Sad Quotes About Love and Life

Sad Love Quotes

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov 

“I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.”

― Charles Bukowski, Women

“nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”

― Gabriel García Márquez 

“People like to say love is unconditional, but it's not, and even if it was unconditional, it's still never free. There's always an expectation attached. They always want something in return. Like they want you to be happy or whatever and that makes you automatically responsible for their happiness because they won't be happy unless you are ... I just don't want that responsibility.”

― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility 

“Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.”

― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo 

“Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.”

― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly. Literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for us to endure nobly.”

― Matthew Quick, The Silver Linings Playbook

“there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.”

― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“I can't eat and I can't sleep. I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?”

― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“The worst type of crying wasn't the kind everyone could see--the wailing on street corners, the tearing at clothes. No, the worst kind happened when your soul wept and no matter what you did, there was no way to comfort it. A section withered and became a scar on the part of your soul that survived. For people like me and Echo, our souls contained more scar tissue than life.”

― Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits

“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”

― Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

“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 of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.”

― Augusten Burroughs, Dry

“So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.”

― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly,

“I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.”

― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

“Was I bitter? Absolutely. Hurt? You bet your sweet ass I was hurt. Who doesn't feel a part of their heart break at rejection. You ask yourself every question you can think of, what, why, how come, and then your sadness turns to anger. That's my favorite part. It drives me, feeds me, and makes one hell of a story.”

― Jennifer Salaiz 

 “When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.”

― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“The sadness will last forever.”

― Vincent van Gogh 

“There are moments when I wish I could roll back the clock and take all the sadness away, but I have the feeling that if I did, the joy would be gone as well.”

― Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember 

“Sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don't know why we are sad, so we say we aren't sad but we really are.”

― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.”

― Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger 

“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”

― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959 

“I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart”

― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

“A void in my chest was beginning to fill with anger. Quiet, defeated anger that guaranteed me the right to my hurt, that believed no one could possibly understand that hurt.”

― Rachel Sontag, House Rules  

“Tears are words the mouth can't say nor can the heart bear.”

― Joshua Wisenbaker

“You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.”

― Sharon Creech, Walk Two Moons

“the saddest thing is to be a minute to someone,

when you've made them your eternity.”

― Sanober Khan

“From the moment we are born, we begin to die.”

― Janne Teller, Nothing

“Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there's nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.”

― Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“I saw the world in black and white instead of the vibrant colours and shades I knew existed.”

― Katie McGarry, Pushing the Limits

“I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

“a flower knows, when its butterfly will return,

and if the moon walks out, the sky will understand;
but now it hurts, to watch you leave so soon,
when I don't know, if you will ever come back.”

― Sanober Khan 

“One of the greatest tragedies in life is to lose your own sense of self and accept the version of you that is expected by everyone else.”

― K.L. Toth

“And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.”

― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“It is a grave injustice to a child or adult to insist that they stop crying. One can comfort a person who is crying which enables him to relax and makes further crying unnecessary; but to humiliate a crying child is to increase his pain, and augment his rigidity. We stop other people from crying because we cannot stand the sounds and movements of their bodies. It threatens our own rigidity. It induces similar feelings in ourselves which we dare not express and it evokes a resonance in our own bodies which we resist.”

― Alexander Lowen, The Voice of the Body

“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

“Anne was always glad in the happiness of her friends; but it is sometimes a little lonely to be surrounded everywhere by happiness that is not your own.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island

“He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“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

“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

“I just let the pain take over, allowing it to numb the pain of being left behind.”

― Jessica Sorensen, The Coincidence of Callie & Kayden

“It's OK not to be OK.”

― Lindsey Kelk, I Heart New York 

“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 

“I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.”

― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“I was lonely. I felt it deeply and permanently, that this state of being on my own might never disappear. But I welcomed the lonliness, which had everything to do with being anonymous. It's never lonliness that nibbles away at a person's insides, but not having room inside themselves to be comfortably alone.”

― Rachel Sontag, House Rules

“If you can't get what you want, you end up doing something else, just to get some relief. Just to keep from going crazy. Because when you're sad enough, you look for ways to fill you up.”

― Laura Pritchett, Sky Bridge

“When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad.”

― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“Don't dwell on things. Don't stay in one place too long. It was the only way to stay ahead of sadness.”

― Rick Riordan, The Lost Hero

“Tantrums are seldom about the thing they appear to be about.”

― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle

“tiny: but there is the word, this word phil wrayson taught me once: weltschmerz. it's the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be. i live in a big goddamned weltzschermz ocean, you know? and so do you.”

― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“A tragedy need not have blood and death; it's enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy.”

― Jean Racine

“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

“The older I get, the more I see there are these crevices in life where things fall in and you just can't reach them to pull them back out. So you can sit next to them and weep or you can get up and move forward. You have to stop worrying about who's not here and start worrying about who is.”

― Alex Witchel, The Spare Wife

“i want to give up my bearings, slip out of who i am, shed everything, the way a snake discards old skin.”

― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed  

“Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.”

― Lauren Oliver, Delirium