Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished, for you, my love, my loss, my lesion, a rosary of words to count out time's illusions, all the minutes, hours, days the calendar compounds as if the past existed somewhere like an inheritance still waiting to be claimed.

When sparrows build and the leaves break forth, My old sorrow wakes and cries.

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

That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.

T is the work of many a dark hour, many a prayer, to bring the heart back from an infant gone.

Arms now empty will be filled and hearts now hurting from broken dreams and yearning will be healed.

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn

Grief brims itself and flows away in tears.

Heart, we will forget him! You and I, to-night! You may forget the warmth he gave, I will forget the light. When you have done, pray tell me, That I my thoughts may dim; Haste! lest while you’re lagging, I may remember him!

The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines into darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

when you [lose someone], it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all nerves are still a little raw

Holding onto something that's gone only makes a sickness inside.

One by one, drops fell from her eyes like they were on an assembly line - gather, fall, slide...gather, fall, slide...each one commemorating something she had lost. Hope. Faith. Confidence. Pride. Security. Trust. Independence. Joy. Beauty. Freedom. Innocence.

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.

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.

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.

The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.

Nothing dries sooner than tears.

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

All the best songs have an element of sadness.

The numbness of his loss had passed, and the pain would hit me out of nowhere, doubling me over, racking my body with sobs. Where are you? I would cry out in my mind. Where have you gone? Of course, there was never any answer.

Memory is the only friend of grief.

This feather stirs; she lives! if it be so, it is a chance which does redeem all sorrows that ever I have felt.

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.