Heartbroken Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Heartbroken. Here they are! All 100 of them:

I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.
Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)
I wish someone had told me that love isn’t torture. Because I thought love was this thing that was supposed to tear you in two and leave you heartbroken and make your heart race in the worst way. I thought love was bombs and tears and blood. I did not know that it was supposed to make you lighter, not heavier. I didn’t know it was supposed to take only the kind of work that makes you softer. I thought love was war. I didn’t know it was supposed to… I didn’t know it was supposed to be peace.
Taylor Jenkins Reid (Daisy Jones & The Six)
Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds it’s way back to you.
Ranata Suzuki
As artists, we are eternally heartbroken.
Lady Gaga
There is an ocean of silence between us… and I am drowning in it.
Ranata Suzuki
The sweetest part of being a couple is sharing your life with someone else. But my life, evidently, had not been good enough to share.
Charlaine Harris (Club Dead (Sookie Stackhouse, #3))
To be rejected by someone doesn't mean you should also reject yourself or that you should think of yourself as a lesser person. It doesn't mean that nobody will ever love you anymore. Remember that only ONE person has rejected you at the moment, and it only hurt so much because to you, that person's opinion symbolized the opinion of the whole world, of God.
Jocelyn Soriano (Mend My Broken Heart)
…the sad part is, that I will probably end up loving you without you for much longer than I loved you when I knew you. Some people might find that strange. But the truth of it is that the amount of love you feel for someone and the impact they have on you as a person, is in no way relative to the amount of time you have known them.
Ranata Suzuki
If you cannot hold me in your arms, then hold my memory in high regard. And if I cannot be in your life, then at least let me live in your heart.
Ranata Suzuki
When you lose someone, you get used to living day to day without them. But you’ll never get used to the “10 second heartbreak.” That’s the time it takes to wake to full consciousness each day and remember…
Nina Guilbeau
I had someone once who made every day mean something. And now…. I am lost…. And nothing means anything anymore.
Ranata Suzuki
Yes, I understand why things had to happen this way. I understand his reason for causing me pain. But mere understanding does not chase away the hurt. It does not call upon the sun when dark clouds have loomed over me. Let the rain come then if it must come! And let it wash away the dust that hurt my eyes!
Jocelyn Soriano (Mend My Broken Heart)
When you experience loss, people say you’ll move through the 5 stages of grief…. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance ….. What they don’t tell you is that you’ll cycle through them all every day.
Ranata Suzuki
I think perhaps I will always hold a candle for you – even until it burns my hand. And when the light has long since gone …. I will be there in the darkness holding what remains, quite simply because I cannot let go.
Ranata Suzuki
If you’re searching for a quote that puts your feelings into words – you won’t find it. You can learn every language and read every word ever written – but you’ll never find what’s in your heart. How can you? He has it.
Ranata Suzuki
Love is never supposed to hurt. Love is supposed to heal, to be your haven from misery, to make living fucking worthwhile.
Mia Asher (Arsen: A Broken Love Story)
Well, you can't have heartbreak without love," Dan pointed out. "If your heart was really broken, then at least you know you really loved him.
Leila Sales (Past Perfect)
I’ve never felt so heartbroken and so in love at the same time. If you would’ve told me the day we met that you were going to break my heart— and that days, months, or even years would pass, that I would still be hurting like this—it wouldn’t have stopped me from falling in love with you.
Gail McHugh (Collide (Collide, #1))
I miss that feeling of connection. Knowing he was out there somewhere thinking about me at the same time I was thinking about him.
Ranata Suzuki
They'll say you are bad or perhaps you are mad or at least you should stay undercover. Your mind must be bare if you would dare to think you can love more than one lover.
David Rovics
He was both everything I could ever want… And nothing I could ever have…
Ranata Suzuki
I am heartbroken, but I have been heartbroken before, and this might be the best for which I can hope.
Lemony Snicket (The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #13))
I truly loved you, but now I'm walking away
Jonny Lang
Though these words will never find you, I hope that you knew I was thinking of you today….. and that I was wishing you every happiness. Love Always, The girl you loved once.
Ranata Suzuki
We hurt so much because we have lost a part of ourselves. If we have loved much, we must have given much also, and when everything's over, we feel as though we have lost everything.
Jocelyn Soriano (Mend My Broken Heart)
My dad had limitations. That's what my good-hearted mom always told us. He had limitations, but he meant no harm. It was kind of her to say, but he did do harm.
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
It’s difficult for me to imagine the rest of my life without you. But I suppose I don’t have to imagine it... I just have to live it
Ranata Suzuki
You put me through hell. On purpose. Made me suffer. And there’s no end in sight. I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, ace, but this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde shit ain’t cutting it with me.
Sylvia Day (Reflected in You (Crossfire, #2))
I raised you so high that every other man on earth is now doomed to live in your shadow.
Ranata Suzuki
He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot)
The last time I felt alive – I was looking into your eyes. Breathing your air…. touching your skin… … Saying goodbye…. The last time I felt alive…. I was dying.
Ranata Suzuki
It is our wounds that create in us a desire to reach for miracles. The fulfillment of such miracles depends on whether we let our wounds pull us down or lift us up towards our dreams.
Jocelyn Soriano (Mend My Broken Heart)
I'll understand if you don't want me. But I will be heartbroken. You are all I ever dreamed of and hoped for. You are much, much more. Please know that I didn't think I was mean-minded. But I realize I am. I don't want you to put your arms around me and say it's all right, that you forgive me. I want you to be sure that you do, and my love for you will last as long as I live. I can see no lightness, no humour, no joke to make. I just hope that we will be able to go back to when we had laughter, and the world was coloured, not black and white and grey. I am so sorry for hurting you. I could inflict all kinds of pain on myself, but it would not take back any I gave to you. - David Power
Maeve Binchy (Echoes)
It’s painful, loving someone from afar. Watching them – from the outside. The once familiar elements of their life reduced to nothing more than occasional mentions in conversations and faces changing in photographs….. They exist to you now as nothing more than living proof that something can still hurt you … with no contact at all.
Ranata Suzuki
Note to self ; He doesn't care anymore.
Lyla Tyela Belikov
Love is as simple as the absence of self given to another. God, when invited, fills the void of any unrequited love; hence loving is how one is drawn closer to God no matter its most horrific repercussions.
Criss Jami (Venus in Arms)
How could you be heartbroken and happy at the same time?
Cassandra Clare (City of Lost Souls (The Mortal Instruments, #5))
My heart no longer felt as if it belonged to me. It now felt as it had been stolen, torn from my chest by someone who wanted no part of it.
Meredith T. Taylor (Churning Waters (The Churning Waters Saga, #1))
time made me stronger, you're no longer on my mind
Boyz II Men
I wept bitterly, surrendering momentarily to my fear and heartbroken confusion, but slowly I began to quiet a bit, as Jamie stroked my neck and back, offering me the comfort of his broad, warm chest. My sobs lessened and I began to calm myself, leaning tiredly into the curve of his shoulder. No wonder he was so good with horses, I thought blearily, feeling his fingers rubbing gently behind my ears, listening to the soothing, incomprehensible speech. If I were a horse, I'd let him ride me anywhere.
Diana Gabaldon (Outlander (Outlander, #1))
Your smile and your laughter lit my whole world.
Ranata Suzuki
If you have to speculate if someone loves you and wants to be with you, chances are they don't. It's not that complicated. Love, in most cases, betrays the one feeling it. Don't waste moments waiting and wondering. Don't throw away your time dreaming of someone that doesn't want you. No one is that amazing, certainly not the one who would pass you up.
Donna Lynn Hope
I didn’t love you to seek revenge. I didn’t love you out of loneliness or unhappiness. I didn’t love you for any of the misguided reasons that time might convince you I did. I just loved you because you’re you.
Ranata Suzuki
I threw his framed picture off my balcony just to hear my heart break.
Kimberly Novosel (Loved)
You should never start thinking about 'what might have been,' and you should also never start thinking about another boy when you're heartbroken over someone else.
Lauren Barnholdt (Two-Way Street)
I would have followed you to hell and back... if only you'd lead me back.
Ranata Suzuki
I have poured my heart out …. And now I am empty.
Ranata Suzuki
I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it.
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
There was no other way to say it. After being heartbroken for so long, I had made myself completely numb inside. Maybe not from physical pain, but anything emotional, yes. Sexual pleasure? Numb to that, too. I’d have been a great actress. After all, I had the perfect, mind-blowing orgasm down to an art. Suppose I deserve an Oscar for that.
Jennifer Salaiz
The mark of a real man, is a man who can allow himself to fall deeply in love with a woman. But the reason why a man is often heartbroken, is because a woman can become overcome by the reality that she has made a man out of a boy, because it's just such an overwhelming process, a beautiful and powerful evolution. Therefore, a man needs to fall in love with a woman who knows that men don't happen every day, and when a man does happen, that's a gift! A gift not always given, and one that shouldn't be thrown away so easily.
C. JoyBell C.
So this— This is agony. This is what they talk about when they talk about heartbreak. I thought I knew what it was like before. I thought I knew, with perfect clarity, what it felt like to have my heart broken, but now—now I finally understand.
Tahereh Mafi (Restore Me (Shatter Me, #4))
The only place I ever felt at home was with you. There isn’t a place for me anywhere anymore… I’ve been evicted.
Ranata Suzuki
When we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we grow up, and we were free to travel around the counry, we would always go and find it in Norfolk...And that's why years and years later, that day Tommy and I found another copy of that lost tape of mine in a town on the Norfolk coast, we didn't just think it pretty funny; we both felt deep down some tug, some old wish to believe again in something that was once close to our hearts.
Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go)
I heard you were a player , okay , lets play a game. We'll flirt, play fights, talk 24/7, say goodmorning and goodnight every day, give each other nicknames, hang out, talk on the phone for hours, take cute pictures together, make promises to each other and hold each other. And whoever falls in love first, loses.
Lyla Tyela Belikov
There is something mystically sad and beautiful about how i will never see you again but meet you again and again in poetry.
Sanober Khan (A Thousand Flamingos)
Raw love, like raw heartache, could blindside you.
Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)
I looked at Mommy but quickly shook my head. "I don't want to miss her." Becky put her soft, warm hand on my shoulder, just like Mommy used to when I was upset. "Your mom wants to be here with you. She wants that very much. But Jesus wants her with him right now." I frowned. "I need her more than Jesus does.
Jamie McGuire (Walking Disaster (Beautiful, #2))
It’s times like this…. when it’s over a year later and I’m still crying over you that I want to turn to you and say: See…. This is why I asked you never to kiss me.
Ranata Suzuki
...I feel like a traitor, a phony, a fake. But I am a hypocrite with the best intentions, and I need kissing desperately.
Coco J. Ginger
I was born the day you kissed me, died the day you left me, but lived for the time that you loved me
Anju
They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
We cannot love a person with an all accepting, transcending and encompassing love without being hurt somewhat, without being disappointed, without being failed of our expectations. We cannot love without being broken, yet we cannot continue in love without being stronger than our brokenness.
Jocelyn Soriano (Mend My Broken Heart)
Why do you think you deserve happily ever after? You were offered it before and tossed it away.
Donna Lynn Hope
So now there is not even anyone to dream about, and what an odd feeling. I don’t have the strength to put together the features of a fantasy face. I am heartbroken over no one, over having nobody to wish for, nobody to hope for. I am heartbroken, usually, over someone. Now I am heartbroken over no one
Jenny Slate (Little Weirds)
I try to do something positive – I socialise more… But deep down I know the truth. An entire world of people can never replace the one that I’ve lost.
Ranata Suzuki
my dear, I have nothing to say. my heart burns like the evening sky.
Sanober Khan
This is the world we live in, a world of safety and happiness and order, a world without love. A world where children crack their heads on stone fireplaces and nearly gnaw off their tongues and the parents are concerned. Not heartbroken, frantic, desperate. Concerned, as they are when you fail mathematics, as they are when they are late to pay their taxes.
Lauren Oliver (Pandemonium (Delirium, #2))
There comes a point where you no longer care if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel or not. You’re just sick of the tunnel.
Ranata Suzuki
At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost more than unbridled passion--the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man--was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then--I don't know how it was-- I couldn't bear to let you go--possibly to Arabella again--and so I got to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you.
Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure)
He looked at me like I was the stars when all I’d ever felt like was the dark nothingness between them.
Ranata Suzuki
If you are heartbroken right now, then I feel for you deeply, Evelyn says. That I have the utmost respect for. Thats the sort of thing that can split a person in two. But I wasnt heartbroken when Don left me. I simply felt like my marriage had failed. And those are very different things.
Taylor Jenkins Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)
I have met so many heartbroken men. It's a catastrophe. Women are easily overcome by the process that happens when a boy falls in love and becomes a man. Men's hearts are so often broken. Still, you have to leave your broken heart in a place where- when the woman who knows how to see what a gift is, sees it- your broken heart can be picked up again. I think that it takes a very strong woman (inner strength) to be able to handle a man falling in love with her, without morphing into a monster (the process is a very potent process, it can poison a woman, really). A woman thinks she wants a man to fall in love with her for all the perks that come with it; but when a real love really does happen, when a real man shows his manhood; it's often too powerful a thing to endure without being poisoned. Hence, all the heartbroken men. But, I do believe that there are strong women in the world today. A few. But there are. You could say, that the mark of a real woman, is a woman who can handle a man- a man falling in love with her. A woman who can recognize that, and keep it with her.
C. JoyBell C.
I decided I would fill the emptiness in me with God and with paint.
Kimberly Novosel
Our parting was like a stalemate…. Neither of us won. Yet both of us lost. And worse still … that unshakable feeling that nothing was ever really finished.
Ranata Suzuki
I would have done anything for him. But these days, I don't want to do anything. I don't want to get drunk or go to a wild party or make out with random boys-not that I've ever wanted to. I don't want to watch chick flicks or eat ice cream or get a haircut or buy out half of the mall. I don't want cold, cruel revenge. I don't want to see him suffer when karma catches up with him and kick his ass. I don't even want to talk to him right now, simply because it would be awkward and pathetic and I wouldn't know what to say to him. Yes, there is self-control, preventing me from being stupid and acting like a desperate doofus in the manner most heartbroken people do. But there is also a weary numbness threatening to consume every inch of me: Isn't there a way for me to skip straight to the part where I'm fine again?
Marla Miniano (Every Girl's Guide to Heartache)
Mastering the art of seduction gives one a great power, and like any power, it's to be wielded with responsibility; a man who wields the art of seduction without a sense of responsibility and restraint is a walking proximity bomb of viral epidemics, needless procreation, heartbroken families, and shattered dreams.
Mike Norton
MISERABLE Release the toxic and infectious- Spreaders of misery, Souls destroying souls- And poisonous liars. Awaken from the hallucinations- And take back your heart. Reclaim your self-esteem- And leave the toxic be.
Giorge Leedy (Uninhibited From Lust To Love)
You can miss places. You can miss people. Just know that what you’re really missing is the way things were. And even if you could go there again…. see them again…. you can’t go back. They’re not the same. You’re not the same. The loss of them changed you.
Ranata Suzuki
Though I never really had you…. … to me you will always be the one that got away.
Ranata Suzuki
And I know it's over, but it's the same way I felt when you broke up with me.
Kiera Cass (The Elite (The Selection, #2))
Deep down, I think everybody wants to be ‘the one’ to someone. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that person to anyone else – but I do know you are that person to me. You are the one. The only one. And you always will be.
Ranata Suzuki
Ah, if everyone was as sensitive as you! There's no girl who hasn't gone through that. And it's all so unimportant!
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
They say “Follow your heart”…. …. But I can’t follow you where you’re going…
Ranata Suzuki
Though life has fated that we never cross paths again, don’t ever feel alone. For we are parallel …. and I will always be by your side.
Ranata Suzuki
... "As you wish." "But I'd like to remain your friend." He put his hands in his pockets. "Always.
Sarah J. Maas
He was acting like our kiss had broken him, and his reaction was breaking me.
Shannon A. Thompson (Seconds Before Sunrise (Timely Death, #2))
My heart’s been empty since you left - but still I refuse to put up a vacancy sign. I’m just not ready for anybody else to move in yet.
Ranata Suzuki
THAT’S HOW MY STORY ENDS. With the loss of everyone I have ever loved. With me, in a big, beautiful Upper East Side apartment, missing everyone who ever meant anything to me. When you write the ending, Monique, make sure it’s clear that I don’t love this apartment, that I don’t care about all my money, that I couldn’t give a rat’s ass if people think I’m a legend, that the adoration of millions of people never warmed my bed. When you write the ending, Monique, tell everyone that it is the people I miss. Tell everyone that I got it wrong. That I chose the wrong things most of the time. When you write the ending, Monique, make sure the reader understands that all I was ever really looking for was family. Make sure it’s clear that I found it. Make sure they know that I am heartbroken without it. Spell it out if you have to. Say that Evelyn Hugo doesn’t care if everyone forgets her name. Evelyn Hugo doesn’t care if everyone forgets she was ever alive. Better yet, remind them that Evelyn Hugo never existed. She was a person I made up for them. So that they would love me. Tell them that I was confused, for a very long time, about what love was. Tell them that I understand it now, and I don’t need their love anymore. Say to them, “Evelyn Hugo just wants to go home. It’s time for her to go to her daughter, and her lover, and her best friend, and her mother.” Tell them Evelyn Hugo says good-bye.
Taylor Jenkins Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)
You are cruel, Elias,” she whispers against my mouth. “To give a girl all she desires only to tear it away.” “This isn't the end for us, Laia of Serra.” I cannot give up what we could have. I don't care what bleeding vow I made. “Do you hear me? This is not our end.” “You've never been a liar.” She dashes her hands against the wetness in her eyes. “Don't start now.
Sabaa Tahir (A Reaper at the Gates (An Ember in the Ashes, #3))
Every quote, every book, every film seemed to suggest that ‘one day’ someone would come into my life and love me with an intensity and a passion I had never experienced before. And to their credit they were right; It all came and went so fast it really did feel as if it were just ‘one day’....
Ranata Suzuki
No one ever told me how sorrow traumatizes your heart, making you think it will never beat exactly the same way again. No one ever told me how grief feels like a wet sock in my mouth. One I’m forced to breathe through, thinking that with each breath I’ll come up short and suffocate.
Sarah Noffke (Awoken (The Lucidites, #1))
A day after I got my eye cut out, Gus showed up at the hospital. I was blind and heart-broken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, 'I have wonderful news!' and I was like, 'I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now,' and Gus said, 'This is wonderful news you want to hear,' and I asked him, 'Fine, what is it?' and he said, 'You are going to live a good long life filled with great and terrible moments you cannot even imagine yet!
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of the land... I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a clearer case of 'stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in.' I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. . . . The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity. Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.
Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass)
It didn’t hurt me. Not “hurt”. Hurt is a four letter word. It’s short, almost cute sounding. Aawwww, did that hurt? No. It didn’t hurt. Destroyed, Obliterated, Desecrated, Annihilated, Demolished, Shattered, or Demoralised maybe… But no. It didn’t hurt me. It didn’t “hurt” me at all.
Ranata Suzuki
And then the third night was after we broke up, which was worth a million matches but instead just took all I had. That night it felt that somehow by flicking them off the roof, the matches would burn down everything, the sparks from the tips of the flames torching the world and all the heartbroken people in it. Up in smoke I wanted everything, up in smoke I wanted you, although in a movie that wouldn’t work, even, too many effects, too showy for how tiny and bad I felt. Cut that fire from the film, no matter how much I watch it in dailies. But I want it anyway, Ed, I want what can’t possibly happen, and that is why we broke up.
Daniel Handler (Why We Broke Up)
Have you ever longed for someone so much, so deeply that you thought you would die? That your heart would just stop beating? I am longing now, but for whom I don't know. My whole body craves to be held. I am desperate to love and be loved. I want my mind to float into another's. I want to be set free from despair by the love I feel for another. I want to be physically part of someone else. I want to be joined. I want to be open and free to explore every part of them, as though I were exploring myself.
Tracey Emin (Strangeland)
...my father, [was] a mid-level phonecompany manager who treated my mother at best like an incompetent employee. At worst? He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room ... I'm sure he told himself: 'I never hit her'. I'm sure because of this technicality he never saw himself as an abuser. But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bad directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun.
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed form kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.
David Mitchell (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet)
The dogs left with us and we walked. I sobbed the whole way home, still heartbroken. My mom had no time for my whining. “Why are you crying?!” “Because Fufi loves another boy.” “So? Why would that hurt you? It didn’t cost you anything. Fufi’s here. She still loves you. She’s still your dog. So get over it.” Fufi was my first heartbreak. No one has ever betrayed me more than Fufi. It was a valuable lesson to me. The hard thing was understanding that Fufi wasn’t cheating on me with another boy. She was merely living her life to the fullest. Until I knew that she was going out on her own during the day, her other relationship hadn’t affected me at all. Fufi had no malicious intent. I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age. I have so many friends who still, as adults, wrestle with feelings of betrayal. They’ll come to me angry and crying and talking about how they’ve been cheated on and lied to, and I feel for them. I understand what they’re going through. I sit with them and buy them a drink and I say, “Friend, let me tell you the story of Fufi.
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood)
The Pomegranate The only legend I have ever loved is the story of a daughter lost in hell. And found and rescued there. Love and blackmail are the gist of it. Ceres and Persephone the names. And the best thing about the legend is I can enter it anywhere. And have. As a child in exile in a city of fogs and strange consonants, I read it first and at first I was an exiled child in the crackling dusk of the underworld, the stars blighted. Later I walked out in a summer twilight searching for my daughter at bed-time. When she came running I was ready to make any bargain to keep her. I carried her back past whitebeams and wasps and honey-scented buddleias. But I was Ceres then and I knew winter was in store for every leaf on every tree on that road. Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me. It is winter and the stars are hidden. I climb the stairs and stand where I can see my child asleep beside her teen magazines, her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit. The pomegranate! How did I forget it? She could have come home and been safe and ended the story and all our heart-broken searching but she reached out a hand and plucked a pomegranate. She put out her hand and pulled down the French sound for apple and the noise of stone and the proof that even in the place of death, at the heart of legend, in the midst of rocks full of unshed tears ready to be diamonds by the time the story was told, a child can be hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance. The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured. The suburb has cars and cable television. The veiled stars are above ground. It is another world. But what else can a mother give her daughter but such beautiful rifts in time? If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift. The legend will be hers as well as mine. She will enter it. As I have. She will wake up. She will hold the papery flushed skin in her hand. And to her lips. I will say nothing.
Eavan Boland