Discreet Sad Quotes

Sadly Anna-Lena was about as good at whispering as she was at thinking quietly, so it was pretty much the sort of shouted whisper that’s the equivalent of a fart in an airplane that you think won’t be noticed if you let it out a little bit at a time. You never manage to be as discreet as you imagine.

The middle of the 'Atlantis' the warm, luxurious cabins,ining-rooms, halls, shed light and joy, buzzed with the chatter of an elegant crowd, was fragrant with fresh flowers, and quivered with the sounds of a string orchestra. And again amidst that crowd, amidst the brilliance of lights, silks, diamonds, and bare feminine shoulders, a slim and supple pair of hired lovers painfully writhed and at moments convulsively clashed. A sinfully discreet, pretty girl with lowered lashes and hair innocently dressed, and a tallish young man with black hair looking as if it were glued on, pale with powder, and wearing the most elegant patent-leather shoes and a narrow, long-tailed dress coat, a beau resembling an enormous leech. And no one knew that this couple had long since grown weary of shamly tormenting themselves with their beatific love-tortures, to the sound of bawdy-sad music ; nor did any one know of that thing which lay deep, deep below at the very bottom of the dark hold, near the gloomy and sultry bowels of the ship that was so gravely overcoming the darkness, the ocean, the blizzard.

I see that the wardrobe looks penetrable because it has a door. But when I open it, I see that penetration has been put off: since inside is also a wooden surface, like a closed door. Function of the wardrobe: to keep drag and disguises hidden. Nature: that of the inviolability of things. Relation to people: we look at ourselves in the mirror on the inside of the door, we always look at ourselves in an inconvenient light because the wardrobe is never in the right place: awkward, it stands wherever it fits, always huge, hunchbacked, shy and clumsy, unaware how to be more discreet, for it has too much presence. A wardrobe is enormous, intrusive, sad, kind.

Walking back up the hill to Francy's empty house, I realize Robert must be discreetly glad that Frank the pathetically lost man is now leaving him alone awhile. Robert has enough sadness in his own lonely separate peace. A godly man with no God fit to purpose

The quality of our life on planet earth depends on the choices we make every day. Choices about how we spend our time, how we live our lives, and most important, how we treat ourselves and others. I am sad to see how people seem to be more bitter, divided, and overwhelmed than ever these days. We are as a global community, increasingly disconnected from ourselves and other people. The first step toward fixing what ills us, is to embrace feeling better. Habits are a means to this end. They teach us the skills of change and they propel us towards our dreams, and they add more shine to the world.  By embracing feelings of success and adding more goodness to you day-to-day life, you are making the world brighter not only for yourself, but also for others. You are vanquishing shame and guilt and you are freeing yourself and others who have endured a lifetime of self trash talk. The most profound transformations I've shared with you in this book are not about discreet habits being formed, they are about essential shifts in experience, from suffering to less suffering, from fear to hope, from being overwhelmed to feeling empowered.

Isabel is embarrassed about her sadness. She’s embarrassed about being embarrassed about her sadness, she who has love and money. She tries looking discreetly into her bag for a Kleenex, without anything that could be called frantic rummaging. She ponders the prospect that decadent unhappiness might, in its way, be worse than genuine, legitimate despair. Which is, as she knows, a decadent question to pose at all.

we stared at each other, and I knew we were both thinking about the same exact thing: the night before. Not the long talk we’d had about our families—and that raw honesty we’d given each other—but about what happened after that. The movie. The damn movie. I didn’t know what the hell I’d been thinking, fully fucking aware I was already mopey, when I asked if he wanted to watch my favorite movie as a kid. I’d watched it hundreds of times. Hundreds of times. It felt like love and hope. And I was an idiot. And Aiden, being a nice person who apparently let me get away with most of the things I wanted, said, “Sure. I might fall asleep during it.” He hadn’t fallen asleep. If there was one thing I learned that night was that no one was impervious to Little Foot losing his mom. Nobody. He’d only slightly rolled his eyes when the cartoon started, but when I glanced over at him, he’d been watching faithfully. When that awful, terrible, why-would-you-do-that-to-children-and-to-humanity-in-general part came on The Land Before Time, my heart still hadn’t learned how to cope and I was feeling so low, the hiccups coming out were worse than usual. My vision got cloudy. I got choked up. Tears were coming out of my eyes like the powerful Mississippi. Time and dozens of viewings hadn’t toughened me up at all. And as I’d wiped at my face and tried to remind myself it was just a movie and a young dinosaur hadn’t lost his beloved mom, I heard a sniffle. A sniffle that wasn’t my own. I turned not-so-discreetly and saw him. I saw the starry eyes and the way his throat bobbed with a gulp. Then I saw the sideways look he shot me as I sat there dealing with my own emotions, and we stared at each other. In silence. The big guy wasn’t handling it, and if there were ever a time in any universe, watching any movie, this would be the cause of it. All I could do was nod at him, get up to my knees, and lean over so I could wrap my arms around his neck and tell him in as soothing of a voice as I could get together, “I know, big guy. I know,” even as another round of tears came out of my eyes and possibly some snot out of my nose. The miraculous part was that he let me. Aiden sat there and let me hug him, let me put my cheek over the top of his head and let him know it was okay. Maybe it happened because we’d just been talking about the faulty relationships we had with our families or maybe it was because a child losing its mother was just about the saddest thing in the world, especially when it was an innocent animal, I don’t know. But it was sad as shit. He sniffed—on any other person smaller than him it would have been considered a sniffle—and I squeezed my arms around him a little tighter before going back to my side of the bed where we finished watching the movie

Nobody knows your sorrows. It is best to keep it that way, as expressing sadness often invites pity. Sensitive women or young people often find pity consoling, and so they pervert their tearfulness into superficial melancholy in order to be further comforted. Some may become dependent on this superficial comfort, and will entangle themselves in darkness so that those around them will constantly try to “brighten” their spirits. Some call this “the depression.” Make it a regular habit to deny sadness when someone asks how you are coping. When you publicize your lament, the dead feel you’ve cheapened their absence, as though you’re taking advantage of their deaths to reap the attention you secretly wished for yourself while they were dying. When you mourn openly, the dead feel as though they’ve been murdered. If you must weep, do it in the bath, or in bed alone at night. Do not dedicate your sadness to anything but the dead. It is easy to confuse things, which is another reason to be discreet.

Deep blue like the hour between the dog and the wolf. An attractively scooped neckline. Sleeves and hemline a length and cut you would call kind. Buttons in back like discreetly sealed lips. Good give in the fabric. Double lined. The sort of dress that looks like nothing but a sad dark sack on the hanger, but on the body it’s a different story. Takes extremely well to accessories. My mother loved this sort of dress. At whatever weight she was—thin, fat, middling—she owned an iteration. I saw her wear it to work, lunch with friends, on dates, to movies, parties, funerals. I saw her wear it alone in her apartment for days on end. Scratch at a stain on the boob. Shit. The hemline begin to unravel. Fuck fuck fuck. Do you have a safety pin? Holes begin to appear in the armpits. Jesus. The sleeves fray. Well. That’s that, isn’t it? She wore it so much she’d wear it out and then she’d have to hunt for another, whip through the plus-size racks for something that fit just as impossibly well, that was just as dignified, just as forgiving in its plain dark elegance.

A woman paralyzed by her own selfishness and triviality, a woman who knew she should love her life more than she did but couldn’t seem to love her life beyond a few odd inconsequential incidents. It is, in fact, time to start dating again. But Dan has no idea what that means for a gay man well into his thirties who has neither money nor abs. - if you’re delivering a song, there are instances when the veil of the ordinary falls away and you are, fleetingly, a supernatural being, with music rampaging through you and soaring out into a crowd. You connect, you’re giving it, you’re the living sweat-slicked manifestation of music itself, the crowd feels it as piercingly as you do. Always, almost always, you “spot a girl. She doesn’t need to be pretty. She’s the love of somebody’s life (you hope she is), and for those few seconds she’s the love of yours, you’re singing to her and she’s singing back to you, by raising her arms over her head and swinging her hips, adoring you or, rather, adoring some being who is you and the song combined, able to touch her everywhere. It’s the briefest of love affairs. - Isabel is embarrassed about her sadness. She’s embarrassed about being embarrassed about her sadness, she who has love and money. She tries looking discreetly into her bag for a Kleenex, without anything that could be called frantic rummaging. She ponders the prospect that decadent unhappiness might, in its way, be worse than genuine, legitimate despair. Which is, as she knows, a decadent question to pose at all. - members of a biological aristocracy - Dan is taken by a tremor of scorn twisted up with painful affection, as if they were two names for the same emotion - but that’s my narcissism speaking ive been working on the idea that there are other people in the world - Beyond lust there’s a purity, you know? Does it ever get to be too late? If neither of you abuses the dog (should they finally get a dog?) or leaves the children in the car on a hot day. Does it ever become irreparable? If so, when? How do you, how does any“one, know when they cross over from working through this to it’s too late? Is there (she suspects there must be) an interlude during which you’re so bored or disappointed or ambushed by regret that it is, truly, too late? Or, more to the point, do we arrive at it’s too late over and over again, only to return to working through this before it’s too late arrives, yet again? Do you think we ever really survive our childhoods? Most mothers think their children are amazing and singular people. Most mothers are wrong about that. You’re beautiful in your own skin. You brought with you into the world some kind of human amazingness, and you can depend on it, always. Please try not to ever let anybody talk you out of that. She says, “You’re not in love with me.” “Trust me. I’ve had a lot of experience at not being in love with people. I’ve been not in love with pretty much everybody, all my life.” She wonders how many women think more kindly and, all right, more lustfully toward their husbands after they’ve left them. Maybe someone’s done a study. “If you’re determined to be insulted.

Their corner She withdrew her hand from his soft but firm grip, And that was all about their romantic trip, She went her way and he went his way, And they got busy chasing the mammons of the day, The hands that held on to each other had slipped away, To feed the obsequious vanities of every new day, But at that discreet corner where she freed her hand, There she does often for a moments few stand, To hold the same sensation and to grab the same feeling, Under which her heart had discovered a new healing, And as her bus arrives, she occupies her seat, And keeps looking at the fading away corner in that narrow street, Where at dusk two shadows often meet, Holding each others hands as they wish and greet, The memory of the hands that held on to each other, Under the sun, under the moon, under the rain, in every weather, The man stands there moments after the woman has left, And his mind turns contemplative in ways simple yet deft, He too catches the bus and goes away, Leaving behind the shadows that you will find there every night and every day, Today the woman did not visit the corner, Today the man too did not surrender, His wishes and his desires, To this corner where he often her memories admires, And where she experiences his sensations crawling all over her, This corner where she felt him and he felt her, Where could they be wondered the street? And the corner, sadly in its obscurity clad dimension did retreat, The following day, they walked together holding their hands again, The street overflowed with joy and the corner had nothing left to disdain, They caught the bus together and looked at the corner and the narrow street, Where they now often meet, And the corner resonates with their whispering smiles, Because now in their minds they cover journeys of endless miles!

At Tolimundarni, on the fringe of the war zone itself, they’d been thrown off the train by military police who weren’t falling for Y’sul’s pre-emptively outrage-fuelled arguments regarding the summit-like priority and blatant extreme officiality of an expedition - nay, a quest! - he was undertaking with these - yes, these, two - famous, well-connected, honoured alien guests of immeasurably high intrinsic pan-systemic cross-species reputation, concerning a matter of the utmost import the exact details of which he was sadly not at liberty to divulge even to such patently important and obviously discreet members of the armed forces as themselves, but who would, nevertheless, he was sure, entirely understand the significance of their mission and thus their clear right to be accorded unhindered passage due to simple good taste and a fine appreciation of natural justice and would in no way be swayed by the fact that their cooperation would be repaid in levels of subsequent kudos almost beyond crediting…

Bridges Life did not appear to breathe here, It was covered in endless rounds of thread of fear, So it tread quietly along the fringes, Scared that it might be the cause of collapsing bridges, Bridges that connected life with hope, And it watched these bridges from a distance placing itself on a discreet slope, But it dared not cross them, none of them, It looked at them in desperation, especially some, For it often crossed them to renew its reserves of liveliness, But now it feels pervaded by a deep feeling of sadness, Life here seems to be a part of some sort of purgatory, Waiting to cross over and leave behind this existence derogatory, It may not be a perspicuous show of feelings, But here these are life’s daily dealings, And I wonder what about life’s own posterity, Because in this land of death life somehow loses all its virility, Tamed by some obnoxious devil, Who has had a diabolic conception and then raised by some heinous evil, Maybe that is why the bridges look so frail and hopeless themselves, Bearing stacks of hopelessness displayed on hope’s own shelves, For when life does not cross the bridges of hope, It is death that forsakes life and then time withdraws its rope, That maintains the perfect cohesion, Between beginnings and ends , between fission and fusion, And when this balance is lost anywhere, Life is cast into a place where there exists life everywhere, But nothing else nowhere, Just life, no hopes, no beauty, no bliss, no summer, a life that becomes its own prisoner in this infinity somewhere, However, now the bridges have fallen, but few still stand, And life that is tired of living without hope, feels the dying hope’s hand, And like the rope of time it pulls it unto itself, and makes life cross the bridge, Thus, life once again walks on the happy ridge, Hoping to live another day, feel life in a better and different way, For living the same moment of time begets no joy, if it is lived the same way everyday, And time weaves its threads of mystery and surprises around it, Then death too gets woven somewhere in this loop of time, and life finally says, “so be it!” And it jumps into the sea of time and collects its moments of myriad experiences, While time registers all these instances, And when the loop of death unwinds, In it a new loop of life it always finds, Now, even if the bridges may fall and time may end, Life has learned to create moments of happiness that never end!

Old age homes are, sadly, a pre-coffin portal, with stays of varied duration – often wheel-chaired in and usually gurneyed out to a discreetly parked black van. Long-term residents could quickly categorise the newbies in terms of the three M’s – mobility, marbles, and months left.

Will it help you do what you already want to do? Will it help you feel successful? The answers to those questions is freeing because if the change program doesn't satisfy these two requirements, it's not worth your time.  The quality of our life on planet earth depends on the choices we make every day. Choices about how we spend our time, how we live our lives, and most important, how we treat ourselves and others. I am sad to see how people seem to be more bitter, divided, and overwhelmed than ever these days. We are as a global community, increasingly disconnected from ourselves and other people. The first step toward fixing what ills us, is to embrace feeling better. Habits are a means to this end. They teach us the skills of change and they propel us towards our dreams, and they add more shine to the world.  By embracing feelings of success and adding more goodness to you day-to-day life, you are making the world brighter not only for yourself, but also for others. You are vanquishing shame and guilt and you are freeing yourself and others who have endured a lifetime of self trash talk. The most profound transformations I've shared with you in this book are not about discreet habits being formed, they are about essential shifts in experience, from suffering to less suffering, from fear to hope, from being overwhelmed to feeling empowered.

What kind of male swears at a woman?” “Well, sir,” murmured Tiller after a discreet cough, “in fiction it is the—ah—Dashiell Hammett type, sir.” “Ah. Heart of gold beneath hardboiled exterior?” “Yes, sir. Blasphemy, the use of violence…” “Let’s restrict ourselves to life as it is lived, Tiller. By the way, I infer you’re an addict of detective fiction.” “Oh, yes, sir! And I’ve read many of your own, sir, and—” “Hmm,” said Ellery hastily. “Let that pass. In real life, Tiller?” “I fear,” said the valet in a sad murmur, “that there are few hearts of gold in real life, sir. Hard exteriors, certainly. I should say, sir, that there are two general types of woman-abusing men. Confirmed misogynists, sir, and—husbands.

We had entered the museum together, but soon I was separated from the group. I lingered near the start of the display, fascinated as well as repelled, transported to the days of my youth in Rhodesia, as I listened to an interview. It was a filmed interview, on a loop, and so the images and the words recurred at regular intervals. A white woman, in her mid-thirties, speaking with those clipped southern African vowels, was setting out her concerns about majority rule. I cannot remember any more detail. But in familiar code-word language, in a reasonable tone, quite matter of fact, as if spelling out the obvious, she justified an evil system. Over, and over, and over again. It became the voice I had heard throughout my youth, and beyond. I watched and listened, mesmerised by this voice from the fifties. Then it hit me. I was overwhelmed by a great wash of sadness for generations lost during the scourge of apartheid. Not just for the millions who died, directly or indirectly, victims of war or preventable disease; but for the might-have-beens, the should-have-beens, the could-have-beens: the unread writers, the unheard musicians, the uncelebrated athletes, the talented and the ordinary – lost to Africa, lost to the world, sacrificed to prejudice. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I was weeping. Or to put it bluntly, I sobbed. There was none of the dignity that can be associated with the word ‘weep’. These were not discreet tears, not dignified drops, rolling down my cheeks. My shoulders shook and my nose ran copiously.