My art is an act of creation and destruction, with all the sorrow and joy these engender as well as all the shadow and light these contain.

God’s gift to his sorrowing creatures is a joy worthy of their destiny.

In life, you don’t have miracles, you don’t have anything but whatever you can hold on to.

Truly there are different kinds of pain. But the most agonizing is the pain of regret, for which there is no lasting relief and no remedy.

Again and again, however we know the landscape of loveand the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the othersfall: again and again the two of us walk out...

Sorrow spares no one, and scars respect no person.

Happiness is an illusion

To weep is to make less the depth of grief.

A wretched soul bruised with adversity,We bid be quiet when we hear it cry;But were we burdened with like weight of pain,As much, or more, we should ourselves complain.

But the heavy stroke which most of all distresses me is my dear Mother. I cannot overcome my too selfish sorrow, all her tenderness towards me, her care and anxiety for my welfare at all...

Wisdom is unwanted in the colony of fools

I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out...

If you know someone who tries to drown their sorrows, you might tell them sorrows know how to swim.

moments of something this good, this unexpected and off his usual path, they always dredged up old shit, like somehow happiness came with sorrow as its anchor.

Question me now about all other matters, but do not ask who I am, for fear you may increase in my heart it’s burden of sorrow as I think back; I am very full of...

She came and she went, in sorrow for the death of dreams, and she came no more.

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.

Every time someone reaches out to you, even if it’s to point out your sin and they seem to be judging you, it is a token of God’s mercy. He sees the past, present, and...

Do you think it’s easy for me? No, I don’t remember you. I don’t remember holding you or talking to you or falling in love with you—but I walk around with a giant hole in...

Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take time to recede. But already, there are small islands of – hope? Happiness? Something like them, at any rate.

Speech one may regret,Silence no sorrow begets,Humility be born before honour,Soft answer turns wrath’s corner

Sorrow is God’s plowshare that turns up and subsoils the depths of the soul, that it may yield richer harvests. If we had never fallen, or were in a glorified state, then the strong torrents...

Love is a feeling that is imposed on you. You cannot be lazy; it is up to you to make things work and make the best of it.

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...

When sorrow knocks at your door, tell it you’re busy finding happiness.

zoom lens effect,” in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.

No Child of YoursI saw a child hide in the cornerSo I went and asked her nameShe was so naive and so petiteWith such a tiny frame. ‘No one,’ she replied, that’s what I am...

Hard it is to suffer through stupid people. They make you feel sorry for them, and if your sorrow is as great as your hurt, you will allow them to go free of punishment, for...

Sometimes you can be touched by God, but not healed. Often when this happens, he is using your pain for a greater purpose.

I have seen the face of sorrowShe looks away in the distanceAcross all these bridgesFrom whence I cameAnd those spans, trussed and archedHold up our lives as we go back againTo how we thought thenTo...

Doing this was likewading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement thatyou were still moving, lifted up on a stream of...

Through the eyes of a happy girl lies guilt and destruction.

The weapons of divine justice are blunted by the confession and sorrow of the offender.

Young people have many pleasures and many sorrows, because they have only themselves to think of.

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...

… but remember that I shall love your sorrow…

…every woman has some reason to weep and weeping is sweetest when it is for another’s sorrow.

grief is a housewhere the chairshave forgotten how to hold usthe mirrors how to reflect usthe walls how to contain usgrief is a house that disappearseach time someone knocks at the dooror rings the bella...

Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon.She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow.Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet...

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 built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever.

He gently touched his mother’s cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.

Where is an intimate friend who’ll hear the secret from me straight out– of what human beings have been from the moment they began? They are born of toil and molded from the clay of...

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to...

We are born into a realm of constant change. Everything is decaying. We are continually losing all that we come in contact with. Our tendency to get attached to impermanent experiences causes sorrow, lamentation and...

Ah, cruel fate, how swiftly joy and sorrow alternate!

Not for the first time, it occurred to me that sorrow could be purified into song the same way a piece of coal is purified into a diamond.

Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It’s what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you’re bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is...

Those who have endured the scars of life, sorrows of the Heart, the grief of loss, pain of body, mind or spirit, and have fathomed the unexplainable sufferings of life have the greatest capacity to...

God didn’t design your life so you would constantly fall down, but he does hope that you will be brought to your knees.