Heartbreaking quotes

Variant: The good times of today are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

1960s, The Trumpet of Conscience (1967)
Variant: In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Variant: It is sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.

The Prophet (1923)

To a Young Writer

The character "Rose Walker" in The Sandman #65
Context: Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' or 'how very perceptive' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.

"In Blackwater Woods"
American Primitive (1983)
Source: New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1

Source: Hearts in Atlantis (1999)

Variant: Sometimes good things fall apart so that better things can fall together.

II-II, q. 26, art. 6
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 29–30
Context: You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Manuscript Found in Accra (2012), Love has always passed me by

Source: The Book Thief

Book 4, chapter 1. Often misquoted as "The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can never end".
Books, Coningsby (1844), Henrietta Temple (1837)

Source: Wuthering Heights

Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Source: Water Bound

Source: Love Is the Higher Law

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Source: De Profundis

Source: The Little Stranger

Variant: You know, a heart can be broken, but it still keeps a-beating just the same.
Source: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Source: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Source: The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War (2008), chapter 13

"Opposites" (1973)
Source: Opposites, More Opposites, and a Few Differences

Source: The Taming of the Shrew

Attributed to Irving as early as 1883. [Hit and miss : a story of real life, Angie Stewart, Manly, Chicago, J.L. Regan, 1883, i, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435018229575?urlappend=%3Bseq=7] However, it does not seem to appear in Irving's known works. Other citations from the same year leave the quotation unattributed. [Henry S. (ed.), Clubb, The Peacemaker and Court of Arbitration, Volume 1, Universal Peace Union, 1883, 125, Philadelphia, https://books.google.com/books?id=Uu84AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA125] [The Australian Women's Magazine and Domestic Journal, Vol. 2 No. 2 (May 1883), 1883, Melbourne, 435, https://books.google.com/books?id=mq0sAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA435]. A similar passage is found in a pseudonymous novel published two years earlier in 1881: "Julia knew that sacrifices to patience are not in vain. Although they often do not produce the happiness for which they are made, they will, always, flow back and soften and purify the heart of the one who makes them". [Illma, Or, Which was Wife?, Miss, M.L.A., Cornwell & Johnson, 1881, 239, New York, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435017658592?urlappend=%3Bseq=245]
Disputed

Source: City of Fallen Angels, character Isabelle

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Source: Bridge to Terabithia

Source: Shantaram

1920s, Marriage and Morals (1929)

The Circle, p. 21
Catching the Big Fish (2006)
Context: I like the saying "The world is as you are." And I think films are as you are. That's why, although the frames of a film are always the same — the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds — every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it's there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things. And it's probably different from what I fell in love with.
So you don’t know how it's going to hit people. But if you thought about how it's going to hit people, or if it's going to hurt someone, or if it's going to do this or do that, then you would have to stop making films. You just do these things that you fall in love with, and you never know what's going to happen.

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

Source: Mary Queen of Scotland and The Isles

Source: The Great Gatsby

Source: My Name Is Memory

Variant: Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Source: The Spectator Bird

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Source: Clockwork Prince

Source: On the Road

"Dreams," from the anthology Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers, ed. Arna Bontemps (1941)

Source: Anna Karenina

Source: Dear John

"The Ancient Dust", page 153
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside (1984)

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Source: The Bridges of Madison County

Source: The Book Thief

Variant: Keep trying, hold on, and always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don't, then who will?

Hyperion http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5436, Bk. III, Ch. IV (1839). <br class="br">Variant: Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad. <br class="br">Context: &quot;Ah! this beautiful world!&quot; said Flemming, with a smile. &quot;Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and sunshine, and Heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly; and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. In the lives of the saddest of us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms and kiss it. Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark. Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.&quot;

Variant: There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him, so I buried them, and let them hurt me. (p. 181)
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), p. 181

Source: For Darkness Shows the Stars

Source: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Source: Mosquitoes

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

Source: The Van Alen Legacy

Source: Napoleon Hill's Positive Action Plan: 365 Meditations For Making Each Day a Success

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin