Sadness Quotes

“(...) Since I was a kid."
"Which you refer to as 'back when you were happy.'"
"Right.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Take a shower. Wash away every trace of yesterday. Of smells. Of weary skin. Get dressed. Make coffee, windows open, the sun shining through. Hold the cup with two hands and notice that you feel the feeling of warmth. 
 You still feel warmth.
Now sit down and get to work. Keep your mind sharp, head on, eyes on the page and if small thoughts of worries fight their ways into your consciousness: threw them off like fires in the night and keep your eyes on the track. Nothing but the task in front of you. 
Get off your chair in the middle of the day. Put on your shoes and take a long walk on open streets around people. Notice how they’re all walking, in a hurry, or slowly. Smiling, laughing, or eyes straight forward, hurried to get to wherever they’re going. And notice how you’re just one of them. Not more, not less. Find comfort in the way you’re just one in the crowd. Your worries: no more, no less.

Go back home. Take the long way just to not pass the liquor store. Don’t buy the cigarettes. Go straight home. Take off your shoes. Wash your hands. Your face. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. It’s still beating. Still fighting. Now get back to work.
Work with your mind sharp and eyes focused and if any thoughts of worries or hate or sadness creep their ways around, shake them off like a runner in the night for you own your mind, and you need to tame it. Focus. Keep it sharp on track, nothing but the task in front of you.
Work until your eyes are tired and head is heavy, and keep working even after that.

Then take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.
Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more. 
You’re doing just fine.
You’re doing fine.

I’m doing just fine.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You're Doing Just Fine

“A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I think there is something beautiful in reveling in sadness. The proof is how beautiful sad songs can be. So I don’t think being sad is to be avoided. It’s apathy and boredom you want to avoid. But feeling anything is good, I think. Maybe that’s sadistic of me.”
― Joseph Gordon-Levitt

“It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.”
― Jackson Pearce, Fathomless

“True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.”
― Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Though these words will never find you, I hope that you knew I was thinking of you today….. and that I was wishing you every happiness.
Love Always,
The girl you loved once.”
― Ranata Suzuki

“I have been smashed and put back together so many times nothing works right. Nothing is where it should be, heavy thumping in my shoulder where my heart now beats.”
― Elizabeth Scott, Living Dead Girl

“From the first day I met her, she was the only woman to me. Every day of that voyage I loved her more, and many a time since have I kneeled down in the darkness of the night watch and kissed the deck of that ship because I knew her dear feet had trod it. She was never engaged to me. She treated me as fairly as ever a woman treated a man. I have no complaint to make. It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes

“She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".”
― Alain de Botton

“Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart;
My silent heart, lie still and break:
Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed
For a dream's sake.”
― Christina Rossetti

“Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have no broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong.”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“I wish the night would end,
I wish the day'd begin,
I wish it would rain or snow,
or the wind would blow,
or the grass would grow,
I wish I had yesterday,
I wish there were games to play...”
― V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic

“It's like I have this large black hole in my brain and it's sucking the life out of me. The answers are in there so I sit for hours and stare. No matter how hard and long I look, I only see darkness.”
― Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits

“Sad people have the gift of time, while the world dizzies everyone else; they remain stagnant, their bodies refusing to follow pace with the universe. With these kind of people everything aches for too long, everything moves without rush, wounds are always wet.”
― Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth

“It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

“And empty words are evil.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“It's OK not to be OK.”
― Lindsey Kelk, I Heart New York

“That was the day my whole world went black. Air looked black. Sun looked black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls of my house….Took three months before I even looked out the window, see the world still there. I was surprised to see the world didn’t stop.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.”
― Tim Winton, Breath

“The trick. . .is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity, self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary.”
― Wendy Wasserstein

“...being Lulu, it made me realize that all my life I've been living in a small, square room, with no windows and no doors. And I was fine. I was happy, even. I thought. Then someone came along and showed me there was a door in the room. One that I'd never even seen before. Then he opened it for me. Held my hand as I walked through it. And for one perfect day, I was on the other side. I was somewhere else. Someone else. And then he was gone, and I was thrown back into my little room. And now, no matter what I do, I can't seem to find that door.”
― Gayle Forman, Just One Day

“If there is a particular person in your life that is repeatedly choosing not to honor you and is causing you more sadness or pain than they are joy - it might be time to release that friendship back to God and trust that it is not where you belong.”
― Mandy Hale, The Single Woman–Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass: Embracing Singleness with Confidence

“She's known sadness. That's what it is. I only just thought that as I wrote it. She's known sadness, and it has made her kind.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“I yearned for everything long gone.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.”
― Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica