Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

Alone, he must bear the weight of a sin he dare not confess to the one person he loves…and has lost.

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise.

People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.

I realized the shells were talking in a voice I recognized. I should have; it was my own. Had I always known that? I suppose I had. On some level, unless we're mad, I think most of us know the various voices of our own imaginations. And of our memories, of course. They have voices, too. Ask anyone who has ever lost a limb or a child or a long-cherished dream. Ask anyone who blames himself for a bad decision, usually made in a raw instant (an instant that is most commonly red). Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

She wished such words unsaid with all her heart

Do tears not yet spilled wait in small lakes?

I've lost loved ones in my life who never knew how much I loved them. Now I live with the regret that my true feelings for them never were revealed.

Grief heals ... unshed tears fester like a canker in the soul.

As I handed her the bag, the old scars on my wrist throbbed with buried memories.

Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.

No," he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king's voice... whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give.

Is this what sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept?

Self-pity comes so naturally to all of us.

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

I wonder how many years Suga has been carrying his curse around with him. I forget that other people in the world have broken parts too.

Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.

There's some sad things known to man, but ain't too much sadder than, the tears of a clown when noones around.

After everything that happened, how could I miss him? But I did, I did.

Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out.

Memories have to be our most painful blessing.

If I cried me a river of all my confessions, would I drown in my shallow regret?

The dull pain of truth weights my soul, pulling it under. I am left hopelessly awake.

Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.

My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.

Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.