Quotes about sadness
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“Is it sad that my first thought happened to be: Thank God I'm off the treadmill.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Alice in Zombieland

God

“I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Mandarins

Source: The Mandarins

Feeling, Happiness

“It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise

Silence, Time

“It was such a sweet, sad song with such sweet, sad lyrics. Old-fashioned a little, but also timeless.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Source: Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

Fashion

“The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 5

People, World, Way, Time

“What are you reading?" Owen asks.
"Charlotte's Web," Liz says. "It's really sad. One of the main characters just died."
"You ought to read the book from end to beginning," Owen jokes. "That way, no one dies, and it's always a happy ending.”

Gabrielle Zevin book Elsewhere

Source: Elsewhere

Books, Way, Reading, Happiness

“The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things, she decided, wondering how many writers and philosophers had said this before her, the trivial pleasures like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.”

Barbara Pym book Less than Angels

Less than Angels (1955), chapter 9

Life, Pleasure, Home, Cooking

“Sometimes you couldn’t face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again.”

Ann Brashares book The Last Summer

Source: The Last Summer

“Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Ballads and Other Poems

Source: Ballads and Other Poems

Life, Fate, Sun, Heart

“Because sometimes you just feel sad and you can't explain it.”

Jenny Han book To All the Boys I've Loved Before

To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Feeling

“Being happy or unhappy - is that really the most important thing? Knowing the truth would be a different kind of happiness - a more satisfying kind, I think, even if it turned out to be a sad kind.”

Ira Levin book This Perfect Day

Source: This Perfect Day

Truth, Thinking, Happiness

“Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Love, Thinking

“I left parts of myself everywhere,
The way absent-minded people leave
Gloves and umbrellas
Whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck”

Charles Simic (1938) American poet

Bad luck, People, Color, Way

“Giving to other people makes me feel alive. Not my car or my house. Not what I look like in the mirror. When I give my time, when I can make someone smile after they were feeling sad…”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

People, Smile, Cars, Feeling

“Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him.
"Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her.
"It takes a man with real heart"
—he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest—
"to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”

Clive Barker Days of Magic, Nights of War

Source: Days of Magic, Nights of War

Beauty, Fools, Singing, Heart

“there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

Sad, People, World

“Everything in life has some good in it. And when something awful happens, the goodness stands out even more--it's sad, but that's the truth.”

Banana Yoshimoto book The Lake

Source: The Lake

Life, Truth

“I can see that the sadness has returned. And it's not a beautiful sadness- beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Beauty

“He was making a brave attempt, but Jason could see the sadness lingering in his eyes. Something had happened to him… something to do with Calypso.”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

“Our cure, to be no more; sad cure!”

John Milton book Paradise Lost

Source: Paradise Lost

“Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Feeling, Imagination

“When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

“I still don't think it's pathetic to cry over someone. It just means you care about them deeply and you're sad.”

Jenny Han book P.S. I Still Love You

Source: P.S. I Still Love You

Thinking, Cry

“I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J. K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.”

Harold Bloom (1930–2019) American literary critic and scholar

Reading

“How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd…”

Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942) French novelist who died at the age of 39 in Auschwitz

Source: Suite Française

World, Beauty

“She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Happiness

“It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Beauty

“And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Love

“I’m done. I’m old, I’m sad - that’s on a good day. I want out of this mess. But I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.”

Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad

Source: A Visit from the Goon Squad

Death, Art

“Yes, you should talk," he said. "Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth.”

John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath

Source: The Grapes of Wrath

“Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

Autumn, Summer

“She was sad about what happened to Kostos. And someplace under that, she was sad that people like Bee and Kostos, who had lost everything, were still open to love, and she, who'd lost nothing, was not.”

Ann Brashares The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Love, People, Bee

“My suffering left me sad and gloomy.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi (2001), Chapter 1, p. 3

Suffering

“There's no way for them to take away my sadness, but they can make sure I am not empty of all the other feelings.”

David Levithan book Love Is the Higher Law

Source: Love Is the Higher Law

Way, Feeling

“[I]sn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Source: Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

World, Spring, Parting

“Whenever I get that sad, depressed feeling, I go out and kill a policeman.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Feeling

“What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.”

Bernhard Schlink book The Reader

Source: The Reader

Question, Thinking, Happiness

“My mama used to say, 'Are you sad? Then just wait a minute.”

Shannon Hale book Book of a Thousand Days

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

Waiting

“The fact that one of these ladies was my mom made me particularly sad because my mom is beautiful. And she’s always on a diet. Sometimes, my dad calls her beautiful, but she cannot hear him.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Beauty, Moms

“But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Truth, World, History, Dependency

“A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.”

Rob Sheffield (1966) American music journalist

Source: Love Is a Mix Tape

Love

“It’s not the parting or the absence that’s sad. You love them, and that’s why saying good-bye breaks your heart.”

Kyōichi Katayama (1959) Japanese writer

Source: Socrates In Love

Love, Heart, Parting

“Don't make everyone know about your sadness.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

“That was what happened to laughter when you caged it. It became unbearably sad. It was worse than crying.”

Isobelle Carmody book Greylands

Source: Greylands

Laughter, Cry

“Gentle lady, do not sing
Sad songs about the end of love;
Lay aside sadness and sing
How love that passes is enough.

Sing about the long deep sleep
Of lovers that are dead, and how
In the grave all love shall sleep:
Love is aweary now.”

James Joyce book Chamber Music

Source: Chamber Music

Love, Lovers, Sleep, Singing

“When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad.”

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

People

“Peeta smiles at me, sad and mocking. "Okay. Thanks for the tip, sweetheart.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Smile

“I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Feeling

“It was sad, the imbalance of it all. Why do kids assume so much from one parent and hold the other to a lower, looser standard?”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

Parent

“Albums that remind me of my childhood happiness make me incredibly sad now.”

Mindy Kaling book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Source: Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

Childhood, Happiness

“Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Love, Fate, Sense, Indifference

“Beauty and love pass, I know… Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Love, Death, Beauty, Happiness

“I guess after tonight Boots won't think the whole world is her friend," thought Gregor. She had to find out sometime, but it still made him sad.”

Suzanne Collins book Gregor the Overlander

Source: Gregor the Overlander

World, Thinking

“I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.”

Mark Haddon book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Source: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Faith, Dogs, Mood, Thinking

“She seemed imprisoned in her sadness.”

Sena Jeter Naslund (1942) American writer

Source: Four Spirits

“if it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?”

Sheryl Crow (1962) American musician and actress

Hell, Happiness

“But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.”

Stephen King Dreamcatcher

Source: Dreamcatcher

Feeling, Betrayal, Joy

“Some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you..”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Soul, Cry

“The sadness of the women's movement is that they don't allow the necessity of love. See, I don't personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Love, Women, Personality

“… owning a dog always ended with this sadness because dogs just don't live as long as people do.”

John Grogan (1958) American journalist

Source: Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog

People, Dogs

“There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.”

Glen Cook book The White Rose

Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 2, “The Plain of Fear” (p. 456)
Context: An old, tired man. That is what I am. What became of the old fire, drive, ambition? There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.

Youth, Dreams, Time

“Birds sing even when the world is filled with sadness. I don't know why people can't do the same thing.”

Michael Gilbert (1912–2006) Author

Source: Perfected Sinfulness

People, World, Bird, Singing

“She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Sad

“The banjo is such a happy instrument--you can't play a sad song on the banjo - it always comes out so cheerful.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Happiness

“I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.”

James Thurber book The 13 Clocks

Source: The 13 Clocks

Feeling, Heart

“Soon. She knew. Soon he would come visiting. Incarnadine and sweet and sad and broken. Just like her.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things

“I'm just not having a very good time and I don't have any reason to think it'll get anything but worse. I'm tired. I'm hurt. I'm sad. I feel used.”

Marsha Norman 'night, Mother

Source: 'night, Mother

Feeling, Thinking, Time, Hurt

“Despereaux," she whispered.
And then she shouted it, "Despereaux!"
Reader, nothing is sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name.
Nothing.”

Kate DiCamillo book The Tale of Despereaux

Source: The Tale of Despereaux

Love, World

“Only the happy ones return to contentment. Those who were sad return to despair.”

Kóbó Abe book The Woman in the Dunes

Source: The Woman in the Dunes

Despair, Happiness

“only adj.

thats the dilemma isn't it? when you're single, there's the sadness and joy of only me. And when you're paired, there's the sadness and joy of only you.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Joy

“I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own distasters.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise

People, Feeling, Parting

“The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

“Everything feels right with the world…
… and the sad thing is that I know it's a dream. I know it must soon end, and when it does I will be thrust awake into a place where either I'm broken, or the world is broken.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: Challenger Deep

World, Dreams, Feeling

“Sadness of love without release.”

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) Novelist

Love

“Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.”

Anne Michaels (1958) Poet and novelist

Feeling, Happiness

“She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Way

“She was sensible and clever, but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Source: Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay

Joy

“Well, let me leave it at this: if God does exist, He would have a great deal be sad about. And if He doesn’t exist, then that too would make Him quite sad, I imagine. So to answer your question, God must be sad.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

God, Imagination, Question

“Being a writer means crying over the sad parts, even though you already know it’s going to be okay.”

Clare B. Dunkle (1964) American writer

Parting, Cry

“He is ugly and sad… but he is all love.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love

“it was important to him that i know who she was, so im glad for that. but it makes me sad too. they loved each other so much, and now she's gone. it doesn't seem fair.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Love

“Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away."
"But, Lena, that's sad."
"No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine

“But I don't feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn't around anymore. So I would be feeling sad about something that isn't real and doesn't exist. And that would be stupid.”

Mark Haddon book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Source: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Stupidity, Feeling, Dead

“As much as I feel sad, I think that not knowing is what really bothers me.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Feeling, Thinking

“It's a time of sorrow and sadness when we lose a loss of life.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Life, Loss, Time

“When you lose your parents, the sadness doesn't go away. It just changes. It hits you sideways sometimes instead of head-on. Like now.”

Jude Watson book In Too Deep

Source: In Too Deep

Parent, Change

“That is why I write - to try to turn sadness into longing, solitude into remembrance.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Solitude

“Through many waters borne, brother, I am come to thy sad grave, that I may give these last gifts to the dead. Forever and ever, brother, hail. Forever and ever, farewell.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Princess

Water, Dead

“I looked into his eyes, and I realized he was the same man I'd seen in my dreams. His face might be totally different, but the same soul was in there, the same intelligence and all the sadness.”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Dreams, Soul, Intelligence

“The sad thing is, people don't want to believe that the person they're in love with is out of his mind, drinking and using, so if you give them even half an excuse, they're going to want to believe it.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

Love, People, Drink, Personality

“Reader, nothing is sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name. Nothing.”

Kate DiCamillo book The Tale of Despereaux

Variant: Reader, nothing is sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name. Nothing.
Source: The Tale of Despereaux (2004)

Love, World