Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish.

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed- why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.

To return after long years of painful absence to some place which has been the scene of our former joys, and whence the force of circumstance, and not choice, has driven us, is oppressive to the heart.

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.

All the best songs have an element of sadness.

Sorrow is the great idealizer.

Night is the time to weep,To wet with unseen tearsThose graves of memory where sleepThe joys of other years.

Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past without looking forward to the future.

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

Sir, sorrow is inherent in humanity. As you cannot judge two and two to be either five, or three, but certainly four, so, when comparing a worse present state with a better which is past, you cannot but feel sorrow. It is not cured by reason, but by the incursion of present objects, which bear out the past.

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

'Hamlet' is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it.

There is no worse sorrow than remembering happiness in the day of sorrow.

I think of John every day. I do try to block it, but December 8th is not the only day I think of him.

It's the poignancy and sadness in things that gets to me.

I am not sad, but I am melancholic. When you lose your mother at 20 and then your father soon after, melancholia is part of your life.

There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery

When it was all over, and I was left alone in my office, I put my face in my hands and wept. I could do nothing less.

'Hiraeth' means homesickness to a home to which you cannot return: the grief of the lost places of your past. I fell in love with the word and instantly connected to it. It reminded me of the days when I had left my home in Gwalior, and I had that strange pull in my stomach, and now I can so relate to this word.

The only time I get a tear in my eye is when I think of what I can possibly miss.

You never say and do the things you wish you had said or done when someone close to you may not be around in awhile. Closure is impossible; that's the heart of the grief you will carry with you for the rest of your life.

For grief is felt not so much for the want of what we have never known, as for the loss of that to which we have been long accustomed.

I was right when I said I'd never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can't ever do anything else except look back.

Do i really want him dead? What i want... what i want is to have him back.