things.
22.    Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.
23.    Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.

John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, November 16, 2021)”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“The word sadness originally meant "fullness," from the same Latin root, satis, that also gave us sated and satisfaction. Not so long ago, to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It wasn't just a malfunction in the joy machine. It was a state of awareness– setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once. When we speak of sadness these days, most of the time what we really mean is despair, which is literally defined as the absence of hope. But true sadness is actually the opposite, an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be. That's why you'll find traces of the blues all over this book, but you might find yourself feeling strangely joyful at the end of it. And if you are lucky enough to feel sad, well, savor it while it lasts– if only because it means that you care about something in this world enough to let it under your skin.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“Such is life. Some days you wake up in Kansas, and some days in Oz. Sometimes the world feels pretty much stuck in place, and you’ve made your peace with that. Why waste time on silly pipe dreams, when there are socks to darn and pigs to feed? At other times, you look around and see how exciting the world can be, how flexible and arbitrary things are, how easy it might be to cast aside your old life and get to work building the one you really want.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“etherness n. the wistful feeling of looking around at a gathering of loved ones, all too aware that even though the room is filled with warmth and laughter now, it won't always be this way-that the coming years will steadily break people away into their own families, or see them pass away one by one, until there comes a time you look back and try to imagine what it feels like to have everyone together in the same place.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“OZURIE feeling torn between the life you want and the life you have”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“vellichor n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“onism n. the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“Adronitis
n. frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone—spending the first few weeks chatting in their psychological entryway, with each subsequent conversation like entering a different anteroom, each a little closer to the center of the house—wishing instead that you could start there and work your way out, exchanging your deepest secrets first, before easing into casualness, until you’ve built up enough mystery over the years to ask them where they’re from, and what they do for a living.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“spinning playback head n. the disorienting feeling of meeting back up with an old friend and realizing that you've become different people on divergent paths-that even though they're standing right in front of you, the person you once knew isn't really there anymore.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“anemoia nostalgia for a time you never experienced.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“siso n. a solitary experience you wish you could have shared with someone else-having dinner in a romantic setting, reaching the summit after an arduous climb, having a run-in with a crazy stranger that nobody's going to believe-which makes you look around for confirmation that it even happened at all.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“koinophobia the fear that you've lived an ordinary life.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“harmonoia n. an itchy sense of dread when life feels just a hint too peaceful—when everyone seems to get along suspiciously well, with an eerie stillness that makes you want to brace for the inevitable collapse, or burn it down yourself. From harmony + paranoia. Pronounced “hahr”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“YU YI the longing to feel things intensely again”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“monachopsis
n. the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“allope n. a mysterious aura of loneliness you feel in certain places, the palpable weight of all the lonely people secretly holed up in their houses and apartments, with a flickering blue glow cast up on their walls-so many of whom might just want someone to talk to, or want to feel needed, and could be that for each other of only they could somehow connect.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“anoscetia the anxiety of not knowing "the real you.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“elsewise adj. struck by the poignant strangeness of other people's homes, which smell and feel so different than your own-seeing the details of their private living space, noticing their little daily rituals, the way they've arranged their things, the framed photos of people you'll never know.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“looseleft adj. feeling a sense of loss upon finishing a good book, sensing the weight of the back cover locking away the lives of characters you've gotten to know so well.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“kairosclerosis n. the moment you realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“liberosis
n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“harke
n. a painful memory that you look back upon with unexpected fondness, even though you remember having dreaded it at the time; a tough experience that has since been overridden by the pride of having endured it, the camaraderie of those you shared it with, or the satisfaction of having a good story to tell.

From hark back, a command spoken to hunting dogs to retrace their course so they can pick up a lost scent. Pronounced "hahrk.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“zielschmerz n. the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“idlewild adj. feeling grateful to be stranded in a place where you can’t do much of anything—sitting for hours at an airport gate, the sleeper car of a train, or the backseat of a van on a long road trip—which temporarily alleviates the burden of being able to do anything at any time and frees up your brain to do whatever it wants to do, even if it’s just to flicker your eyes across the passing landscape. From Idlewild, the original name of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“Maybe your self-mythology is no different than any other mythology. It’s a story that changes in the telling, evolving over time. Whatever resonates will stay, and what doesn’t will fall away. To pick away at the literal truth is to miss the point of it, miss the joy of it. So go ahead and build your myth. Try to tell a good story about yourself that captures something true, whether or not the facts agree.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“trueholding n. the act of trying to keep an amazing discovery to yourself, fighting the urge to shout about it from the rooftops because you’re afraid that it’ll end up being diluted and distorted, and will no longer have been created just for you.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“When you were born, you could have been anybody. So quick and malleable, your parents could look at your face and see a future president. They tried to mold you as you grew, but they could only work with what they had. And when their tools stopped working, they gradually handed them off to you, asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” There’s a certain art to becoming who you are. There’s no standard kit you can use to assemble yourself, swapping out parts as needed. Instead, it feels more like a kind of stretching, a teasing out at the edges, like a glassblower standing at the furnace. A teenage personality is a delicate medium, its emotions almost too heavy to handle. You had to figure out a way to keep yourself together and tease out the good parts without falling out of balance or stretching yourself too thin. You couldn’t stop everything to try to fix your flaws, but you couldn’t just ignore them either. Luckily, you were nothing if not flexible, softened by the heat of youth, which kept you warm on a dingy couch or a night in the wilderness. You knew that you weren’t just you, you were also the person you would one day become. So even when you failed, you could still be whatever you wanted to be. As long as you kept moving. Inevitably you got hit, and you got hurt. You prided yourself on how well you absorbed the blow, bouncing back as if nothing had happened. But the pain changed you, in little chips and cracks that might take you years to notice. Over time you learned how to position yourself in very specific ways, protecting the most vulnerable parts of your psyche, even as you knew they were still a crucial part of the real you. Gradually you became more and more reluctant to move from that position. Growing a little harder, a little more brittle.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“waldosia n. a condition characterized by scanning faces in a crowd looking for a specific person who would have no reason to be there, which is your brain’s way of checking to see whether they’re still in your life, subconsciously patting its emotional pockets before it leaves for the day.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows