“And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.”

Source: The Little Stranger

Last update Dec. 19, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "And perhaps there is a limit to the grieving that the human heart can do. As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, …" by Sarah Waters?
Sarah Waters photo
Sarah Waters 20
novelist 1966

Related quotes

James Clerk Maxwell photo

“The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.”

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) Scottish physicist

in a letter to Lord Rayleigh, as quoted in John William Strutt, Third Baron Rayleigh http://books.google.com/books?id=cKk5AAAAMAAJ (1924), p. 47.

Swami Vivekananda photo
Karen Blixen photo
Rita Rudner photo
Karen Blixen photo

“I know of a cure for everything: salt water… in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

As quoted in Reader's Digest (April 1964)
Variant: I know a cure for everything. Salt water … in one form or another, sweat, tears or the salt sea.
Variant: The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.

Stefan Zweig photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“And this becomes a point of balance when you can forget yourself into immortality. You’re not so absorbed in self, but you are absorbed in something beyond self.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)
Context: I’ve seen people who discovered a great meaning in their jobs and they became so absorbed in that that they didn’t have time to become self-centered. They loved their job. And the great prayer that anyone could pray at that point is: “O God, help me to love my job as this individual loves his or hers. O God, help me to give my self to my work and to my job and to my allegiance as this individual does.” And this is the way out. And I think this is what [Ralph Waldo] Emerson meant when he said: “O, see how the masses of men worry themselves into nameless graves, while here and there, some great unselfish soul forgets himself into immortality.” And this becomes a point of balance when you can forget yourself into immortality. You’re not so absorbed in self, but you are absorbed in something beyond self.

Stephen King photo

Related topics