117 Sorrowful Quotes

In life's tapestry, moments of sorrow are inevitable threads woven into our experiences. These poignant times often bring reflection, introspection, and a deeper understanding of human resilience and emotion. Whether you are seeking solace, a way to express your own grief, or simply a moment of connection, our curated collection of the top 117 sorrowful quotes is here to resonate with your feelings. These quotes, penned by wise minds across history, capture the essence of sorrow and the universal truths that accompany it. Dive into these words and find a companion for your heart’s deepest sighs.

1. “Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”But I say unto you, they are inseparable.Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.” - Kahlil Gibran

2. “Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;Thy fate is the common fate of all,Into each life some rain must fall” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

3. “Voy a hacer un rompeolascon mi alegria pequena. No quiero que sepa el mar que por mi pecho van penas.” - Julia de Burgos

4. “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?” - George Eliot

5. “It's a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life.” - George W. Bush

6. “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

7. “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

8. “Deep in earth my love is lyingAnd I must weep alone.” - Edgar Allan Poe

9. “Even when a river of tearscourses throughthis body,the flame of lovecannot be quenched.” - Izumi Shikibu

10. “Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.” - Khaled Hosseini

11. “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

12. “Those who do not weep, do not see.” - Victor Hugo

13. “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

14. “It sounded old. Deserve. Old and tired and beaten to death. Deserve. Now it seemed to him that he was always saying or thinking that he didn't deserve some bad luck, or some bad treatment from others. He'd told Guitar that he didn't "deserve" his family's dependence, hatred, or whatever. That he didn't even "deserve" to hear all the misery and mutual accusations his parents unloaded on him. Nor did he "deserve" Hagar's vengeance. But why shouldn't his parents tell him their personal problems? If not him, then who? And if a stranger could try to kill him, surely Hagar, who knew him and whom he'd thrown away like a wad of chewing gum after the flavor was gone––she had a right to try to kill him too.Apparently he though he deserved only to be loved--from a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be...what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.” - Toni Morrison

15. “We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.” - Erich Maria Remarque

16. “There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.” - George Eliot

17. “Middle children weep longer than their brothers and sisters. Over her mother’s shoulder, stilling her pains and her injured pride, Jackie Lacon watched the party leave. First, two men she had not seen before: one tall, one short and dark. They drove off in a small green van. No one waved to them, she noticed, or even said goodbye. Next, her father left in his own car; lastly a blond, good-looking man and a short fat one in an enormous overcoat like a pony blanket made their way to a sports car parked under the beech trees. For a moment she really thought there must be something wrong with the fat one, he followed so slowly and so painfully. Then, seeing the handsome man hold the car door for him, he seemed to wake, and hurried forward with a lumpy skip. Unaccountably, this gesture upset her afresh. A storm of sorrow seized her and her mother could not console her.” - John le Carré

18. “I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was reproof. Shouldn't I feel better than I had in the dead of night.” - Francine Prose

19. “No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God . . . and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.” - Orson F. Whitney

20. “Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she’d realized again what she’d learned at five when her mother left – that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother’s voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood.” - Ron Rash

21. “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

22. “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

23. “I remember watching the mascara tears flood the ivories and I thought, "It's OK to be sad." I've been trained to love my darkness.” - Lady Gaga

24. “Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

25. “Love SorrowLove sorrow. She is yours now, and you musttake care of what has beengiven. Brush her hair, help herinto her little coat, hold her hand,especially when crossing a street. For, think,what if you should lose her? Then you would besorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessnesswould be yours. Take care, touchher forehead that she feel herself not soutterly alone. And smile, that she does notaltogether forget the world before the lesson.Have patience in abundance. And do notever lie or ever leave her even for a momentby herself, which is to say, possibly, again,abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.And amazing things can happen. And you may see,as the two of you gowalking together in the morning light, howlittle by little she relaxes; she looks about her;she begins to grow.” - Mary Oliver

26. “Every bond is a bond to sorrow.” - James Joyce

27. “I wanted to cry, but the tears did not come.” - Tatiana de Rosnay

28. “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

29. “Inventory:"Four be the things I am wiser to know:Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.Four be the things I'd been better without:Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.Three be the things I shall never attain:Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.Three be the things I shall have till I die:Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.” - Dorothy Parker

30. “Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say goodnight till it be morrow.” - Shakespeare

31. “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

32. “A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.” - Françoise Sagan

33. “In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once.” - Abraham Lincoln

34. “It's as if a child with a brush and too much enthusiasm has been set free with a tin of black paint inside me.” - Jenny Downham

35. “Solitude has soft, silky hands, but with strong fingers it grasps the heart and makes it ache with sorrow.” - Kahlil Gibran

36. “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

37. “Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either” - Golda Meir

38. “It's only natural to feel lonely after the enjoyable moments pass. But as you experience new joys those feelings of sorrow will start to fade.” - Mizu Sahara

39. “I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.” - Anais Nin

40. “Astley comes to my side. "Are you well?" "No," I tell him, voice hoarse. "I am not well. I am broken inside. I am broken almost all-the-way deep, and I don't know...I don't know if I can ever be unbroken, let alone well again”.” - Carrie Jones

41. “You will be a great queen when you come back, you know. And someday you'll love me the way you love your wolf.” - Carrie Jones

42. “There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.” - George Eliot

43. “Give sustenance, Allah.Give sustenance to me.” - Khaled Hosseini

44. “Be like a branch of a tree; flex your body to face 'wind of sorrow'; flex little harder to dance in the 'wind of happiness'.” - Santosh Kalwar

45. “It is foolish to tear one’s hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness.” - Marcus Tullius Cicero

46. “...this woman, moved by some private sorrow as much as the words being spoken, cried almost silently, unobserved by others, apart from Mma Ramotswe, who stretched out her hand and laid it on her shoulder. Do not cry, Mma, she began to whisper, but changed her words even as she uttered them, and said quietly, Yes, you can cry, Mma. We should not tell people not to weep - we do it because of our sympathy for them - but we should really tell them that their tears are justified and entirely right.” - Alexander McCall Smith

47. “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

48. “Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face.” - Gregory Maguire

49. “Here dwells a snake, one thousand miles longCoiled, one thousand miles deepEyes like candy, it has eyes like candyHard and blue, but soft as kittens feetOut of sight or in the element of lightIt could be a devil, it could be an angelWith spiders inside a vision from hellIts spine is a vertical screamSlow as concrete, blurred as a dreamFueled by inertia, depth, radius, and velocity,Its soul--a twisted wreckage of despair and painAnd the spiders inside are just praying for rainKilling time killing timeAnd praying for rainOne thousand miles deep” - James O'Barr

50. “He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.” - Jodi Picoult

51. “Chase away sorrow by living” - Melissa Marr

52. “There is often grief that comes with loving, Moshe. But it is worth it.” - Bodie Thoene

53. “The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.” - Cormac McCarthy

54. “You could concentrate much more deeply when you were alone with agony.” - William Goldman

55. “We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.” - John Green

56. “Your tale is of the longest," observed Monks, moving restlessly in his chair.It is a true tale of grief and trial, and sorrow, young man," returned Mr. Brownlow, "and such tales usually are; if it were one of unmixed joy and happiness, it would be very brief.” - Charles Dickens

57. “I watch my loved ones weep with sorrow, death's silent torment of no tomorrow. I feel their hearts breaking, I sense their despair, United in misery, the grief that they share. How do I show that, I am not gone...but the essence of life's everlasting songWhy do they wee? Why do they cry?I'm alive in the wind and I am soaring high. I am sparkling light dancing on streams, a moment of warmth in the fays of sunbeams.The coolness of rain as it falls on your face, the whisper of leaves as wind rushes with haste. Eternal Song, a requiem by Avian of Celieriafrom Crown of Crystal Flame by C.L. Wilson” - C.L. Wilson

58. “Gdje su zlatne ptice ljudskih snova, preko kojih se to bezbrojnih mora i vrletnih planina do njih dolazi? Da li nam se ta duboka čežnja djetinje nerazumnosti posigurno javlja samo kao tužni znak izvezen na mahramama i na safijanskim koricama nepotrebnih knjiga?” - Meša Selimović

59. “…in silence learned the sweet solace which affection administers to sorrow.” - Louisa May Alcott

60. “Sorry.Sorry means you feel the pulse of other people's pain as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it. And so it binds us together, makes us trodden and sodden as one another. Sorry is a lot of things. It's a hole refilled. A debt repaid. Sorry is the wake of misdeed. It's the crippling ripple of consequence. Sorry is sadness, just as knowing is sadness. Sorry is sometimes self-pity. But Sorry, really, is not about you. It's theirs to take or leave.Sorry means you leave yourself open, to embrace or to ridicule or to revenge. Sorry is a question that begs forgiveness, because the metronome of a good heart won't settle until things are set right and true. Sorry doesn't take things back, but it pushes things forward. It bridges the gap. Sorry is a sacrament. It's an offering. A gift.” - Craig Silvey

61. “Sorrow looks back, Worry looks around, Faith looks up” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

62. “تحطم تمثال البلور البرئ .. أصعب شئ عندما تتحدث إلى نفسك .. إلى صديقك .. ثم تذهب نفسك منك إلى الناس .. تخرج روحك و تتركك لتموت .. نهاية بشعة .. و الأصعب حينما تبالغ في إخفاء أمر ما .. ثم تكون من الغباء بحيث لا تفهم نظرة الشفقة في أعين الناس .. و ما يخفونه من كلمة مسكين يستحق الشفقة .. أسئلة عديدة بلا إجابة .. كيف تفعل هذا؟!! كيف تتسبب في كشف أسراري ؟!! حدث شرخ كبير .. و جرح من الجروح صعبة الإلتئام ..” - آيه فوزي

63. “There are some situations which men understand by instinct, by which reason is powerless to explain; in such cases the greatest poet is he who gives utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed as if they listened to an entire poem, and when th sufferer is sincere they are right in regarding his outburst as sublime.” - Alexandre Dumas

64. “We all struggle alone through the ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows of our lives.” - Elizabeth Kim

65. “Many partners of addicts have told me they feel bad about themselves for staying in the relationship because of the betrayal they’ve experienced. They imagine that the people who know their past judge them to be stupid for staying with the person who’s caused them so much pain. I often counter this thinking, explaining that leaving may seem quick and easy because they can pretend they’re okay and the problem has disappeared. However, if you leave your relationship, you’ll be stuck with your pain and sorrow without the person you loved to help you sort it out. Why is this true? Because even though it feels as if your pain comes from your partner, it’s actually coming from inside you.” - Alexandra Katehakis

66. “Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived.” - Mary Shelley

67. “I fancied my luck to be witnessing yet another full moon. True, I’d seen hundreds of full moons in my life, but they were not limitless. When one starts thinking of the full moon as a common sight that will come again to one’s eyes ad-infinitum, the value of life is diminished and life goes by uncherished. ‘This may be my last moon,’ I sighed, feeling a sudden sweep of sorrow; and went back to reading more of The Odyssey.” - Roman Payne

68. “You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair.” - Eva Ibbotson

69. “Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.” - Margaret Atwood

70. “Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.” - Lynne Sharon Schwartz

71. “It was the sibling thing, I suppose. I was fascinated by the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together. The glances they exchanged; the complicated balance of power established over decades; the games I would never play with rules I would never fully understand. And perhaps that was key: they were such a natural group that they made me feel remarkably singular by comparison. To watch them together was to know strongly, painfully, all that I'd been missing.” - Kate Morton

72. “Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace.” - Aberjhani

73. “I mean talk. Never forget that God is your friend. And like all friends, He longs to hear what's been happening in your life. Good or bad, whether it's been full of sorrow or anger, and even when you're questioning why terrible things have to happen. So I talk withhim.” - Nicholas Sparks

74. “The heart knoweth its own sorrow and there are times when, like David, it is comforting to think that our tears are put in a bottle and not one of them forgotten by the one who leads us in paths of sorrow.” - Hannah Hurnard

75. “How does your patient, doctor?Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest.Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart.Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.” - William Shakespeare

76. “Someday, beyond the clouds and all the world's wrongs, there will be love, compassion and justice, and we shall all understand.” - Flavia Weedn

77. “... but remember that I shall love your sorrow...” - Cordwainer Smith

78. “...and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears.” - N.K. Jemisin

79. “The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true-- not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.” - Herman Melville

80. “I never guessed I could cry so hard my face hurt.” - Vernor Vinge

81. “When we grow up, we find ways to hide our anxieties, our loneliness, our fear and sorrow. But children hide nothing, putting everything into their tears, which they spread liberally about for the whole world to see.” - Yoko Ogawa

82. “The possibilities were endless. Battles would be fought. Wonders revealed. Many journeys. Many lands. Many joys. Many sorrows.But stories all...” - William Joyce

83. “When we tell our stories, the gods hear our sorrows.” - Cathy Ostlere

84. “The point of life isn't to avoid pain. The point of life is to be alive! To feel things. That means the good and the bad. There'll be pain. But also joy, and friendship and love. And it's worth it, believe me.” - John Stephens

85. “...sorrow binds us - I will always cherish you - my only disillusionment is unspoken words ...” - John Geddes

86. “Death. What a brief word for the extinguishing of life. To be no more. To have days cut off and at their end. To never again..........anything.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

87. “It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it—if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy—the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.” - George Eliot

88. “exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.” - Edward W. Said

89. “In life, you don’t have miracles, you don’t have anything but whatever you can hold on to.” - Nandanie Phalgoo

90. “I hadn’t understood at the time. If sinners were so unhappy,why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why.Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my pastwas my life.” - Janet Fitch

91. “You know what 'Dolores' means? It's Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?” - Wally Lamb

92. “Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that came down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures. And of these histories most fair still in the ears of the Elves is the tale of Beren and Lúthien” - J.R.R. Tolkien

93. “They sat quietly together for a few minutes, Joe holding Fiona's hand, Fiona sniffling. No flowery words, no platitudes passed between them. Joe would have done anything to ease her suffering, but he knew nothing he might do, or say, could. Her grief would run its course, like a fever, and release her when it was spent. He would not shush her or tell her it was God's will and that her da was better off. That was rubbish and they both knew it. When something hurt as bad as this, you had to let it hurt. There were no shortcuts.” - Jennifer Donnelly

94. “It lit up like a Christmas Tree Hazel Grace...” - John Green

95. “No truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end andlearn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning.” - Haruki Murakami

96. “I'll read enoughWhen I do see the very book indeedWhere all my sins are writ, and that's myself.Give me that glass and therein will I read.No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struckSo many blows upon this face of mineAnd made no deeper wounds?O flattering glass,Like to my followers in prosperityThou dost beguile me!” - William Shakespeare

97. “There was a listlessness in his gait, as if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

98. “It was the sound of a thousand hungry children crying, ten thousand widows tearing their hair over their husband's graves, a chorus of angels singing the last dirge on the day of God's death.” - Christopher Moore

99. “Pains are not to be relievedSorrows are not to fade awaya slight change in the visionmay bring a new experience” - Rixa White

100. “Sometimes you can be touched by God, but not healed. Often when this happens, he is using your pain for a greater purpose.” - Shannon L. Alder

101. “You can find sorrow in the arithmetic, and you can find a bittersweet hope.” - David Levithan

102. “Sorrow's a tall mountain you climb one inch at a time. You ain't supposed to do it quick; else you won't profit from the journey.” - Jan Watson

103. “It is the heart that has been pierced that feels the most.” - Jocelyn Murray

104. “Fire tests gold, suffering tests brave men.” - seneca

105. “Sorrow is what I feel for people who aren’t doing what they love. I keep my distance from them as though they’re contagious. They are, I believe.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

106. “As ofttimes as it rains on my little spot of earth, you'd think I'd grow accustomed to the gloom.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

107. “Ask him why there are hypocrites in the world.''Because it is hard to bear the happiness of others.''When are we happy?''When we desire nothing and realize that possession is only momentary, and so are forever playing.''What is regret?''To realize that one has spent one's life worrying about the future.''What is sorrow?''To long for the past.''What is the highest pleasure?''To hear a good story.” - Vikram Chandra

108. “The inner man is the periphery of our consciousness. It is also the inner man that takes care of and protects the inner woman for example through putting up creative boundaries. The meeting between a man and a woman on the outer plane creates a relationship. This relationship is not a conflict, but they complement each other. The outer meeting between a man and a woman also creates integration between our own inner male and female sides.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

109. “Awareness is a choiceless consciousness. Awareness is the capacity to embrace, accept and include both joy and sadness, love and aloneness, light and darkness, male and female qualities and life and death. Through saying “yes” and accepting both tendencies and including whatever aspect that happens in the moment, we meet our unlimited and boundless inner being. The inner man and woman need to find their own independence and integrity.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

110. “Walk openly, Marian used to say. Love even the threat and the pain, feel yourself fully alive, cast a bold shadow, accept, accept. What we call evil is only a groping towards good, part of the trial and error by which we move toward the perfected consciousness…God is kind? Life is good? Nature never did betray the heart that loved her? Why the reward she received for living intensely and generously and trying to die with dignity? Why the horror at the bridge her last clear sight of earth?...I do not accept, I am not reconciled. But one thing she did. She taught me the stupidity of the attempt to withdraw and be free of trouble and harm... She said, “You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Now you know. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born, just to be!”I had had no answer for her then. Now I might have one. Yes, think of it, I might say. And think how random and indiscriminate it is, think how helplessly we must submit, think how impossible it is to control or direct it. Think how often beauty and delicacy and grace are choked out by weeds. Think how endless and dubious is the progress from weed to flower.Even alive, she never convinced me with her advocacy of biological perfectionism. She never persuaded me to ignore, or look upon as merely hard pleasures, the evil that I felt in every blight and smut and pest in my garden- that I felt, for that matter, squatting like a toad on my own heart. Think of the force of life, yes, but think of the component of darkness in it. One of the things that’s in whale’s milk is the promise of pain and death. And so? Admitting what is so obvious, what then? Would I wipe Marion Catlin out of my unperfected consciousness if I could? Would I forgo the pleasure of her company to escape the bleakness of her loss? Would I go back to my own formula, which was twilight sleep, to evade the pain she brought with her?Not for a moment. And so even in the gnashing of my teeth, I acknowledge my conversion. It turns out to be for me as I once told her it would be for her daughter. I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow.” - Wallace Stegner

111. “I wanted to putt my hand on this hand and hold it still under mine, made still by his made still. Oh he was bright and I was dark and I gave him all my darkness on that ship; but we joined, for all good things in the world, and to find somethin together; and loved, I never knew I could do it and was afraid; and on the bow of the ship that night that he said, "What have we done Christy?"I said, wonderin too, "But somethin good will come of this, I know somethin good will come of this..."Only sorrow came.” - William Goyen

112. “...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.” - Iain Banks

113. “I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.” - Daniel Pennac

114. “For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

115. “So much ice.She thumbed a drying tear away.How much water can the weight of ice carry?” - Dianna Hardy

116. “He finally comprehended that the sole impossibility regarding human sorrow is to arrive at some unsurpassable limit to it.” - James Carlos Blake

117. “Axsem would say nothing more to any of them. No sooner had Fallon released him than he fled deep into the trees, staff in hand, with Hailos following after. Through the morning air, they heard the wail of his mourning. The scarred heart of the general was torn wide open by having to recall even one abbreviated story from his past. He needed time to coddle his mangled heart and push away the torturous memories.” - S.R. Ford