“These bitter sorrows of childhood! when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.”

“Farewell, and when to-morrow
Seems little, like to-day,
And we find life's deepest sorrow
Melts gradual away;
Yet do not quite forget me.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

“Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

“I'm waiting. … For something new and strange,
Something I've dreamt about in some deep sleep,
Truer than any waking,
Heard about, long ago, so long ago,
In sunshine and the summer grass of childhood,
When the sky seems so near.
I do not know its shape, its will, its purpose
And yet all day its will has been upon me,
More real than any voice I ever heard,
More real than yours or mine or our dead child's,
More real than all the voices there upstairs,
Brawling above their cups, more real than light.
And there is light in it and fire and peace,
Newness of heart and strangeness like a sword,
And all my body trembles under it,
And yet I do not know.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered… sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks…”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

“When everyone sorrows, no one hears the sorrows.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

“And life goes on, which seems kind of strange and cruel when you're watching someone die. But there's a joy and an abundance of everything, like information and laughter and summer weather and so many stories.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

“Yet there be certain times in a young man’s life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

“music's power
Is little felt in sunlit hour;
But hear its voice when hopes depart,
Like swallows, flying from the heart
On which the summer's late decline
Has set a sadness and a sign;......
How deeply will the spirit feel
The lute, the song's sweet-voiced appeal;
And how the heart drink in their sighs
As echoes they from Paradise.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

“The man whose silent days
In harmless joys are spent,
Whom hopes cannot delude,
Nor sorrow discontent:That man needs neither towers
Nor armour for defence,
Nor secret vaults to fly
From thunder's violence.”

Thomas Campion (1567–1620) English composer, poet and physician