Joanna Newsom Quotes

It's very shocking, I think, for people caring for the dying to realise how unsaintly they feel, how much anger is mixed up with their grief. In fact, often I think the anger that they feel is a form of grief; it's a kind of raging against what's happening.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

When my young men began the killing, my heart was hurt.

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.

I think whenever you lose somebody close to you, there's always a part of you that wishes you could have done something differently.

That most unfortunate war, which I deeply deplore.

Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.

Sorrow is held the eldest child of sin.

The regrets I have are strong enough that I wouldn't share 'em. I think that you can't live without suffering some.

I miss her in my bones. I was her big brother. I was supposed to protect her - I could not... It very nearly destroyed me.

A friend of mine passed away unexpectedly at the very end of making 'Ghosts', someone who had been as close to me as someone could get, someone who was far too young. But I couldn't really sing about it for a long time - not in the way I would have wanted to.

Remorse is memory awake.

The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others; Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.

Let me tell you a few things about regret. There is no end to it. Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?

There are a hundred places where I fear To go, --so with his memory they brim! And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, 'There is no memory of him here!' And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Forget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild thro’ the spirit’s gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.

‎Because if I hadn't been so afraid of everyone else, I might have told Hannah that someone cared. And Hannah might still be alive.

Let this single hour atone For the theft of all of me

It's a battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace, and a wound that will never heal. No prima donna, the perfume is on an old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey. Goodnight to the street sweepers, the night watchmen flame keepers and goodnight, Matilda, too.

Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

As the warm air blew in the car, simple snapshots of the life they'd lived together surfaced in his mind; but as always, those images led inexorably to their final day together.

You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

No more memories, no more silent tears. No more gazing across the wasted years. Help me say goodbye.