Nicholson Baker Quotes

A photograph can make you feel so many different things. When you look at war photographs of Vietnam, or something similar, it makes you feel anguish and sadness and pain. Then in other moments, when you look at Jackie Kennedy walking down Fifth Avenue, that makes you feel glory and richness.

I've cried over string arrangements.

Though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve.

I think it's good for people to see the positive beauty that can flower from the deepest grieving.

They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.

I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower's stem.

When my father passed away two or three years ago, I didnt listen to music for four days - thats a long time for me.

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

Death is never very pretty.

Thats beautiful! Sad and beautiful," murmured Meggie. Why were sad stories often so beautiful? It was different in real life.

He doesn’t just look upset—he looks newly blind. There is such loss in his eyes, and it permeates every other part of his body.

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds, That sees into the bottom of my grief?

Abra DeMadrigal didn't look young enough to be my sister anymore. Her sorrow weighed her down and aged her. She was still beautiful, but she looked very far away. No wonder our people had raven eyes, so distant, so sad. No matter how wise she was, my mother looked like a woman who hadn't truely believed how much evil there was in our world. Not until this moment.

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories.

I just sat all night looking at him, saying, 'Wow, it's incredible.' When Yoko woke up, I told her, 'He's fine,' and we cried.

And can it be that in a world so full and busy the loss of one creature makes a void so wide and deep that nothing but the width and depth of eternity can fill it up!

Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.

For beauty with sorrow Is a burden hard to be borne: The evening light on the foam, and the swans, there; That music, remote, forlorn.

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

The first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing mattered. Grief or grief has drained me clean; Still it seems a pity No one saw,—it must have been Very pretty.

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness

And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief.

Somewhere out in the darkness, a phoenix was singing in a way Harry had never heard before: a stricken lament of terrible beauty. And Harry felt, as he had felt about phoenix song before, that the music was inside him, not without: It was his own grief turned magically to song.

Grieving is like being ill. You think the entire world revolves around you and it doesn't.