“
I am not a graceful person. I am not a Sunday morning or a Friday sunset. I am a Tuesday 2 a.m., gunshots muffled by a few city blocks, I am a broken window during February. My bones crack on a nightly basis. I fall from elegance with a dull thud, and I apologize for my awkward sadness. I sometimes believe that I don’t belong around people, that I belong to all the leap days that didn’t happen. The way light and darkness mix under my skin has become a storm. You don’t see the lightning, but you hear the echoes.
”
”
Anna Peters
“
Everything is an illusion; that is the whole thing about it - illusion, immitation, a mirage. It makes me too sad. Its having like a good dream, you know you are going to wake up.
”
”
Francesca Lia Block
“
Feel. Grieve. Let yourself fell the anger at the fact that he was taken from you. Feel the loss of him . Feel the sadness and the missing him. Don't block it out, don't cut so it so stop, don't drink yourself numb. Just sit and let it all rip you apart. And then get up and keep breathing. One breath at a time. One day at a time. Wake up, and be shredded. Cry for a while. Then stop crying and go about your day. You're not okay but you're alive, and you will be okay, someday
”
”
Jasinda Wilder (Falling into You (Falling, #1))
“
We are walking down the street holding hands. There is a playground at the end of the block, and I run to the swings and I climb on and Henry takes the one next to me facing the opposite direction. And we swing higher and higher passing each other, sometimes in synch and sometimes streaming past each other so fast that it seems we are going to collide. And we laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost or dead or far away. Right now we are here and nothing can mar our perfection or steal the joy of this perfect moment.
”
”
Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)
“
To the most inconsiderate asshole of a friend,
I’m writing you this letter because I know that if I say what I have to say
to your face I will probably punch you.
I don’t know you anymore.
I don’t see you anymore.
All I get is a quick text or a rushed e-mail from you every few days. I
know you are busy and I know you have Bethany, but hello? I’m supposed to
be your best friend.
You have no idea what this summer has been like. Ever since we were
kids we pushed away every single person that could possibly have been our
friend. We blocked people until there was only me and you. You probably
haven’t noticed, because you have never been in the position I am in now.
You have always had someone. You always had me. I always had you. Now
you have Bethany and I have no one.
Now I feel like those other people that used to try to become our friend,
that tried to push their way into our circle but were met by turned backs. I
know you’re probably not doing it deliberately just as we never did it deliberately.
It’s not that we didn’t want anyone else, it’s just that we didn’t need
them. Sadly now it looks like you don’t need me anymore.
Anyway I’m not moaning on about how much I hate her, I’m just trying
to tell you that I miss you. And that well . . . I’m lonely.
Whenever you cancel nights out I end up staying home with Mum and
Dad watching TV. It’s so depressing. This was supposed to be our summer
of fun. What happened? Can’t you be friends with two people at once?
I know you have found someone who is extra special, and I know you
both have a special “bond,” or whatever, that you and I will never have. But
we have another bond, we’re best friends. Or does the best friend bond disappear
as soon as you meet somebody else? Maybe it does, maybe I just
don’t understand that because I haven’t met that “somebody special.” I’m
not in any hurry to, either. I liked things the way they were.
So maybe Bethany is now your best friend and I have been relegated to
just being your “friend.” At least be that to me, Alex. In a few years time if
my name ever comes up you will probably say, “Rosie, now there’s a name I
haven’t heard in years. We used to be best friends. I wonder what she’s doingnow; I haven’t seen or thought of her in years!” You will sound like my mum
and dad when they have dinner parties with friends and talk about old times.
They always mention people I’ve never even heard of when they’re talking
about some of the most important days of their lives. Yet where are those
people now? How could someone who was your bridesmaid 20 years ago not
even be someone who you are on talking terms with now? Or in Dad’s case,
how could he not know where his own best friend from college lives? He
studied with the man for five years!
Anyway, my point is (I know, I know, there is one), I don’t want to be
one of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, so
influential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distant
memory. I want us to be best friends forever, Alex.
I’m happy you’re happy, really I am, but I feel like I’ve been left behind.
Maybe our time has come and gone. Maybe your time is now meant to be
spent with Bethany. And if that’s the case I won’t bother sending you this letter.
And if I’m not sending this letter then what am I doing still writing it?
OK I’m going now and I’m ripping these muddled thoughts up.
Your friend,
Rosie
”
”
Cecelia Ahern (Love, Rosie)
“
Did you know,” the old woman said now, standing beside the grown-up Annie, “that a dog will go to a crying human before a smiling one? Dogs get sad when people around them get sad. They’re created that way. It’s called empathy. “Humans have it, too. But it gets blocked by other things—ego, self-pity, thinking your own pain must be tended to first. Dogs don’t have those issues.
”
”
Mitch Albom (The Next Person You Meet in Heaven)
“
When I stopped trying to block my sadness and let it move me instead, it led me to a bridge with people on the other side.” … I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.
”
”
Barbara Brown Taylor
“
I was staring to learn how to forget the things that made me sad. It was like a charm you followed step-by-step, collecting and blending the ingredients, placing everything in its proper place, reciting the incantation. It was the magic of forgetting.
”
”
Francesca Lia Block (Pink Smog (Weetzie Bat, #0))
“
...that the basic transaction of life itself was a sad, endless amalgam of public endurance and private indulgence.
”
”
Stefan Merrill Block (The Story of Forgetting)
“
Rejection makes you sad and cry, cry it out but not for long because the tears will block good things coming ahead of you
”
”
Akinwumi jarule
“
If you were sad about something that hadn't happened yet you couldn't be disappointed.
”
”
Francesca Lia Block (My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales)
“
The hours tick by as I lie in bed.
Memories keep surfacing, tormenting me into unbelievable sadness. I can't bring myself to move. I can't fight the memories that keep filling my thoughts. I stay curled in the fetal position as each memory plays out. I can't stop them from coming. I can't make them go away. Nothing can distract me. I can't block the memories, so they continue to come.
”
”
Ashley Earley (Alone in Paris)
“
Sadness is just another wall that blocks you from moving on. I know it's hard to get past it, but you got to break through.
”
”
Gray Fullbuster
“
Love can be so sttange and sad. It can be hard to understand why we run toward certain people and away from others at different times in our lives. Why we search so hard for that thing we are looking for, and the run so fast when we find it. Sick Pleasure - Francesca Lia Block
”
”
Stephanie Perkins (Summer Days and Summer Nights: Twelve Love Stories)
“
It's an unfortunate word, 'depression', because the illness has nothing to do with feeling sad, sadness is on the human palette. Depression is a whole other beast. It's when your old personality has left town and been replaced by a block of cement with black tar oozing through your veins and mind. This is when you can't decide whether to get a manicure or jump off a cliff. It's all the same. When I was institutionalised I sat on a chair unable to move for three months, frozen in fear. To take a shower was inconceivable. What made it tolerable was while I was inside, I found my tribe - my people. They understood and unlike those who don't suffer, never get bored of you asking if it will ever go away? They can talk medication all hours, day and night; heaven to my ears.
”
”
Ruby Wax
“
The New Your energy goes beyond anything you'll find anywhere else. It's too much for some people and it grinds them down, but it lifts up and animates the rest of us.
”
”
Lawrence Block (Gotham Central, Book One: In the Line of Duty)
“
I was starting to learn how to forget the things that made me sad. It was like a charm you followed step-by-step, collecting and blending the ingredients, placing everything in its proper place. It was the magic of forgetting.
”
”
Francesca Lia Block (Pink Smog (Weetzie Bat, #0))
“
People often say “Just look for the silver lining.” But what do you say to the person surrounded by fog? They don’t see a fluffy object in the sky, blocking the sun for a moment or two. But instead, they see everything as it was before, but through the murky, un-clarity of hopelessness. As if they were standing at the bottom of a grimy lake except able to breathe. But not wanting to because with each breath they grow numb from the cold loneliness. What if they’re surrounded by a dreary blanket of darkness, made up of their own thoughts, too impenetrable for any light to break through? So what do you tell that person who, as far as the eye could see, only sees fog? A place where there is no silver lining peeking around the corner. Imagine a place where your only companion is the confusion you walk around with.
”
”
Sadie Turner
“
I think you ought to write, in bed, and make use of your unhappiness. I do it. Many do. One should cook and eat one's misery. Chain it like a dog. Harness like Niagara Falls to generate light and supply voltage for electric chairs.
”
”
Saul Bellow
“
Why was fabulousness important? The world was a scary, sad place and adornment was one of the only ways she knew to make herself and the people around her forget their troubles. That was why she had opened her store almost five years ago. Everyone who entered the little square white house with miniature Corinthian columns, cherub statues, and French windows seemed to leave carrying armloads of newly handmade and well spruced-up recycled vintage clothing, humming sixties girl-group songs, seventies glam and punk, eighties New Wave one-hit wonders, or nineties grunge, doing silly dances, and not caring what anyone thought.
Weetzie loved the old dresses she found and sold, because they had their own secret histories. She always wondered where, when, and how they had been worn. What they had seen. Old dresses were like old ladies.
”
”
Francesca Lia Block (Necklace of Kisses (Weetzie Bat, #6))
“
Judgment is the number one reason we feel blocked, sad, and alone. Our popular culture and media place enormous value on social status, looks, racial and religious separation, and material wealth. We are made to feel less than, separate, and not good enough, so we use judgment to insulate ourselves from the pain of feeling inadequate, insecure, or unworthy. It’s easier to make fun of, write off, or judge someone for a perceived weakness of theirs than it is to examine our own sense of lack.
”
”
Gabrielle Bernstein (Judgment Detox: Release the Beliefs That Hold You Back from Living A Better Life)
“
these negative emotions are not simply something to endure and erase. They are purposeful. Beneficial. They tell us what we need. Anger inspires action. Sadness is necessary to process grief. Fear helps keep us safe. Completely eradicating these emotions is not just impossible—it’s unhealthy. These negative emotions only become toxic when they block out all the other emotions. When we feel so much sadness that we can’t let any joy in. When we feel so much anger that we cannot soften around others. True mental health looks like a balance of these good and bad feelings. As Lori Gottlieb says in her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, “Many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.
”
”
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
“
A romantic painting shows a heap of icy debris in a polar light; no man, no object inhabits this desolate space; but for this very reason, provided I am suffering an amorous sadness, this void requires that I fling myself into it; I project myself as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever. "I'm cold," the lover says, "Iet's go back"; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked. There is a coldness particular to the lover, the chilliness of the child (or of any young animal) that needs maternal warmth.
”
”
Roland Barthes (A Lover's Discourse: Fragments)
“
When the Path Is Blocked When the path is blocked, back up and see more of the way. We are each a mountain for the other to climb, and often our path to love is interrupted by a mishap or a problem or something unexpected that needs attending. We tend to call these unexpected things in life “obstacles.” Often the thing in the way comes from another person: a stubbornness falls like a tree blocking where we want to go, or a sadness comes like a flash flood to muddy the road between us, or just as we go to rest in the clearing we have prepared, we are bitten by something hiding in the undergrowth. Thus, in daily ways, we have this constant choice: to see each other as the stubborn, muddy, biting thing that blocks our way, or to back up and take in the whole person as we would a mountain in its entirety, dizzy when looking up into its majesty. When we are blocked in our closeness with another, we have this constant opportunity: to raise our eyes and behold each other completely, then to kneel and lift the fallen tree, or cross the flooded path, or pluck and toss the biting thing. We have the chance to keep climbing, so we might cup the water that runs from each other, so we might quench our thirst as from a mountain stream, knowing that love like water comes softly through the hardest places.
”
”
Mark Nepo (The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have)
“
CG: ATTENTION WORTHLESS HUMAN.
CG: THIS IS YOUR GOD SPEAKING.
CG: IT IS A WRATHFUL GOD WHO DESPISES YOU MORE THAN YOU COULD HAVE POSSIBLY DARED TO FEAR.
CG: I HAVE WATCHED YOUR ENTIRE PATHETIC LIFE UNFOLD.
CG: I HAVE OBSERVED YOU WHILE YOU WOULD QUAKE AND TREMBLE IN PERSONAL PRAYERS OF SHAME.
CG: WHILE YOU PLEADED FORGIVENESS FOR BEING SUCH A WRETCHED DISGUSTING FAILURE ON EVERY CONCEIVABLE LEVEL.
CG: PROSTRATE BEFORE THE STUPID AND FALSE CLOWN GODS YOU HAVE SCRIBBLED ON THE WALLS OF YOUR BLOCK.
CG: BOGUS DEITIES WORSHIPED BY A PRIMITIVE "PARADISE" PLANET.
CG: BUT YOUR PRAYERS WILL NOT BE ANSWERED.
CG: THERE ARE NO MIRACLES IN STORE FOR YOU, HUMAN.
CG: ONLY MY HATE.
CG: IT IS A HATE SO PURE AND HOT IT WOULD CONSUME YOUR SAD UNDERDEVELOPED HUMAN THINK PAN TO EVEN CONTEMPLATE.
CG: IT IS A HATE THAT TO FATHOM MUST BE PUT INTO SONG.
CG: SHRIEKED BY THE TEN THOUSAND ROWDY SHOUT SPHINCTERS PEPPERING THE GRUESOME UNDERBELLY OF THE MOST TRUCULENT GOD THE FURTHEST RING CAN MUSTER.
CG: IT IS A HATE THAT MADE YOU AND WILL SURELY DESTROY YOU.
CG: MY HATE IS THE LIFEBLOOD THAT PULSES THROUGH THE VEINS OF YOUR UNIVERSE.
CG: IT IS MY GIFT TO YOU.
CG: YOU'RE WELCOME FOR THAT.
CG: YOU UNGRATEFUL PIECE OF SHIT.
EB: hi karkat!
”
”
Andrew Hussie (Homestuck)
“
My birthday is in March, and that year it fell during an especially bright spring week, vivid and clear in the narrow residential streets where we lived just a handful of blocks south of Sunset. The night-blooming jasmine that crawled up our neighborhood's front gate released its heady scent at dusk, and to the north, the hills rolled charmingly over the horizon, houses tucked into the brown. Soon, daylight savings time would arrive, and even at early nine, I associated my birthday with the first hint of summer, with the feeling in classrooms of open windows and lighter clothing and in a few months no more homework. My hair got lighter in spring, from light brown to nearly blond, almost like my mother's ponytail tassel. In the neighborhood gardens, the agapanthus plants started to push out their long green robot stems to open up to soft purples and blues.
”
”
Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake)
“
She looked at the empty page, which remained blank, apart from the small wet dots from her tears, for hours. Her mind was a turmoil of sadness, rage, fear and all those emotions that gave her inspiration. However her heart lacked the will as the empty words enclosed her soul pulling it down towards the frenzied ravenous imps that stalked hells pantry....
”
”
Virginia Alison
“
It's funny how misery takes you straight back, connecting the dots through your life - the memories tumble out like sad photographs from a battered old album.
”
”
Keith Stuart (A Boy Made of Blocks)
“
Her neighborhood is obscenely beautiful. I cannot help but observe this as I stand on her marbled steps, flanked by stone griffins, beaks open in midscreech. A line of stately houses, a canopy of grandly bowing trees. Just a block from campus, off a poshly quaint street lined with bistros that offer champagne by the glass, cafés that make the cortadas with the ornate foam art that all the faculty drink, shops selling cold-pressed juice and organic dog treats. Unlike my street, which smells of sad man piss, hers smells of autumn leaves.
”
”
Mona Awad (Bunny)
“
Whatever love meant there was some version of it that I felt for Winter. And it didn't matter if he felt that for me or not or if it was real love or just my sadness about my dad that had turned into longing. Love, that elusive leading lady, plays too many parts to be typecast.
”
”
Francesca Lia Block (Pink Smog (Weetzie Bat, #0))
“
Did you know," the old woman said now, standing beside the grown-up Annie, "that a dog will go to a crying human before a smiling one? Dogs get sad when people around them get sad . They're created that way. It's called empathy. Humans have it, too. But it gets blocked by other things -- ego, self-pity, thinking your own pain must be tended to first. Dogs don't have those issues.
”
”
Mitch Albom (The Next Person You Meet in Heaven)
“
Grandma Fifi had two friends named Martin and Merlin who were afraid in a way Dirk didn't want to be. They were both very handsome and kind and always brought candies and toys when they came over for tea and Fifi's famous pastries. But as much as Dirk liked Martin and Merlin he knew he was different from them. They talked in voices as pale and soft as the shirts they wore and they moved as gracefully as Fifi did. Their eyes were startled and sad. They had been hurt because of who they were. Dirk didn't want to be hurt that way. He wanted to be strong and to love someone who was strong; he wanted to meet any gaze, to laugh under the brightest sunlight and never hide.
”
”
Francesca Lia Block (Baby Be-Bop (Weetzie Bat, #5))
“
fear...is THE underlying emotion behind anger, anxiety, sadness, jealousy, judgement, and other such negative emotions, all of which are energetic blocks to our awareness and ongoing awakening.
”
”
Peter Santos (Everything I Wanted To Know About Spirituality But Didn't Know How To Ask: A Spiritual Seekers Guidebook)
“
- Are you sad? Do you want me to leave?
- I’m not sad, but I’m blocked. My whole past seems to stop me. I can’t let go. I feel as if I can inhale but not exhale. I’m just constrained, unnatural.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (Delta of Venus)
“
Petri. My monkey. They boiled him."
Her voice sounded strange, even to her own ears. She'd been quiet in the town car Luke had summoned, but once it had dropped them off a block from his apartment , she couldn't seem to stop talking. Luke's grip tightened on her wrist at the words. "Yes. The dead monkey is gone, and we're very sad. I got it the first ten fucking times you mentioned it." He snapped
”
”
Leah Clifford (A Touch Menacing (The Touch Trilogy #3))
“
I keep finding the ashes of the man I unequivocally loved, everywhere.
Everytime, I go to bed, they are displaced about my covers when memories flood back in my mind.
When I glance at my skin, the ashes are smeared on my skin like hand prints from a tragic crime scene.
When you cross my mind, the ashes of moments of intimacy fall to my heart, my body forcefully expell them through my lungs and tear ducts.
The ashes spew out in an eruption of utter chaos. The ashes block out my perception of love and self value. My sight is distorted to truth and trust. The particles of ashe prevent me from forgetting.
ANONYMOUS
”
”
Starr.
“
Do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill that love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.'
I did not know, as I listened to my father's footsteps winding back down the stairs, that he had given me more than the key to this hard moment. I did not know that he had put in my had the secret that would open far darker rooms that this--places where there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all.
”
”
Corrie ten Boom (The Hiding Place)
“
Bennie's corner of Brooklyn looked different every time Sierra passed through it. She stopped at the corner of Washington Avenue and St. John's Place to take in the changing scenery. A half block from where she stood, she'd skinned her knee playing hopscotch while juiced up on iceys and sugar drinks. Bennie's brother, Vincent, had been killed by the cops on the adjacent corner, just a few steps from his own front door. Now her best friend's neighborhood felt like another planet. The place Sierra and Bennie used to get their hair done had turned into a fancy bakery of some kind, and yes, the coffee was good, but you couldn't get a cup for less than three dollars. Plus, every time Sierra went in, the hip, young white kid behind the counter gave her either the don't-cause-no-trouble look or the I-want-to-adopt-you look. The Takeover (as Bennie had dubbed it once) had been going on for a few years now, but tonight its pace seemed to have accelerated tenfold. Sierra couldn't find a single brown face on the block. It looked like a late-night frat party had just let out; she was getting funny stares from all sides--as if she was the out-of-place one, she thought. And then, sadly, she realized she was the out-of-place one.
”
”
Daniel José Older (Shadowshaper (Shadowshaper Cypher, #1))
“
Grief is not something you know if you grow up wearing feathers with a Charlie Chaplin boyfriend, a love-child papoose, a witch baby, a Dirk and a Duck, a Slinkster Dog, and a movie to dance in. You can feel sad and worse when your dad moves to another city, when an old lady dies, or when your boyfriend goes away. But grief is different. Weetzie’s heart cringed in her like a dying animal. It was as if someone had stuck a needle full of poison into her heart. She moved like a sleepwalker. She was the girl in the fairy tale sleeping in a prison of thorns and roses.
”
”
Francesca Lia Block (Weetzie Bat (Weetzie Bat, #1))
“
The other thing that I would say about writer's block is that it can be very, very subjective. By which I mean, you can have one of those days when you sit down and every word is crap. It is awful. You cannot understand how or why you are writing, what gave you the illusion or delusion that you would every have anything to say that anybody would ever want to listen to. You're not quite sure why you're wasting your time. And if there is one thing you're sure of, it's that everything that is being written that day is rubbish. I would also note that on those days (especially if deadlines and things are involved) is that I keep writing. The following day, when I actually come to look at what has been written, I will usually look at what I did the day before, and think, "That's not quite as bad as I remember. All I need to do is delete that line and move that sentence around and its fairly usable. It's not that bad." What is really sad and nightmarish (and I should add, completely unfair, in every way. And I mean it -- utterly, utterly, unfair!) is that two years later, or three years later, although you will remember very well, very clearly, that there was a point in this particular scene when you hit a horrible Writer's Block from Hell, and you will also remember there was point in this particular scene where you were writing and the words dripped like magic diamonds from your fingers -- as if the Gods were speaking through you and every sentence was a thing of beauty and magic and brilliance. You can remember just as clearly that there was a point in the story, in that same scene, when the characters had turned into pathetic cardboard cut-outs and nothing they said mattered at all. You remember this very, very clearly. The problem is you are now doing a reading and you cannot for the life of you remember which bits were the gifts of the Gods and dripped from your fingers like magical words and which bits were the nightmare things you just barely created and got down on paper somehow!! Which I consider most unfair. As a writer, you feel like one or the other should be better. I wouldn't mind which. I'm not somebody who's saying, "I really wish the stuff from the Gods was better." I wouldn't mind which way it went. I would just like one of them to be better. Rather than when it's a few years later, and you're reading the scene out loud and you don't know, and you cannot tell. It's obviously all written by the same person and it all gets the same kind of reaction from an audience. No one leaps up to say, "Oh look, that paragraph was clearly written on an 'off' day."
It is very unfair. I don't think anybody who isn't a writer would ever understand how quite unfair it is.
”
”
Neil Gaiman
“
My bottom lip quivers and I pull it between my teeth. Why do I always feel so sad around him? I'm so raw... open... exposed. He seems to pull emotions out of me I blocked years ago. Now a lifetime of tears I've managed to not shed has done nothing but spill when I'm with him.
”
”
Kim Jones (Clubwhore (Devil's Renegade MC #1))
“
There is always a man eager to explain my mental illness to me. They all do it so confidently, motioning to their Hemingway and Bukowski bookshelf as they compare my depression to their late-night loneliness. There is always someone that rejected them that they equate their sadness to and a bottle of gin (or a song playing, or a movie) close by that they refer to as their cure. Somehow, every soft confession of my Crazy that I hand to them turns into them pulling out pieces of themselves to prove how it really is in my head.
So many dudes I’ve dated have faces like doctors ready to institutionalize
and love my crazy (but only on Friday nights.)
They tell their friends about my impulsive decision making and how I “get them” more than anyone they’ve ever met but leave out my staring off in silence for hours and the self-inflicted bruises on my cheeks.
None of them want to acknowledge a crazy they can’t cure.
They want a crazy that fits well into a trope and gives them a chance to play Hero. And they always love a Crazy that provides them material to write about.
Truth is they love me best as a cigarette cloud of impossibility, with my lipstick applied perfectly and my Crazy only being pulled out when their life needs a little spice.
They don’t want me dirty, having not left my bed for days. Not diseased. Not real.
So they invite me over when they’re going through writer’s block but don’t answer my calls during breakdowns. They tell me I look beautiful when I’m crying then stick their hands in-between my thighs. They mistake my silence for listening to them attentively and say my quiet mouth understands them like no one else has.
These men love my good dead hollowness. Because it means less of a fighting personality for them to force out. And is so much easier to fill someone who has already given up with themselves.
”
”
Lora Mathis
“
Did you know... that a dog will go to a crying human before a smiling one? Dogs get sad when people around them get sad. They're created that way. It's called empathy. Humans have it, too. But it gets blocked by other things-- ego, self-pity, thinking your own pain must be tended to first.
”
”
Mitch Albom (The Next Person You Meet in Heaven)
“
The sad fact is, many of us have lost our way trying to help people find theirs. Arguments won't change people. Simply giving away kindness won't either. Only Jesus has the power to change people, and it will be harder for them to see Jesus if their view of him is blocked by our big opinions.
”
”
Bob Goff (Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People)
“
But Dr. Ham told me, these negative emotions are not simply something to endure and erase. They are purposeful. Beneficial. They tell us what we need. Anger inspired action. Sadness is necessary to process grief. Fear helps keep us safe. Completely eradicating these emotions is not just impossible—it’s unhealthy.
These negative emotions only become toxic when they block out all the other emotions. When we feel so much sadness that we can’t let any joy in. When we feel so much anger that we cannot soften around others. True mental health looks like a balance of these good and bad feelings.
”
”
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
“
Aleister Crowley told a friend he could make any random fall over without touching them. To illustrate, he walked behind a stranger for a block or so, matching his footsteps precisely to the stranger’s. He then scuffed his heels, as if stumbling and falling. And the stranger fell over. The stranger had heard himself fall, and so he fell. If Facebook tells you that everything around you is sad and depressing often enough, you get sad and depressed. All hail the Great Beast 666 of black marketing.
”
”
Warren Ellis (CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis)
“
Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered.
In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck.
Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students.
This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not.
The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.
”
”
Christopher Michael Langan
“
How can he explain such sadness when she is supposed to make him happy? The truth is he cannot explain it himself. All he knows is that something stepped in front of him, blocking his way, until in time he gave up on things, he gave up studying engineering and he gave up on the idea of traveling. He sat down in his life. And there he remained.
”
”
Mitch Albom
“
Could there be anything more sad and more lonely than remembering what terrible things the future will bring?
”
”
Stefan Merrill Block (The Story of Forgetting)
“
Death is not always an occasion for sorrow.
”
”
Lawrence Block
“
Did you know,” the old woman said now, standing beside the grown-up Annie, “that a dog will go to a crying human before a smiling one? Dogs get sad when people around them get sad. They’re created that way. It’s called empathy.
“Humans have it, too. But it gets blocked by other things—ego, self-pity, thinking your own pain must be tended to first. Dogs don’t have those issues.
”
”
Mitch Albom (The Next Person You Meet in Heaven)
“
But I couldn’t block out the sound of his voice. “Hayden wasn’t the son I expected to have,” he said. “I’d imagined playing catch in the yard, watching football on the weekends, going fishing. The things I’d done with my dad; the things I do with Ryan. It was the only kind of relationship I knew how to have with a son.” His voice cracked. “But my second son didn’t enjoy any of those things. He loved music and video games and computers. I didn’t know how to talk to him. And now I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing I’d learned how.” He lowered his head, as if he were trying to hide the fact that he was crying.
”
”
Michelle Falkoff (Playlist for the Dead)
“
When I was a kid growing up in the country, my dad taught me that the best way to carry something heavy is to carry something equally heavy in the other hand. From personal experience, this applies to buckets of water, overstuffed suitcases, concrete blocks, grocery bags filled with large cans of Spaghetti-Os, and dense emotions.
Decades later, I remain a distracted and forgetful student of balance. Gratitude and sorrow aren't, as I once believed, mutually exclusive. They pair quite well together, one in each hand. It can be easy to ebb into the dark seas of sadness, staring too long at grief and disunity. The trick is to keep filling the other bucket.
”
”
Shannan Martin (The Ministry of Ordinary Places: Waking Up to God's Goodness Around You)
“
Brutality is boring. Over and over, hell night after hell night, the same old dumb, tedious, bestial routine: making men crawl; making men groan, hanging men from the bars; shoving men; slapping men; freezing men in the showers; running men into walls; displaying shackled fathers to their sons and sons to their fathers. And if it turned out that you'd been given the wrong man, when you were done making his life unforgettably small and nasty, you allowed him to be your janitor and pick up the other prisoners' trash.
There was always another prisoner, and another. Faceless men under hoods: you stripped them of their clothes, you stripped them of their pride. There wasn't much more you could take away from them, but people are inventive: one night some soldiers took a razor to one of Saddam's former general in Tier 1A and shaved off his eyebrows. He was an old man. "He looked like a grandfather and seemed like a nice guy," Sabrina Harman said, and she had tried to console him, telling him he looked younger and slipping him a few cigarettes. Then she had to make him stand at attention facing a boom box blasting the rapper Eminem, singing about raping his mother, or committing arson, or sneering at suicides, something like that—these were some of the best-selling songs in American history.
"Eminem is pretty much torture all in himself, and if one person's getting tortured, everybody is, because that music's horrible," Harman said. The general maintained his bearing against the onslaught of noise. "He looked so sad," Harman said. "I felt so bad for the guy." In fact, she said, "Out of everything I saw, that's the worst." This seems implausible, or at least illogical, until you think about it. The MI block was a place where a dead guy was just a dead guy. And a guy hanging from a window frame or a guy forced to drag his nakedness over a wet concrete floor—well, how could you relate to that, except maybe to take a picture? But a man who kept his chin up while you blasted him with rape anthems, and old man shorn of his eyebrows whose very presence made you think of his grandkids--you could let that get to you, especially if you had to share in his punishment: "Slut, you think I won't choke no whore / til the vocal cords don't work in her throat no more!..." or whatever the song was.
”
”
Philip Gourevitch (Standard Operating Procedure)
“
Most people think that what we say is the key to good communication. Of course, words are very important, but when you’re talking to someone who is upset (mad, sad, scared, etc.), what you say is much less important than the way you say it.
”
”
Harvey Karp (The Happiest Toddler on the Block: How to Eliminate Tantrums and Raise a Patient, Respectful and Cooperative One- to Four-Year-Old)
“
The biggest waste of time remains the time spent in thinking that people responsible for our misery will one day suffer the consequences; because it wrecks us more than them by constantly running in our mind, blocking entry to any positive thought.
”
”
Shahenshah Hafeez Khan
“
It's true,' he begins, 'that the universe is this big, vast thing, and humans will probably never explore even a tiny fraction of it. But that doesn't mean we're alone or we're displaced from it. All these elements, everything around us, the building blocks of the Earth and life -- even the very air you're breathing -- originated from those stars. We're a part of them. Orion, Draco, Sirius . . . they're a part of us, too.'
Just like that, I can't keep my eyes off Chance. Even Rachael is momentarily entranced, looking bewildered and amazed all at once.
I can't help thinking about it, how we could've all come from different stars, light-years away. Wondering, maybe, if Chance and I came from the same star. If that's what they mean when two people feel they've known each other in a past life.
No, not in a past life -- but that the building blocks of one person's existence could have originated right alongside that of another's.
I wonder if that's why I can't seem to shake him. Why so much of my life has been focused on someone like him.
'So we're all made of stars,' I murmur. So much for not opening my mouth.
Chance twists around, a sad smile on his face as his eyes meet mine. 'We're all made of stars,' he agrees. 'We burn bright, then we flicker away.
”
”
Kelley York (Made of Stars)
“
When others' obsessions are not ours, we are sad for them, and we talk of how empty their lives will be if they don't achieve their empty goal: the gymnastics prize, the firm partnership. But there is a monomania in which it is the focus, the sense of transport, that is the real pleasure.
”
”
Alice W. Flaherty (The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain)
“
sadness and depression are very different experiences. Sadness is a natural response to certain stimuli. It often results in tears and full breathing. It can be a powerful, rich, enlivening experience. Depression, on the other hand, is often the result of blocking sadness, or of blocking anger.
”
”
Rick Carson (Taming Your Gremlin: A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way)
“
A German was looking through a blown-out window framed by red brick and seemed to be waving something. A block-headed Russian pulled up and shot him through the forehead. The blood ran down over his eye socket and dripped off his high cheekbone and seeped into the pulverized masonry fragments.
~ The Jackass in The Road
”
”
Stephen Deck (Land of the Story Tellers: 24 Stories and 7 Poems)
“
Heh heh heh heh heh heh!” A witch behind Elder laughed manically. “Quiet!” Elder looked back angrily at the witch, “That was my moment! I was supposed to laugh manically.” “Heh heh…” The witch giggled sadly and walked away. “Anyway,” Elder turned back to face Herobrine, “Where was I…yes…HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAH!” Elder laughed manically.
”
”
Write Blocked (Good to Be Bad (The Mob Hunter #4))
“
Indeed," Arthur said. "But ... no one has said I'll be a good king. It would be a relief to know I don't go mad or bad before the end."
Alex sighed, but with a smile. She knew Arthur was prying information out of her just to tease her, but two could play this game.
"You're a good king, don't worry," she said, and then looked sadly to the ground. "At least you are once you heal from ... the incident."
"What incident?" Arthur asked.
Alex shook her head somberly. "Well, if Merlin hasn't told you, then I probably shouldn't."
"Oh, right - the incident," he said, pretending to know. "Old Merlin's told me about that plenty of times."
"Good," Alex said. "So you know all about the leeches."
Arthur gulped. "Yes ... I do," he said nervously.
"Luckily by then you've already been captured by the Saxons and your legs have been ripped off," Alex said. "So there aren't too many leech wounds."
Arthur gulped. "It's the definition of luck," he said.
"It's a shame you lose both your arms in the battle before you get captured," Alex said. "But you aren't known as Arthur the Limbless for nothing."
"Arthur the Limbless? "
"Oh, yes," Alex said. "A lesser king would have let the title belittle him, but you still manage to instill fear in all your enemies. Then again, that could be because of your future wife, Queen Girtha. Of course, Merlin has told you about her ..."
"Naturally," Arthur said. "She's that nasty woman, right? So hideous, people are afraid to look at her. Now remind me, how many terrible children do we have?"
"Just the one," Alex said. "And who would have expected you to die during childbirth?"
"I die in childbirth?" Arthur asked with a quiver in his voice. "How is that possible?"
"Isn't that obvious?" Alex asked. "That's why they call your wife Girtha the Strong Handed. Did you never make that connection?"
"Oh, that's right," Arthur said. "I made that connection once before, but I forgot about it."
"I don't blame you," Alex said. "I would have blocked it out of my mind, too.
”
”
Chris Colfer (Beyond the Kingdoms (The Land of Stories, #4))
“
For what it's worth, I know how you feel," Conner told him. "I used to doubt myself a lot. When people told me I wasn't good enough, I believed them. It's hard not to when you're young."
"Tell me about it," Bold said. "Does it get better when you're older?"
"It did for me," Conner said.
"How?" Bolt asked.
"Someone else believed in me," Conner said. "All it took was one person's approval and suddenly I believed myself, too. It gave me a shield to block out all the doubt and negativity. It made me realize I was just as capable and deserving as the people I compared myself to. But you know what? I was wrong."
"You were?" Bolt asked.
"Totally," Conner said. "I didn't need someone else. I had confidence in myself, deep down inside, the whole time. Approval is just a shortcut to self-worth, but sometimes we have to find things out on your own. Sometimes if we want something bad enough, we have to inspire ourselves to get it. Sometimes we have to be our own superhero."
Out of everything Conner said, he could tell this resonated with the boy the most. If he wanted to help people, maybe he had to start with himself.
"But what if I fail?" Bolt asked. "What if the Snake Lord wins and I don't save anyone? Then I'll never be a superhero."
"A very wise man once told me that 'courage is what makes a superhero super,'" Conner said. "He never sad anything about succeeding.
”
”
Chris Colfer (An Author's Odyssey (The Land of Stories, #5))
“
Sometimes, the world suddenly seemed equal to what I required of it. But, otherwise, I was under the world, a cockroach-man scuttling beneath stones in filth, scrambling from the light. Or else I was above the world, as certain and mighty as a fundamental force, as electricity. The sadness of always being at a distance from things, above or else beneath.
”
”
Stefan Merrill Block (The Storm at the Door)
“
Thinking back, ladies, looking back, gentlemen, thinking and looking back on my European tour, I feel a heavy sadness descend upon me. Of course, it is partly nostalgia, looking back at that younger me, bustling around Europe, having adventures and overcoming obstacles that, at the time, seemed so overwhelming, but now seem like just the building blocks of a harmless story. But here is the truth of nostalgia: we don’t feel it for who we were, but who we weren’t. We feel it for all the possibilities that were open to us, but that we didn’t take. Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the wax hits the table top and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past, a solid single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held.
It is impossible - no matter how blessed you are by luck or the government or some remote, invisible deity gently steering your life with hands made of moonlight and wind - it is impossible not to feel a little sad, looking at that bit of wax. That bit of the past. It is impossible not to think of all the wild forms that wax now will never take. The village, glimpsed from a train window, beautiful and impossible and impossibly beautiful on a mountaintop, and you wonder what it would be if you stepped off the train and walked up the trail to its quiet streets and lived there for the rest of your life. The beautiful face of that young man from Luftknarp, with his gaping mouth and ashy skin, last seen already half-turned away as you boarded the bus, already turning towards a future without you in it, where this thing between you that seemed so possible now already and forever never was. All variety of lost opportunity spied from the windows of public transportation, really. It can be overwhelming, this splattered, inert wax recording every turn not taken.
‘What’s the point?’ you ask. ’Why bother?’ you say. ’Oh, Cecil,’ you cry. ’Oh, Cecil.’ But then you remember - I remember! - that we are even now in another bit of molten wax. We are in a moment that is still falling, still volatile, and we will never be anywhere else. We will always be in that most dangerous, most exciting, most possible time of all: the Now. Where we never can know what shape the next moment will take. Stay tuned next for, well, let’s just find out together, shall we?
”
”
Cecil Baldwin
“
What draws me to Palestine, then, is neither nationalism not patriotism, but my sense of justice, my refusal to remain silent in the face of injustice, my unwillingness to just go on living my life -- and enjoying the privileges of a tenured university professor – while trying to block out and ignore what Wordsworth once called the still, sad music of humanity.
”
”
Saree Makdisi (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation)
“
Those who live in retirement, whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools or of other walled-in and guarded dwellings, are liable to be suddenly and for a long while dropped out of the memory of their friends, the denizens of a freer world. Unaccountably, perhaps, and close upon some space of unusually frequent intercourse—some congeries of rather exciting little circumstances, whose natural sequel would rather seem to be the quickening than the suspension of communication—there falls a stilly pause, a wordless silence, a long blank of oblivion. Unbroken always is this blank; alike entire and unexplained. The letter, the message once frequent, are cut off; the visit, formerly periodical, ceases to occur; the book, paper, or other token that indicated remembrance, comes no more.
Always there are excellent reasons for these lapses, if the hermit but knew them. Though he is stagnant in his cell, his connections without are whirling in the very vortex of life. That void interval which passes for him so slowly that the very clocks seem at a stand, and the wingless hours plod by in the likeness of tired tramps prone to rest at milestones—that same interval, perhaps, teems with events, and pants with hurry for his friends.
The hermit—if he be a sensible hermit—will swallow his own thoughts, and lock up his own emotions during these weeks of inward winter. He will know that Destiny designed him to imitate, on occasion, the dormouse, and he will be conformable: make a tidy ball of himself, creep into a hole of life's wall, and submit decently to the drift which blows in and soon blocks him up, preserving him in ice for the season.
Let him say, "It is quite right: it ought to be so, since so it is." And, perhaps, one day his snow-sepulchre will open, spring's softness will return, the sun and south-wind will reach him; the budding of hedges, and carolling of birds and singing of liberated streams will call him to kindly resurrection. Perhaps this may be the case, perhaps not: the frost may get into his heart and never thaw more; when spring comes, a crow or a pie may pick out of the wall only his dormouse-bones. Well, even in that case, all will be right: it is to be supposed he knew from the first he was mortal, and must one day go the way of all flesh, As well soon as syne.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë
“
The Takeover (as Bennie had dubbed it once) had been going on for a few years now, but tonight its pace seemed to have accelerated tenfold. Sierra couldn’t find a single brown face on the block. It looked like a late-night frat party had just let out; she was getting funny stares from all sides —as if she was the out-of-place one, she thought. And then, sadly, she realized she was the out-of-place one.
”
”
Daniel José Older (Shadowshaper (Shadowshaper Cypher #1))
“
And I, who believe that God is love, what answer was there to give my young interlocutor whose dark eyes still held the reflection of the angelic sadness that had appeared one day on the face of a hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak to him of that other Jew, this crucified brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world? Did I explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become a cornerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfathomable mystery in which the faith of his childhood was lost? And yet, Zion has risen up again out of the crematoria and the slaughterhouses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. It is they who have given it new life. We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear.
”
”
Anonymous
“
When I look at him, I don’t see the cowardly young man who sold me out to Jeanine Matthews, and I don’t hear the excuses he gave afterward.
When I look at him, I see the boy who held my hand in the hospital when our mother broke her wrist and told me it would be all right. I see the brother who told me to make my own choices, the night before the Choosing Ceremony. I think of all the remarkable things he is--smart and enthusiastic and observant, quiet and earnest and kind.
He is a part of me, always will be, and I am a part of him, too. I don’t belong to Abnegation, or Dauntless, or even the Divergent. I don’t belong to the Bureau or the experiment or the fringe. I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me--they, and the love and loyalty I give them, form my identity far more than any word or group ever could.
I love my brother. I love him, and he is quaking with terror at the thought of death. I love him and all I can think, all I can hear in my mind, are the words I said to him a few days ago: I would never deliver you to your own execution.
“Caleb,” I say. “Give me the backpack.”
“What?” he says.
I slip my hand under the back of my shirt and grab my gun. I point it at him. “Give me the backpack.”
“Tris, no.” He shakes his head. “No, I won’t let you do that.”
“Put down your weapon!” the guard screams at the end of the hallway. “Put down your weapon or we will fire!”
“I might survive the death serum,” I say. “I’m good at fighting off serums. There’s a chance I’ll survive. There’s no chance you would survive. Give me the backpack or I’ll shoot you in the leg and take it from you.”
Then I raise my voice so the guards can hear me. “He’s my hostage! Come any closer and I’ll kill him!”
In that moment he reminds me of our father. His eyes are tired and sad. There’s a shadow of a beard on his chin. His hands shake as he pulls the backpack to the front of his body and offers it to me.
I take it and swing it over my shoulder. I keep my gun pointed at him and shift so he’s blocking my view of the soldiers at the end of the hallway.
“Caleb,” I say, “I love you.”
His eyes gleam with tears as he says, “I love you, too, Beatrice.”
“Get down on the floor!” I yell, for the benefit of the guards.
Caleb sinks to his knees.
“If I don’t survive,” I say, “tell Tobias I didn’t want to leave him.
”
”
Veronica Roth (Allegiant (Divergent, #3))
“
It was Ephialtes, in fact, who initiated democratic reforms that involved paying citizens for jury service. Shortly afterwards, he was assassinated (allegedly by his political opponents), and Pericles, his second-in-command, then took over. So, although it was hardly the ideal omen, we could say that Ephialtes was the true originator of the basic income, or at least the ‘citizen’s income’ variant. The essence of ancient Greek democracy was that the citizens were expected to participate in the polis, the political life of the city. Pericles instituted a sort of basic income grant that rewarded them for their time and was intended to enable the plebs – the contemporary equivalent of the precariat – to take part. The payment was not conditional on actual participation, which was nevertheless seen as a moral duty. Sadly, this enlightened system of deliberative democracy, facilitated by the basic income, was overthrown by an oligarchic coup in 411 BC. The road was blocked for a very long time.
”
”
Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
“
Challenges teach and evolve us and develop certain qualities and traits, such as patience, responsibility, caution, compassion, and perseverance, that wouldn’t be developed if our circumstances were always easy. Challenges make us better people if we can learn to handle them well and not become bitter, angry, or defeated. This is just how it is on planet earth; challenges are part of life and part of having an ego. We can trust life to be full of challenges. Life is dependable that way. It was designed to be that way. We can’t trust, or expect, life to be easy all the time. If we want or expect that, as the ego does, we’ll feel angry, sad, betrayed, and persecuted by life. But life isn’t persecuting us by bringing us challenges. They aren’t proof of an unloving universe. We all have our share of them, and there’s more wisdom and depth to be gained from them than we may realize. Our challenges were designed for us or created by our choices, and our task is to meet them with love and acceptance and grow from them.
”
”
Gina Lake (Trusting Life: Overcoming the Fear and Beliefs That Block Peace and Happiness)
“
Next up, the DJ put on “Maybe Tomorrow.” Evidently they had stumbled into a Jackson 5 block. No one else can make me cry the way you do, baby. The song saddened Carney when May sang it at the top of her lungs, cavorting on her pink-and-yellow blanket in her room. What did she know of heartbreak and disaster? She didn’t understand the truth of the words yet; she would. All the sorrows he met on the road remained at their stations, waiting for his children to come along. You sing the sad songs first, then you act them out.
”
”
Colson Whitehead (Crook Manifesto (Ray Carney, #2))
“
In the shower he felt it coming again—that old wave of sadness, the one that felt ancient and had been with him since he could remember, an awareness that tragedy loomed somewhere in his future, tragedy as heavy as limestone blocks. As if an angel had told him his future while he was still in the womb, and Jimmy had emerged from the womb with the angel's words planted somewhere in his mind, but faded from his lips.
Jimmy raised his eyes to the shower spray. He said without speaking: I know in my soul I contributed to my child's death. I can feel it. But I don't know how.
”
”
Dennis Lehane (Mystic River)
“
With his child passed out on the couch, after arrests and drunk tanks and hospitalizations, Lynch, the undertaker and poet and essayist, looked at his dear addicted son with sad but lucid resignation, and he wrote: “I want to remember him the way he was, that bright and beaming boy with the blue eyes and the freckles in the photos, holding the walleye on his grandfather’s dock, or dressed in his first suit for his sister’s grade-school graduation, or sucking his thumb while drawing at the kitchen counter, or playing his first guitar, or posing with the brothers from down the block on his first day of school.
”
”
David Sheff (Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction)
“
No one will ever know what manifold difficulties I’ve had to overcome in order to bring to a conclusion this first part of my chronicle. In certain dreams you feel leaden, numb, paralyzed, incapable of moving even though frightful and ferocious enemies are closing in on you. A constraint, curb, impediment of this order were a constant obstacle to the, oh, so very long and arduous composition of this work. And yet with every one of these stories the fact of having committed it to writing relieved me of a genuine millstone. My only regret is not to have completely unburdened myself. I’m still sadly short of reaching that target.
”
”
Jacques Yonnet (Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City)
“
At last we settled down with my face thrust into the loose fur of Mars’s throat and his hind legs curled into my stomach. He licked my nose. It must have been like licking a block of ice. I stretched out a random hand and drew it over his head. Out of his ears it would have been no hard task to have made silk purses. And as I fell asleep I was remembering how much in my childhood I had wanted to have a dog and how thoroughly my elders had made me feel this wish to be extravagant and unseemly until it had faded sadly into a secret dream, and been replaced in about my ninth year by an equally profound yearning to be the owner of an Aston Martin.
”
”
Iris Murdoch (Under the Net)
“
Imagine having an active mind trapped inside a body that is entirely paralyzed except for the ability to move your eyes sideways and blink your eyelids. A few people are living in this nightmare, called Locked-In Syndrome. A mere millimeter makes the difference between ending up in a coma (unconscious) or in Locked-In Syndrome (conscious). Both are caused by trauma to the brain stem (located at the base of the neck and involved in regulating basic body functions). If the trauma is to the front of the brain stem, the motor pathways are destroyed but patients are alert. Since the nerves for blinking and eye movement are at the back of the brain stem, they can still move their eyes. This tragic condition has given us an intriguing clue about the connection between acetylcholine and the enjoyment introverts gain from introspection. Although it seems as if people with Locked-In Syndrome should feel claustrophobic and terrified, researchers were shocked to find they don’t. Although sad about their situation, these patients report a sense of tranquility and lack of terror about their loss of physical freedom. In these patients acetylcholine is blocked to the muscles but not to brain pathways, so their capacity to feel good about living in their internal world (the enjoyment from thinking and feeling) remains intact.
”
”
Marti Olsen Laney (The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World)
“
I've often thought that among all the afflicting sights of the world, none can be much more so than this one short walk along three city blocks, where night after night it's possible to see--indeed, it's impossible not to see--these faces from which hope and joy and dignity and light have been draining so steadily and for so long that now there is nothing left but this assortment of indifferent, damaged masks. They belong to human beings who, after a lifetime of struggling to become one thing or another, have succeeded only in becoming the rough sketches of their species, recognizable but empty, the bruised and wretched bodies and souls of the saddest people on earth: the people who no longer care.
”
”
Edwin O'Connor (The Edge of Sadness)
“
…He needed to find some little poor kids to playfully spray with a hose, while he was helping out at a charity carwash for the handicapped or something. Maybe rent a wet dog for the afternoon, and get it to shake its head in slow motion, while he laughed like some douchebag asshole and tried to lightheartedly block the soapy droplets with his hands or one of the little wheelchair kids or something. Women loved that shit if movies were to be believed. They ate it up. Sadly, he had no idea how to go about doing any of that though. None of the pet shops had been open to the idea of him using their puppies as a prop in a seduction fantasy, and all of the schools for the disabled he called had refused to give him an hourly rate on renting their students.
”
”
Elizabeth Gannon (The Guy Your Friends Warned You About (Consortium of Chaos Book 3))
“
Vargus: Be me. Eat a bag of dicks for breakfast. Go home for lunch and eat another bag of dicks. Finish work and start preparing my bag of dicks for dinner while I warm up ‘The Saga Continues’. No Aetherius. Me sad. Chew dicks pensively. Some guy called Scorpius fighting instead. Level 28. Total noobcake. ROFL, wut a tryhard. Noobcake kicks demi-god in my three meals a day and cusses him out in livestream, with broken arms and legs. Dicks spilling from my gobsmacked open mouth (soooooo many dicks). I inhale too hard and my dinner gets lodged in my throat. Stars in my vision, blacking out. Try to call my mom for help, but multiple phalli are blocking my respiratory organs. Tumble out of my chair sideways and hit the ground, hands around my throat to dislodge all the penises I’ve been chowing down on. There’s no hope, there are too many. Everything goes dark. Wake up, my vision is blurry and my throat is blissfully unburdened by inadvertent deep throating. I’m being transported somewhere. Am I on my way to heaven? How will I explain my eating habits to Saint Peter? Big blurry white words are floating into perspective in the center of my vision. I try to focus on them, my brain still struggling to replenish oxygen. The words clear, and it is obvious that my diet has not gone unnoticed. I am in hell. ‘The Elder Scrolls V’. Oh no, oh god no, anything but that! ‘SKYRIM’. Please, St. Peter, I can change, please don’t forsake me, PLEA- “Hey you, you’re finally awake”. Thanks Todd. 10/10, would eat dicks and watch Daemien kick a demi-god in the schlong again.
”
”
Oliver Mayes
“
It was quiet out in the suburbs; the views were open, with no tenements or high-rise blocks to obscure the distant hills. The light was soft and gentle—summer was drifting ever onward and the evening seemed delicate, fragile. We walked in silence, the kind that you didn’t feel the need to fill. I was almost sad when we arrived at the squat, white clubhouse. It was halfway to dark by then, with both a moon and a sun sitting high in a sky that was sugar almond pink and shot with gold. The birds were singing valiantly against the coming night, swooping over the greens in long, drunken loops. The air was grassy, with a hint of flowers and earth, and the warm, sweet outbreath of the day sighed gently into our hair and over our skin. I felt like asking Raymond whether we should keep walking, walk over the rolling greens, keep walking till the birds fell silent in their bowers and we could see only by starlight. It almost felt like he might suggest it himself.
”
”
Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
“
Such moments are too often lost, the private interludes between the tribal gatherings, the transit between destinations, when the city becomes an intimate landscape, a secret shared by two. This was once their neighborhood and she wants to reclaim it for a little while, to walk past the apartment where they spent so much of their lives, even if it makes her sad thinking of all that transpired there, and all that’s lost. It makes her melancholy to imagine that she might never be here again, that these blocks, their former haunts, and their old building will outlast them; that the city is supremely indifferent to their transit through its arteries, and to their ultimate destination. For now, she wants just to be in between. She knows that later it won’t be the party she will remember so much as this, the walk with her husband in the crisp autumn air, bathed in the yellow metropolitan light spilling from thousands of windows, this suspended moment of anticipation before arrival.
”
”
Jay McInerney (Bright, Precious Days)
“
I just checked that crosshead, Alexander Vassilievich,” I told him once when he started to examine the block between a piston rod and a connecting rod just after I had done the same thing.
“And I want to do it myself,” Maltsev answered, smiling, and there was a kind of sadness in his smile which startled me.
I later understood the meaning of this sadness and the reason for his always holding himself aloof from us. He felt a superiority over us because he understood the locomotive better than we did and because he didn’t believe that I or anybody else could learn the secret of his skill, the secret of seeing at the same time the swallow flying by and the signal ahead, being aware at the same moment in time of the track, the whole train, and the power of the locomotive. Maltsev realized of course that we could outdo even him in our zeal, but he couldn’t imagine that we could love the engine more than he did or drive the train better - anything better, he thought, would be impossible. And this was why Maltsev was sad with us; he was lonesome with his talent, as if he lived all by himself, not knowing how to express it to us so we could understand.
”
”
Andrei Platonov (The Fierce and Beautiful World)
“
Torin, I didn’t know it was possible to find someone like you. You love me for who I am, not what I am. You’ve taught me that it’s okay to walk on my own, yet you’re always there to carry me when I can’t. You’ve taught me it’s okay to run, stumble, and fall, and pick myself up because a fall is nothing to be ashamed of. You’ve taught me it’s okay to fly because the sky is the limit and you’ll catch me if I fall. You inspire me, challenge me, and celebrate me. You are the first man I’ve ever loved and you will be the last man I’ll ever love. You are my one and only true love, and I promise I will love you for eternity.” Hawk draped the silk rope around our wrists and picked up the second one. Torin looked into my eyes as he started to speak, his voice sure, his words sincere. “Raine Cooper, from the moment you opened your door and our eyes met for the first time, I knew I had reached the end of my quest, yet I didn’t even know what I was searching for. I just knew you were the one, my omega. Where there was cold, you’ve brought warmth. Where there was sadness, you’ve brought happiness. Where there was pain, you’ve brought relief. Where there was darkness, you’ve brought light. You know me better than anyone, my fears, my shortcomings, my habits, yet you still love me. My vows to you are a privilege because I get to laugh with you, cry with you, walk with you, run with you, and fight with you for the rest of our lives. I promise to be patient. Most of the time,” he added, smiling. “I promise to be faithful, respectful, attentive, and to become even a better man for you. I promise to celebrate your triumphs and step back so you can shine like the star you are, but I’ll always be there when you need me. My shoulders are yours to cry on and to carry your burdens. My body is the shield that blocks the blows that might harm you and yours to do with as you wish. My hopes and dreams will always start and end with you. Yours will be the name I cry when I’m in need. Your eyes are the balm I seek when I’m in pain. And your soul is the beacon that my soul searches for when I’m lost. I will love you fiercely, tenderly, and passionately. And when we have children, I promise to be the best father a child could ever want. For you, Raine Cooper, deserve the best and I plan to give it you. You are my one and only true love, and I promise I will love you for eternity.
”
”
Ednah Walters (Witches (Runes, #6))
“
I kept walking and walking up Fifth Avenue, without any tie on or anything. Then all of a sudden, something very spooky started happening. Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I thought I’d just go down, down, down, and nobody’d ever see me again. Boy, did it scare me. You can’t imagine. I started sweating like a bastard – my whole shirt and underwear and everything. Then I started doing something else. Every time I’d get to the end of a block I’d make believe I was talking to my brother Allie. I’d say to him, “Allie, don’t let me disappear. Allie, don’t let me disappear. Allie, don’t let me disappear. Please, Allie.” And then when I’d reach the other side of the street without disappearing, I’d thank him. Then it would start all over again as soon as I got to the next corner. But I kept going and all. I was sort of afraid to stop, I think – I don’t remember, to tell you the truth. I know I didn’t stop till I was way up in the Sixties, past the zoo and all. Then I sat down on this bench. I could hardly get my breath, and I was still sweating like a bastard. I sat there, I guess, for about an hour.
”
”
J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye)
“
back. She knew she was lucky to have a job but she didn’t feel lucky. She felt depressed. Sad. Tired. And most of all, confused. She knew this was the week of Ruth Ann’s trial. There hadn’t been any press coverage yet, but she remembered the date. She had wanted to call Rick and wish him luck. In fact, she had picked up the phone several times and started to dial the number, but she just couldn’t go through with it. Not after all the things they had said to each other. She opened the back door to the office and stepped out into the night. The parking lot was barren except for her white Mustang, and the only sounds she heard were the passing of cars on Greensboro a few blocks up. She shut the door behind her, putting the key in the dead bolt and twisting it. “Kinda late for a pretty girl like you to be out.” Dawn turned to the sound of the voice, her stomach tightening into a knot. The lot was sparsely lit, and for a moment she didn’t see him. Then, standing by her Mustang, she saw a tall man dressed in khaki pants and a golf shirt. As he stepped toward her, she noticed that his hair was sandy blond and he had a patch of stubble on his face. “Can I help you?” Dawn asked, her voice shaky. She reached into her pocket for her cell phone but then remembered that the battery was dead. Damn, damn, damn. The man was in front of her now. He had continued to approach as if his appearance were completely natural.
”
”
Robert Bailey (The Professor (McMurtrie and Drake, #1))
“
In order to grasp these types of behavior, it’s important to review the nature of human emotions. E-motions are energy in motion. They are the energy that moves us—our human fuel. Our emotions are also like the red light oil gauge on our car signaling us about a need, a loss or a satiation. Our anger is our strength; our fear is our discernment; our sadness is our healing feeling; our guilt is our conscience former; our shame signals our essential limitation and is the source of our spirituality. When our emotions are shamed, they are repressed. Repression involves tensing muscles and shallow breathing. One set of muscles is mobilized to block the energy of the emotion we’re ashamed to feel. Sadness is commonly converted into a false smile (reactive formation). I have often smiled when I felt sad. Once the energy is blocked, we no longer feel it. However, it is still a form of energy. It is dynamic. I already gave you the example of how repressed anger intensifies. Our anger explodes because it cannot be repressed anymore. In reenactment, the emotional energy is “acted out” or “acted in.” The behavior that set up the shaming event is repeated with surrogates who reenact the original shaming scene, or a person shames himself in the way he was originally shamed. This can occur through destructive self-talk, or it can happen when a person cuts himself or drives himself mercilessly, refusing to take breaks, get proper rest or take legitimate vacations.
”
”
John Bradshaw (Healing the Shame that Binds You)
“
Mama made the coach stop at a barber shop around the corner from their house. 'Go in there,' she told Francie, 'and get your father’s cup.' Francie didn't know what she meant. 'What cup?' she asked. 'Just ask for his cup.' Francie went in. There were two barbers but no customers. One of the barbers sat on one of the chairs in a row against the wall. His left ankle rested on his right knee and he cradled a mandolin. He was playing 'O, Sole Mio.' Francie knew the song. Mr. Morton had taught it to them saying the title was 'Sunshine.' The other barber was sitting in one of the barber chairs looking at himself in the long mirror. He got down from the chair as the girl came in. 'Yes?' he asked. 'I want my father’s cup.' 'The name?' 'John Nolan.' 'Ah, yes. Too bad.' He sighed as he took a mug from the row of them on a shelf. It was a thick white mug with 'John Nolan' written on it in gold and fancy block letters. There was a worn-down cake of white soap at the bottom of it and a tired-looking brush. He pried out the soap and put it and the brush in a bigger unlettered cup. He washed Johnny’s cup. While Francie waited, she looked around. She had never been inside a barber shop. It smelled of soap and clean towels and bay rum. There was a gas heater which hissed companionably. The barber had finished the song and started it over again. The thin tinkle of the mandolin made a sad sound in the warm shop. Francie sang Mr. Morton’s words to the song in her mind. Oh, what’s so fine, dear, As a day of sunshine. The storm is past at last. The sky is blue and clear. Everyone has a secret life, she mused.
”
”
Betty Smith
“
Our political discourse has degenerated into anxieties about whether giving benefits to those people over there will take money out of the pockets of my kind of people over here, even when the changes are those from which we would all benefit."
"The church is one of the few remaining institutions in the American scene that normalizes the effects of slavery, with most Christians preserving these segregated spaces in the interests of cultural comfort. Racially separate churches violate the interdependence that should characterize authentic Christian communities. Further, this individualism blocks churches from the blessings of gifts preserved in separate traditions. For example, segregated white churches celebrate the confessions and the rich legacies of the intellectual giants of the faith, but too often preach a weak and disembodied gospel that reduces spirituality to symbolism, and that separates material concerns from moral choices and the pursuit of righteousness."
"Indeed, we have reached a sad state of affairs when we are all unwilling to be challenged when we go to church."
"We should not move too quickly to a cheap reconciliation that forgets the past rather than honoring it as a clay vessel that contains a refined treasure bearing witness to the presence of Jesus at the margins. We need to make space for the histories of ethnic pain to be shared and revered among whites and all peoples of color, and to be instructed by them. That is, we need to understand how our past impinges on the present before we can move forward together toward our future. We cannot be who we are called to be unless we can gain access to the treasures of the gospel that have been preserved in the separate traditions of now segregated ethnic churches. We will not testify to the glory of God and the manifold riches of his mercy to the nations until we do.
”
”
Love L. Sechrest
“
Colette"s "My Mother's House" and "Sido"
After seeing the movie "Colette" I felt so sad that it didn't even touch the living spirit of her that exists in her writing.
'What are you doing with that bucket, mother? Couldn't you wait until Josephine (the househelp) arrives?'
"And out I hurried. But the fire was already blazing, fed with dry wood. The milk was boiling on the blue-tiled charcoal stove. Nearby, a bar of chocolate was melting in a little water for my breakfast, and, seated squarely in her cane armchair, my mother was grinding the fragrant coffee which she roasted herself. The morning hours were always kind to her. She wore their rosy colours in her cheeks. Flushed with a brief return to health, she would gaze at the rising sun, while the church bell rang for early Mass, and rejoice at having tasted, while we still slept, so many forbidden fruits.
"The forbidden fruits were the over-heavy bucket drawn up from the well, the firewood split with a billhook on an oaken block, the spade, the mattock, and above all the double steps propped against the gable-windows of the attic, the flowery spikes of the too-tall lilacs, the dizzy cat that had to be rescued from the ridge of the roof. All the accomplices of her old existence as a plump and sturdy little woman, all the minor rustic divinities who once obeyed her and made her so proud of doing without servants, now assumed the appearance and position of adversaries. But they reckoned without that love of combat which my mother was to keep till the end of her life. At seventy-one dawn still found her undaunted, if not always undamaged. Burnt by fire, cut with the pruning knife, soaked by melting snow or spilt water, she had always managed to enjoy her best moments of independence before the earliest risers had opened their shutters. She was able to tell us of the cats' awakening, of what was going on in the nests, of news gleaned, together with the morning's milk and the warm loaf, from the milkmaid and the baker's girl, the record in fact of the birth of a new day.
”
”
Colette Gauthier-Villars (My Mother's House & Sido)
“
Always looking for an argument and always being immature and childish
”
”
-guy who lies about non-existent achievments on a block game discord
“
Because you’re not a rebel, right, Ryn? You know saying that will get you killed?” The darkness of night cocooned us, and I knew Irrik had blocked us from view of the other soldiers. He tipped his head down and pressed his lips to mine. His warmth pulsed through me again, and I stood on my tiptoes to prolong the kiss. When we pulled away, I beamed up at him. “You don’t want me to die?” “No,” he said in a quiet voice, eyes sad again. “I don’t want to die either. Don’t worry. I’m not a rebel. I’m not a threat. I’m not a woman.” He grumbled something under his breath about too much. I reached up and patted his cheek. “You’re so much more handsome when you’re not scowling. You shouldn’t be so grumpy.
”
”
Raye Wagner (Blood Oath (Darkest Drae, #1))
“
The only sad thing was Keyshia had so many damn abortions that she could never carry a child past the second trimester.
”
”
Nako (The Chanel Cavette Story: From The Boardroom To The Block)
“
On the kitchen counter, she'd set out the ingredients: Flour bag, sugar box, two brown eggs nestled in the grooves between tiles. A yellow block of butter blurring at the edges. A shallow glass bowl of lemon peel. I toured the row. This was the week of my ninth birthday, and it had been a long day at school of cursive lessons, which I hated, and playground yelling about point scoring, and the sunlit kitchen and my warm-eyed mother were welcome arms, open. I dipped a finger into the wax baggie of brown-sugar crystals, murmured yes, please, yes.
”
”
Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake)
“
Rich, what are you doing here?" I asked, my gaze going over toward Brant, finding him watching and feeling almost guilty. Which was ridiculous because I hadn't invited Rich.
"Didn't have much of a choice after you blocked my calls and texts, Mads," he said, shaking his head.
"Didn't you maybe consider that was because I didn't want to talk to you?" I asked, lifting my chin slightly.
"The only possible explanation for that," he said, his charming boyish smile in place, "is because you have somehow forgotten how awesome I am. You can give me five minutes, can't you?"
"Because five years wasn't enough of my time to waste?" I asked, not caring how snippy that came off.
"I know I hurt you," he said, looking apologetic.
"Let's not romanticize it," I cut him off. "You proposed to me and then dumped me because your parents were going to stop paying your bills."
His head jerked back, likely not having expected that. "I fucked up," he admitted, shrugging. "I made the wrong choice."
"Yes, you did," I agreed, having no plans on sparing his feelings. He hadn't spared mine.
"Maddy, come on," he said, shaking his head. "Give me a chance here."
"A chance to what? Somehow try to make me think that dumping me and telling me to get my things out before you came home from work was not possibly the worst possible thing you could have done after I gave you five years of my life?"
"I was..."
"Insensitive and cold-hearted and money-hungry and a complete and utter asshole," I filled in for him.
"Maddy, I didn't even think..."
"That sentence was complete right there," I cut him off. "You didn't even think. Period. You didn't think about how much it would hurt me that you valued your money more than the life we had built together. You didn't think of the fact that I had nowhere to go but back to live with my mother. You didn't think that loving me and me loving you would be enough. You didn't think. And now what? You've finally given it some thought."
"I talked to my..."
He talked to his parents.
Ugh.
I had thought maybe he had grown a set and told them to take their money and shove it. Not that it would change anything, but it would have restored my faith in him being the decent person I had always thought he was.
"And what, Rich? Tried to convince them that I was good enough for them? I don't need their approval. And I don't want to be with a man who values their approval of the person you've chosen to be with so much that it changes your feelings for them."
"It never changed my feelings about you," Rich said, voice sad. And I did believe him. He had loved me. There was no way he had been faking that.
Again, the bitter truth was- he never loved me enough.
Now that I knew that, there was no forgetting it. And the fact of the matter was, I deserved to be loved enough.
"I don't want to be a decision, Rich. I want to be someone you love and are with because you can't not love and and you can't not be with me. Who you love isn't something you can flip-flop on. And I am thankful I found this out before I married you. Before we started a family. Before it could have begun to mean more than it already did.''
"What? You moved on already?" he asked, tone heavy with skepticism.
"Yes."
And I had.
Not just to another man who had the potential to really mean something to me. But to a version of myself that I had forgotten existed. To live somewhere that everyone cared for me. To be near my mother who I missed dearly. To do a job because I loved it, not because I was looking for adulation.
He couldn't factor into any of that.
And it was right about then that the door to the bakery opened and out walked Brant, holding his jacket and moving to slip it over my shoulders. "Figured you were cold," he offered, but his eyes also said: and maybe needed an escape.
He was right on both.
”
”
Jessica Gadziala (Peace, Love, & Macarons)
“
Deep inside, you know it. You're trustworthy. Sadly, you may come across untrustworthy. What are robbing your credibility? Find and fix it!
”
”
Assegid Habtewold (The 9 Cardinal Building Blocks: For continued success in leadership)
“
Sadness can block out the light ,So you have to be faster for the light and if darkness catches up just keep running .
”
”
TJ Lawson
“
If sadness blocks out the light you just got to run faster to the light and if sadness catches up just keep going
”
”
Thomas James Lawson
“
make the time to purify your Heartset so it’s free of the suppressed toxic emotions of fear, anger, sadness, disappointment, resentment, shame and guilt that every human being accumulates as we advance through a life and endure misfortunes. Fail to deal with and steadily heal this “Field of Hurt” that lurks in your subconscious and you’ll find the peak of your energy, creativity and productivity will always be blocked (this is extremely important to understand).
”
”
Robin S. Sharma (The Titan Playbook: Aim for Iconic, Rise to Legendary, Make History)