… the misery is there inside her, like a stone, and there’s no room for any other thoughts. She isn’t trying to make an appeal to our sympathies—she’s just shifting this big weight inside her from one place to another. –Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy. –Franz Kafka, in his journal

Human life begins on the far side of despair. –Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Flies”

I have discovered that all human misery comes from a single thing, which is not knowing enough to stay quietly in your room. –François Pascal

I don’t think I ever feel really happy. One can only expect that life not be miserable. –Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

Feeling hopeless and full of despair is just a slower way of being dead. –ditto

Sadness, scarab
with seven crippled feet,
spiderweb egg,
scramble-brained rat,
bitch’s skeleton:
No entry here.
Don’t come in.
Go away.
Go back
south with your umbrella,
go back
north with your serpent’s teeth.
A poet lives here.
No sadness may
cross this threshold.
Through these windows
comes the breath of the world,
fresh red roses,
flags embroidered with
the victories of the people.
No.
No entry.
Flap
your bat’s wings,
I will trample the feathers
that fall from your mantle,
I will sweep the bits and pieces
of your carcass to
the four corners of the wind,
I will wring your neck,
I will stitch your eyelids shut,
I will sew your shroud,
sadness, and bury your rodent bones
beneath the springtime of an apple tree.
–Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Sadness”

Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair. I will begin to think again, and to act according to the way I think. –Sylvia Plath, journal, November 3, 1952

Anguish is known to everyone, even children, and everyone knows that it is often blank, undifferentiated. Rarely does it carry a clearly written label that also contains its motivation; any label it does have is often mendacious. One can believe or declare oneself to be anguished for one reason and be so due to something totally different. One can think that one is suffering at facing the future and instead be suffering because of one’s past; one can think that one is suffering for others, out of pity, out of compassion, and instead be suffering for one’s own reasons, more or less profound, more or less avowable and avowed, sometimes so deep that only the specialist, the analyst of souls, knows how to exhume them. –Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

It’s amazing how much unhappiness we needlessly cause ourselves by ascribing negative meanings to simple things that happen in our lives. –Gaile Blanke, “Half-Full? Half-Empty? You Decide”

You know that things aren’t going well for you when you can’t even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they’ll presume you’re asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it’s why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible. –Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

… barely a day goes by without my picking up uncanny hints of someone’s urgent misery beneath the social mask. I am never sure how much of this “intuition” is trustworthy and how much is projection, a distortion for the sake of promoting melodrama or feelings of superiority. –Phillip Lopate, “Suicide of a Schoolteacher”

I think if we all acted the way we really felt, four out of eight people at a dinner table would be sitting there sobbing. –Jim Carrey

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It’s the thing that lets us say goodbye. –Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

You think that the despair will stop you cold, but it doesn’t: it wraps itself up in a dark corner somewhere inside and forces the rest of your system to function, to take care of practical matters, which may not be important but which keep you going, which guarantee that you are still, somehow, alive. –Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

Who except the gods can live time through forever without any pain? –Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

... why is crying so pleasurable? I feel clean, absolutely purged after it. As if I had a grief to get over with, some deep sorrow. –Sylvia Plath, journal, January 10, 1959

I’ve already lost all hope
I don’t wait for joyful hours;
In fact, night and day grieving
I howl my agonies,
And as I suffer, I consume myself
Vilely
And ask for death.
–Kata Szidonia Petroczi

It does a person no good to be incredibly bright if at the same time she is also incredibly miserable or has such emotional impairment that she functions destructively. –James T. Webb, Guiding the Gifted Child

Each morning I awake, the sky is gray, the trees are bare. A single crow calls my name as I weep into the pillow, wondering when it will ever end. –(?)

My eyes have only one job: to cry. –Nur Jahan

With one long breath, caught and held
in his chest, he fought his sadness over
his solitary life. Don’t cry, you idiot!
Live or die, but don’t poison everything …
–Saul Bellow, Herzog

There is no greater pain than to remember a happy time when one is in misery. –Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy

It’s strange, the layers of misery that there are. You get used to feeling pretty miserable most of the time—what might be called “low-level misery”—a sort of permanent background of misery, and you learn to cope with it; it almost gets to feel normal. But then something happens...which reminds you of what it was like not to feel miserable, and it hurts so much you almost just can’t bear it. –Jean Ure, Plague

Listen, someone’s screaming in agony—fortunately I speak it fluently. –Spike Milligan, in The Goon Show

There is eloquence in screaming. –Patrick Jones

If I let go of the feelings which cause me pain, I would have no feelings at all. –Dan Goodman, Meditations for Miserable People Who Want to Stay that Way

He realized how miserable and unknown and vulnerable he was in the world. The universe seemed to shriek and clatter and roar around him like a huge and indifferent jalopy rushing down a hill and toward the lip of a bottomless chasm. His lips began to tremble, and then he cried a little. –Stephen King, “The Running Man”

Who ever said that misery loved company? Her misery did not love company. Her misery loved to be alone. Her misery threatened to bludgeon company. –Francine Pascal, Fearless

It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out everything but the darkest colors of the spectrum. My unhappiness precluded all else; unhappiness is a kind of narcissism, in which nothing that does not resonate with your unhappiness can interest you. –Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state to another, nothing more. –Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Crisco

[Dreams] surely can make us miserable, at times. Often, though, that misery is useful, it brings to light things going on inside of us and helps to educate us about our deepest fears, needs, hopes, and issues. Since many things we would rather not know about are nonetheless inside us, affecting us anyway, leaking into our lives like toxic waste into ground water, there may be no harm in experiencing the misery, so long as it helps to clarify what is devitalizing and limiting us through the years, so long as it helps to bring the dull pain of not living fully into a clearer focus that lets us begin to take action by applying our conscious mind to the wound. –from one of my listservs

I’m happy—within the parameters of never being happy, that is. –Robert Smith

Even if I wanted to go my schedule wouldn’t allow it. 4:00, wallow in self pity; 4:30, stare into the abyss; 5:00, solve world hunger, tell no one. 5:30, jazzercize. 6:30, dinner with me. I can’t cancel that again! 7:00, wrestle with my self-loathing; I’m booked! Of course, if I bump the loathing to 9 I could still be done in time to lay in bed, stare at the ceiling, and slip slowly into madness. But what would I wear?! –Jim Carrey, in How the Grinch Stole Christmas

I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed. –Robert Frost, “Home Burial”

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic. –Anaïs Nin, diary, February 1947

Controlled hysteria is what’s required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It’s agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing. –Arthur Miller

You sit here for days saying, this is a strange business. You’re the strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine. –Rumi

The anxiety was like poison ivy. It took nothing to set off that mental itch—a chance remark, remembering an event from the day before—but once it started I found it impossible to stop the cycle. My thoughts twisted in a circle, my pulse hammered, I couldn’t concentrate. –Tracy Thompson, The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression

The anxiety, I told myself, was a sign of improvement; at least it wasn’t despair. But in some ways it was worse. It was like being locked in an airtight box, about to run out of oxygen. Impossible at those moments to sit still, impossible to complete a task, impossible to do anything but get outside and walk, for miles, trying to outrace it. It was like a crazy itch, way down under my skin, and I never knew when it would attack. –ditto

Yes, I’m nervous. You’ll find in time most people are. They simply learn better how to disguise it, and sometimes, if they’re wise, how to use their anxiety to serve the public good. –Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch

I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time. –Charles Schulz, in “Peanuts”

The minions of chaos threaten to cross over at every turn, lurking in the cheating spouse, the undiscovered tumor, the murderous dictator, the brewing tornado, the salmonella in the Christmas turkey, the leak in the brake line. At any given moment, life is falling apart as fast as we’re shoring it up. –Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game

I had become obsessively preoccupied in particular with this disturbing interconnectivity of things, the way the most insignificant of decisions might have ramifications you could never know about when you made them. You stop for gas at the 7-Eleven and thereby miss getting hit by a car that runs the red light in the intersection you would have been crossing if you hadn’t stopped. At the last minute you decide to go to the movie and step into the lobby just as the disgruntled ex-boyfriend of the popcorn girl opens fire with his semiautomatic.
         I found it paralyzingly difficult to make even the simplest decisions. So much hung in the balance, so many complicated parameters needed to be taken into consideration, yet always there was too little information, no way to know what outcomes could result. Life was a terrifying, invisible web of consequences. What mayhem might I unknowingly wreak by saying yes when I could have said no, by going east instead of west? –ditto

It was exhausting, enervating to struggle thus with every simple thing, every decision generating a hundred corollary decisions taking me farther and farther away from the original issue. –ditto

Thanks to the circus between my ears, I can seize upon the smallest disquieting observation and from it extrapolate a terror of cataclysmic proportions. –Dean Koontz, Seize the Night

Time heals many wounds but this loss becomes the defining sadness of your life. –Claire Cook, “Birthday Wishes”

I wish for a moment that Time would lift me out of this day, and into some more benign one. But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say I’m sorry until it is as meaningless as air. –Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife

The problem with grief is that it doesn’t go away. As time ticks on, the rawness dissipates somewhat, and you find yourself settling in to the pain, becoming accustomed to it, wearing it around your shoulders like an old, heavy scarf.
         And Life has to go on. There are children to look after, meals to cook, cards to illustrate, playdates to organize. Grief has to be filed away, compartmentalized, allowed out only when the rest of your life is sufficiently organized when you can have time to yourself to give in to the pain. –Jane Green, Second Chance

There is no space wider than that of grief ... –Pablo Neurda, “Point”

The rain-weeping and sun-burning twine together
to make us grow. Keep your intelligence white-hot
and your grief glistening, so your life will stay fresh.
Cry easily like a little child.
–Rumi, “Muhammad and the Huge Eater”

The grief-armies assemble,
but I’m not going with them.
–Rumi, “A Thirsty Fish”

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. –Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. –ditto

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain. –ditto

There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. –ditto

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. –ditto

There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. –ditto

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved. –Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. –CS Lewis, A Grief Observed

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process. It needs not a map, but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. –ditto

... even out of unspeakable grief, beautiful things take wing. –AR Torres, “The Lessons of Loss”

There are so many ways to lose someone you love. Even limiting the field to those losses we think of as particularly tragic does not narrow the list much. A fire burns the home of a sleeping family. A train derails. And in the aftermath, memory can become bound up with place; sites of loss can be sanctified, obliterated, or simply marked, like the cross by the side of the mountain road where the station wagon, kids asleep in the back, skidded off. –Ken Dornstein, The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky

I believe that there are more urgent and honorable occupations than that incomparable waste of time we call suffering. –Colette

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you. –Rainer Maria Rilke

Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches? –ditto

To hold, you must first open your hand. Let go. –Tao Te Ching

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. –Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

There’s no real formula for grieving, and that is the lesson: It’s okay to be wherever you are with it. John taught us a lesson every day. He’d walk down the sidewalk, and instead of just looking at the nicely manicured bushes in our neighborhood, he’d point out the weed growing up through the sidewalk and he’d say, “That’s life. That’s what life does. You put the cement over it, you do anything you can, and life always comes back.” You go on with your life, like a weed popping up through the crack in the sidewalk. You can’t lie down and go, “My life is over too” as much as you may feel like doing that—which I do a little bit every day. –Amy Yasbeck, speaking about her deceased husband John Ritter

… I’m afraid a boat
so small would sink
with the weight
of all my sorrow.
–Li Ch’ing-Chao, “Spring at Wu Ling”

… And here am I, budding
among the ruins
with only sorrow to bite on,
as if weeping were a seed and I
the earth’s only furrow.
–Pablo Neruda, “Lightless Suburb”

Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love. In both states, the imagination is entirely occupied with one person … Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center; there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on the pivotal figure. –Mark Doty

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a
window or just walking dully along.
–WH Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

Accept that loss is part of life, and that sometimes loss leads to fulfillment. This doesn’t mean that you passively just let things slip away from you, that you pretend not to care. It means being brave enough to grab what you can while you can, even though you know it may not last. –Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Vélez, The Hell with Love: Poems to Mend a Broken Heart

It’s an imperfect process, getting over loss. –ditto

_________________________________________

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it:
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
–Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods”
_________________________________________

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch! And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent,
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
–Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”
_________________________________________

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight. –Kahlil Gibran

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it. –Samuel Johnson

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. –Kenji Miyazawa

The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep. –Henry Maudsley

I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, “God” always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language. –Virginia Heffernan, “A Delicious Placebo”

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come. –Cesare Pavese

I feel that much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this, yet allow themselves to be treated as that. –Ruth Gordon, in Harold and Maude

Time is never strictly chronological in the way it is lived. Musicians know this. Anyone who has ever suffered grief, loss, or a broken heart knows this, too. –Linda Katherine Cutting, Memory Slips

Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong. –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Light of Stars”

Is part of being found the ability to love others fully even though they might not be around tomorrow, either by choice or fate or some divine plan? –Lynnette Porter and David Lavery, Unlocking the Meaning of Lost

No matter how hard I squeezed them, I couldn’t feel the weight of his palms against mine—it was like holding the hands of a disappearing soul. My heart felt like it was exploding. –Immaculée Ilibagiza, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

I’m convinced that tragedy wants to harden us, and that our mission is to never let it. –Janeane Garafalo, in Felicity

Again the night returns
and a mortal thing wails
and another suffers along with it—
trembling, under autumn stars,
the head bows lower every year.
–Georg Trakl, “In an Old Family Album”

But loss is a precious stone to me, a nectar
Distilled in time, preaching the truth of winter
To the fallen heart that does not cease to fall.
–James K. Baxter, “Wild Bees”

Anything that is given can be at once taken away. We have to learn never to expect anything, and when it comes it’s no more than a gift on loan. –(?)

Something rose in me that felt exactly like grief, that throat-closing, heavy longing for the irretrievably lost ... –Goldberry Long, Juniper Tree Burning

We cannot prevent…the birds of sorrow from flying over our heads…but we can refuse…to let them build nests...in our hair. –Ron Schreiber, “The Birds of Sorrow”

He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. –Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Crisco