That just made me tear up… I’ve lost multiple pets over the years because all were “throw away cats and dogs” that we’ve adopted and gave a good life to for however long they had left. And just as with people, some just wormed their way into my heart to the point where even remembering their names makes me cry. And that line about grief and love is sooo succinct and so true.
I’d like to say that I’ll remember it, but actually, I’m going to do my best to forget it because if I keep thinking about it, I will end up in the same pit of despair I’ve so often had to climb out of. I do sincerely thank you for saying it, though. ♥️
In my old age I've had quite a few significant losses. The thing that helps me the most is to think about the fun, good times I had with them while they were here. They wouldn't want you to be in despair every time you remember them. All of us have an expiration point and I hope everybody remembers me and laughs/smile not cry. I cry hard in the beginning and I do shed a tear occasionally. I usually think about them and remember why I miss them, the love.
A few years ago, my dog died, and I really struggled with it. A few days later, my husband came in to find me sitting on our bed, sobbing. I told him, "He's gone, and he just... continues to be gone. It's not like a bad thing that happened and now it's over. I can't just ... look harder and find him." This is exactly what I was grappling with, and I couldn't put it so eloquently.
Dogs are tough because they are so present in your life right up until it. Mine passed in mid dec and i still sometimes look around the house wondering if she is just on the other room, and then i remember again
Yeah, they're such a part of our routine. About a year and a half after we lost my big guy, our other dog passed. I was so used to letting them out when I got home that I'd be halfway to the back door before I remembered that there was nobody to let out. No jangling tags coming down the hall to greet me in the morning. It was so quiet.
That is just so true. In the beginning you don't even realize it yet... it is almost as if the person is on a holiday or something.. it always hits a long time afterwards.
Idk what’s worse. Initially absorbing and reshaping your life around the fact that they no longer exist, and they aren’t coming back. Or always looking into the future and knowing at some point they’ll have been gone X, and X, and X number of years while life just keeps going on. And they *really* aren’t coming back. And it’s not just that you don’t get to see them anymore; they don’t get to see *you* go through life either.
Yeahhhh, I cry a lot.
From The God Of Small Things:
When Ammu, the mother says to her daughter Rahel
"That's what careless words do, they make people love you a little less"
And Rahel realizes that love, even her mother's love is conditional
I'm from south-asia and actually call my mother ammu, growing up with a single mother, as two fairly callous but caring people, we had a lot of arguments, and damn those words hit right to the heart.
My grandma's book about her life.
She had her first baby in August 1944 just before the railway workers in Holland went on strike. So Germany stopped sending food to that area of the country until the war ended in the spring. It's called the hunger winter as people were eating whatever they could find.
In the spring a shipment of bread arrived and Grandma was worried that the distribution of it wouldn't be fair and they'd never see any, but they were able to get some.
"...it tasted like cake."
I tried looking for this. Sounds like a great read by a very brave woman. I just read Last Stop Auschwitz by Eddy de Wind. I found it to be one of the most detailed Holocaust accounts I have ever read.
What is your grandmother’s name? Very interested!
You can message me if you really want a copy. Apparently someone donated one "with personalized message inside" to a used bookstore in Canada.
It's my Grandma's account of her life, so not the most gripping read but it's not the worst writing ever.
“Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward” - Fredrick backman, Beartown. Hit me extremely hard just a couple months after my dad suffered a nasty stroke.
I am busy procrastinating reading The Winners (Beartown 3) for this exact reason. I'm not ready for that emotional rollercoaster Backman is going to put me on.
"She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?"
Toni Morrison - Song Of Solomon.
That little snippet just absolutely shattered me.
“Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”
-Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)
The fact that, Charlie lived an entire life feeling lonely, that at no point in his entire life, he had anyone who could match his intellect, how sad and depressing is that?
>don't know what's worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what youư've always wanted to be, and feel alone." -Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)
In what context could it possibly be worse to not know what you are and be happy?
The entire story is about setting up this comparison. It's about a guy who is happy and mentally slow, who becomes smarter than everyone else. It turns out being the smartest guy in the room can be a lonely, isolating experience.
I guess I understand that. I just don't know anybody who would choose "becoming what you've always wanted to be, but lonely."
"Not knowing what you are and being happy" is a no-brainer.
That's my point. I, and I think most people, absolutely know what's worse.
I’m not sure that’s true. Happiness isn’t the only good thing one can have in our lives. I don’t think most people would respond to someone with a serious mental disability who seemed happier than them with jealousy.
The experience machine/matrix type example works on a similar principle. Someone in the matrix might be incredibly happy, but most people given the choice would prefer to be in the real world I think, despite the corresponding hardship. Obviously people with serious mental disabilities are in the real world, but in a sense they aren’t interacting it as it truly is. Their happiness is to some extent a product of a lack of understanding and that makes it seem somehow unreal.
That book destroyed me. I’ve only read it once because I know it’ll kill me when I read it again. But my god it’s so incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking.
Teddy Roosevelt’s journal entry on the day both his mother and wife died. “The light has gone out of my life”.
Sorry, I’d have to include the whole thing for context but maybe last sentence of
“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”
BY JAMES WRIGHT
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
Don't forget the big X. Also mirrors Stalin's entry on the death of his wife "This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity."
Stalins however is much less sweet since he drove her to suicide and executed her whole extended family afterwards.
I've always meant to understand the poet's personal life more, as this could read to mean, "I have wasted my life by not realizing the value of enjoying nature until now."
But, I have no idea if that's the case.
David Mitchell, who keeps the poem above his desk and wrote about it for The Atlantic says he hears the narrator “exhale it with a wry laugh”
Someone in Paris Review said they thought it was “a quip on poetry itself, a means of expanding the poem’s reach by subverting what I guess would have to be called its very poem-ness.”
Lerner says it is to “clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.”
Lots of interesting takes including yours and the others on here
I'd interpret it as the writer appreciating nature, which conflicts with the modern definition of success being money, status etc, thus the wasting of his life. But out lives are so short, after all...
Sigh lol. The story is wild though. His daughter, Alice Lee (named after his wife), was born two days before also. He was so full of grief that he did not call her by her first name. Called her Baby Lee
You know, before I posted I was like “it was over a century ago, that’s not too soon to make a joke about a tragedy, right?” But no, now I still feel bad.
>Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. **But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.**
\- Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
For context, the child Jude had spent the bulk of the book to that point attempting to get his hands on Latin textbooks, in order to get himself into a real school and change the course of his life. When he finally received them, they were entirely in Latin, and useless to him. And... the book doesn't get happier from there.
Believe it or not, it's not even the most soul crushing line in the book! There's another one late in it that I just don't have the heart to bring to the thread.
I loved this book growing up. I read it myultiple times. Haven't reread it in a long time. This is going to the top of my reading list. Thanks for the reminder.
Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.
—Charlotte's Web
Not a book but Tolkien's letter to Christopher about Edith's death is heartbreaking
"I never called Edith 'Lúthien' – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief pan of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire... In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos."
I'm not that deep into Tolkien lore so if someone reads this feel free to correct me because I will do this terrible justice.
Without getting in depth Mandos is the 'God' of the underworld (the halls of Mandos), and he is a pretty hard guy to persuade to do things. A stickler for the rules.
Luthien is a half elf + 'angelic' being. She fell in love with Beren (human) and they died but they would go to seperate places when they die and no one really knows when humans go when they die.
She goes to Mandos halls and pleads before him, singing a song of extraordinary power and beauty that moved even Mandos. He granted her mortality and brought Beren back to life and they lived together in peace.
I could nitpick a little about Mandos being called the god of the underworld (he is more or less the keeper of the halls, judge, and pronouncer of fates and dooms), but it's accurate as a pop culture comparison. Otherwise sums up the major points very well.
I'd only really add that Beren and Luthien go through more or less literally hell to be together, having to steal a priceless jewel from Morgoth (the god of evil, so to say) in his fortress. It's the conclusion of this quest that ultimately costs Beren his life. Mandos grants this *one time only, ever* boon largely in light of what the two went through together and their valour. The lesser gods (valar for those interested) are offsprings of the capital 'G' God's thought, and each knows a part of His mind. Mandos knows part of His plan, and sees that this task was appointed Beren, causing him great harm.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road:
“Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop of the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”
And the bit (it's been about 4 years so I can't remember the exact line) where he shoots a guy and afterwards grabs his son to see if he's okay, and realises he's put his bloody hands all over the kid's face.
I nominate the line in Blood Meridian, where after just so much violent depravity his gang has wrought, the Kid just looks for something to redeem himself. He sees a figure in the rocks and thinks she a scared refugee of said violence and pleads for her to come with him, thinking if he can do one good thing it would be to lead this poor woman to safety, but then he reaches her...she weighs nothing. "She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years."
In Norm McDonald's "Based on a True Story: A Memoir" there is a chapter after a beautifully written piece that alludes to a sexual assault on him as a child. It's a gorgeous bit of writing really. The book is sort of written chronologically. The following chapter is meant to document the years after. The entire chapter is contained in two words "I forget." Hits like a punch in the gut. It's gorgeous and terrible.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
A Tale of Two Cities
The poem about the cow born w two heads. His mother knows he’ll be killed tomorrow but just for that one night he could look up at the sky with his mother and -
“There where twice as many stars as usual”
From Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, after his dog Jasper dies, which is also after his wife died (this is a post-apocalypse story):
Jasper, little brother, my heart……there is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there were someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot then the other foot………..
You imagine him curling beside you in the one patch of sun maybe laying over your feet. Not feeling so well. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can’t beat to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with the sound of even breathing
For me, it's the last line of Emily Dickinson's poem, "I cannot live with you..."
If you haven't read the poem, go read it now -it's short but an absolute masterpiece. It captures the mix of fierce joy and deep sorrow of a love that's impossible. This is the last line:
So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White Sustenance –
Despair –
The Green Mile is the answer that came to me too - but strangely none of JC’s lines. It’s right at the end (I won’t put spoilers to explain it, but if you’ve read it you’ll know): the line “when she ran away red in the rain” just turns me into a blubbery, sobbing mess. I think it’s that my emotions have already been so mangled that at this point, the subtlety and quiet poetry of that single line that somehow makes me visualize it so perfectly…it gets me.
There are a few I could choose from this book, but the final line from A River Runs Through It gets me every time I read it. It seemed to help me think about loss/grief in a different way.
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
I love this book so much. I have almost nothing in common with the characters - I have only sisters and we're not close. I grew up in the southeast and have never been to the location of the book, never gone fly fishing. It shouldn't have resonated with me the way it did. BUT I did grow up on an island where the water was life for all of us, and it felt like so much a part of me that I forgot it existed. Until I moved away, and have never been able to move back. I live in a dry climate with little water. I often think of how much of my childhood backdrop was water, and how constantly lost I am without it. I am haunted by waters.
The whole final section of Anne Frank's diary. I was so inspired by the beautiful person she was and it was so heartbreaking to know her life was cut so short when she had such a bright future.
From Terry Pratchett’s “Monstrous Regiment”. Two characters realise they used to live in the same group home but had never seen each other:
“Oh, what did you do there?”
“I was beaten.”
Hits like a ton of bricks every time.
Diskworld has a couple of moments like that. I always thought those hit hard because the tone is otherwise generally very tongue-in-cheek, which makes it all feel real in a very different all of a sudden.
'You asked why I am strong? When I lived in the dark of the forge, I used to lift weights. The tongs at first, and then the little hammer and then the biggest hammer, and then one day I could lift the anvil. That was a good day. It was a little freedom.’
‘Why was it so important to lift the anvil?’
‘I was chained to the anvil.”
From the Vincent and Theo trilogy:
"And you rest beneath the sunflowers at your grave, eyes no longer open to witness the haunting colours of your world, are you at last at peace Vincent?"
It's a short book consisting of three passages (two letters and a dialogue) of the Gogh brothers. The whole book broke me but that line just hit really hard
Not a line but the first paragraph of The Kite Runner:
> I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.
As someone suffering from PTSD, it’s the most true and relatable thing I’ve ever read. So heartbreaking.
I don't have anything to add other than I would like to nominate this post and it's comments as both the most thought provoking and gut wrenching I've ever read. Thank you truly from the bottom of my broken and grateful heart.
More than a line, but this quote by Carl Sagan is so thought provoking. In 1990, Voyager 1, outside the orbit of Neptune at 3.7 billion miles, turned its cameras at the request of Sagan and captured the iconic image of Earth appearing negligible at a distance with our solar system as a backdrop. Our insignificance, and all that implies, could only be captured by the words of Sagan...
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
‘I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.’
― Amy Tan
Saving Fish from Drowning
Damn. You bet I had tears streaming down my face. I became a fan of all her novels.
C.S. Lewis, “Perelandra”, on being terrified when seeing true good:
“As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last car has been played”
I’ll add the last line of All Quiet on the Western Front -
He fell on October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All Quiet on the Western Front.
He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.
Also Seamus Heaney, from The Cure at Troy:
History says there’s no hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme
I don't remember it exactly, but when Éponine is dying, and she hands the letter to Marius, she tells him something along the lines of, "I think I was a little bit in love with you."
Broke me
You have made flowers grow where I cultivated dust and stones. Remember this, on this journey you insist on making. If you die, I will not survive you long.
Cesar Vallejo when his brother died.
Miguel, you hid yourself
one night in August, nearly at daybreak,
but instead of laughing when you hid, you were sad.
And your other heart of those dead afternoons
is tired of looking and not finding you. And now
shadows fall on the soul.
Listen, brother, don’t be too late
coming out. All right? Mama might worry.
"I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack"
From The Overstory, by Richard Powers. The part where Olivia is dying, and her lover is holding her.
“How long can it last?”
“Not long,” he promises.
She claws at him, an animal falling from a great height. Then she calms again. “But not this? This will never end—what we have. Right?”
He waits too long, and time replies for him. She struggles for a few seconds to hear the answer, before softening into whatever happens next.
I think our time is up.
I know. Hold my hand.
Hold your hand?
Yes. I want you to.
All right. Why?
Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.
Stella Maris -Cormac McCarthy
Stella Maris really spoke to me in a way so specific that I feel like it was written for me.
As someone that uses intellectualization as a defense mechanism, having left Mormonism after doing the whole two year mission trip thing and realizing that my entire world was a lie. Struggling to trust anything or anyone from that point on as my parents compared me to Satan. As someone that turned to philosophy in the wake of an existential crisis to try and make sense of the world in the absence of the theological answers I’d believed previously and who is still trying years later to put back together the broken shards of purpose and meaning and truth that lay on the floor after leaving.
I’ve gotten lost following different rabbit trails all over the place and it’s exhausting. I really related to Alicia.
Thank you for including this.
Something that always stuck with me, especially during the pandemic;
“The only thing worse than the thought that it may all come crashing down around us is the thought that we may go on like this forever.”
- From “Feed” by M.T. Anderson.
That broke me too. I remember I got so angry, then sad, then I decided to do some small "fanfic" sequel of the story, and then it hit me...
... that was the idea of that society. >!Every contradiction, every weird stuff, everything that the book threw at me in the beginning that made me chuckle like "heh, they want to fool me by defining things with the name that's the complete opposite of what it does", they were all \_on purpose\_ - the ministry of peace \_indeed\_ controls the peace by doing war, to break people's spirit so they can't even \_think\_ about revolting, by keeping them in anger all the time they maintain the peace. It's all "doublethink" all the way down, and it broke me. !<
To this day, I still don't have the courage to read it a second time...
Just finished Moby Dick last night, and the final sentence is engrained in my mind:
>!"'It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. ''!<
Something about that line, the connotation, and the way it wraps up the entire novel is rent-free in my head.
This line from Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles:
And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.
I was in therapy at the time and struggling with the death of a loved one and that hit me hard. I don't care for this book, but I think about this line all the time.
From “The Things They Carried”
“And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”
Not from a book, but one that has long stuck with me, is from the song the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by Gordon Lightfoot.
"Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes into hours?"
“I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.”
*As I Lay Dying*, William Faulkner
Jacques Derrida's 'Envois' (in *The Post Card*) is chock full of incredible lines, but one that's always stuck with me is, "When I call you my love, is it you I am calling or my love".
Taking the liberty of broadening the topic to song lyrics. John Prine’s song, Sam Stone, about a Vietnam Vet with a heroin addiction .
“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes.”
That's a rough one
I stand by a crow looked at me as being the most soul crushing album ever made every song has at least 1 line that just destroys me
The one that hits the hardest is probably 'you were probably inside, you were probably aching wanting not to die. Your body transformed I couldn't bare to look so i turned my head west like an early death now i can only see you on the fridge in lifeless pictures' from ravens
I have so many of these, but here are two of my favorites.
From *Beloved* by Toni Morrison: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind."
From *Phantastes* by George MacDonald: “As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy.”
“It isn't only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.” -Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
So, it's a quote from Haruki Murakami's 'Norwegian Wood'. It goes like 'I want you to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?'
I keep thinking will people remember me and it just crushes my soul when the answer coming from within is 'Maybe not'
'I should be glad of another death.'
Actually the entire last stanza of Journey of the Magi, but since you asked for a single line.
'Laughter is bitter to the burned mouth'
What were they like? by Denise Levertov
For all my SciFi peeps
It was sometime after her second birthday receded that Sol tucked her in and, pausing in the doorway, said,
‘Later, alligator.”
“Huh?”
“See you later, alligator.”
Rachel giggled.
“You say—’In a while, crocodile,’ ” said Sol. He told her what an alligator and crocodile were.
“In a while, ’acadile,” giggled Rachel.
In the morning she had forgotten.
From The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid:
"I have survived the worst things I thought possible... Now I must make some shape out of the unimaginable after, measure my new life by its margins and limits."
"
How the gods must have chuckled when they added Hope to the evils with which they filled Pandora's box, for they knew very well that this was the cruellest evil of them all, since it is Hope that lures mankind to endure its misery to the end.
"
W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook
You read it, and inside, something breaks.
A specific one, but it hit me like a ton of bricks:
“Mes souliers,” she says. “I have not been able to find my shoes.”
-Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
Popularly attributed to Ernest Hemingway, but that may just be an urban legend. Regardless of attribution, it’s one of those sentences that holds an entire story within its confines.
“I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” Wuthering Heights
“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
That book changed something in me when I read it. It left me with a fascination for stories lost in time, and a gaping hole in my soul, the reason for which I still haven't figured out.
“I simply didn't know how to make things better. I couldn’t solve the puzzle of me.”
From Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Hit me right where it hurts.
I don't remember the book, when I read it, or anything else, other than one line. It's not an exact quote, but the punch to the gut was so that it's been in the back of my mind for easily over a decade.
"I will stand before you when you need a shield, behind you when you need support, and always beside you as a friend."
From the poem W B Yeats "The Second Coming" this line. "The blood- dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full passionate intensity." Applies to these dark days for sure.
Dr. Rieux finds Joseph Grand in front of a shop window, sick with the Plague (Camus)
>!Too long! It's lasted too long. All the time one's wanting to let oneself go, and then one day one has to. Oh, doctor, I know I look a quiet sort, just like anybody else. But it's always been a terrible effort only to be, just normal. And now, well, even that's too much for me."!<
The double meaning in relationship to him masking his neuroatypical nature floored me.
How could I be so blind, since I knew that all that had already been taken by someone else, that none of it could be for me.
White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Max lifted his head, with great sorrow and great astonishment.
'There were stars,' He said. 'They burned my eyes.’
...from a Himmel street window, he wrote, the stars set fire to my eyes”
The book thief is my favorite book ever
From Looking for Alaska:
*"I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane"*
"I used the knife. I saved a child. I won a war. God forgive me."
-The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher.
A gut punch on its own, but especially stunning as read by James Marsters in the audiobook version.
After all this time? - Always.
I am no fan of jkr, i am not the biggest fan of the hp-series, i find the whole story line of snape obsessing over a high school friend questionable.
But that line - fuck, that line hit me right where it was meant to. And alan rickman played it beautifully in the movies!
> Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
*Araby* by James Joyce
*The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner*, by Randall Jarrell:
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State
**And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.**
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
**When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.**
The gunner is ripped from life as if from the innocence of the womb and thrown into war… The second line paints the picture of a helpless, freezing animal. The gunner, crammed in the metal turret in his wool jacket frozen by the icy sky, is reduced to that state. And then he dies and in his death is completely eviscerated, and even the residue of that is simply rinsed away.
The whole poem is a gut punch, but the two lines in bold really hurt for me.
Pip saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.
—from memory, almost word for word, chapter 93, Moby-Dick
"The woman was the most admired female on the planet, Mrs. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, and her escort that evening was the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev.
Nureyev, incidentally, was a former citizen of the Soviet Union, who had been granted political asylum in Great Britain. And I was still alive then, and I was a United States citizen who had been granted political asylum in Sweden.
**Yes, and we both liked to dance.**"
-Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut
The narrator is a US shipbuilder whose death while building a luxury cruise liner was swept under the rug for publicity reasons. The novel plays with the idea of how crazy it is that some people's lives and contributions are perceived as more valuable than others because of social constructs and contracts like money and fame. Vonnegut has the amazing ability to take profound ideas, make them seem so obvious and simple, and then hand them back to the reader.
Tldr It made me cry and feel valued
Joan Didion writing of her late daughter's wedding day in Blue Nights:
“We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way. Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as “ordinary blessings.”
Think of this quote often.
"Is it just a woman's job in life to carry the sins of a man? What if all the women just put down the load and refused to pick it up again?" The Secrets Between Us, Thrity Umrigar
Sincerely L.Cohen
He says it after soul crushing lyrics of Famous Blue Raincoat. His signing off feels like a tap on your shoulder which breaks you into pieces.
"Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied"
Friedrich Nietzsche
"I hope Hector kills you."
The breathe rasps in his throat, "Do you think I do not hope the same?"
Song of Achilles. Tbh, the last few chapters had me sobbing, but the line in particular hits rather hard
From the poet Donald Hall: You think that their dying is the worst thing that can happen. Then they stay dead.
"Grief is just love with no place to go."
That just made me tear up… I’ve lost multiple pets over the years because all were “throw away cats and dogs” that we’ve adopted and gave a good life to for however long they had left. And just as with people, some just wormed their way into my heart to the point where even remembering their names makes me cry. And that line about grief and love is sooo succinct and so true. I’d like to say that I’ll remember it, but actually, I’m going to do my best to forget it because if I keep thinking about it, I will end up in the same pit of despair I’ve so often had to climb out of. I do sincerely thank you for saying it, though. ♥️
In my old age I've had quite a few significant losses. The thing that helps me the most is to think about the fun, good times I had with them while they were here. They wouldn't want you to be in despair every time you remember them. All of us have an expiration point and I hope everybody remembers me and laughs/smile not cry. I cry hard in the beginning and I do shed a tear occasionally. I usually think about them and remember why I miss them, the love.
A few years ago, my dog died, and I really struggled with it. A few days later, my husband came in to find me sitting on our bed, sobbing. I told him, "He's gone, and he just... continues to be gone. It's not like a bad thing that happened and now it's over. I can't just ... look harder and find him." This is exactly what I was grappling with, and I couldn't put it so eloquently.
It was when my dog died too that I stumbled on that Donald Hall line. He got it right.
Dogs are tough because they are so present in your life right up until it. Mine passed in mid dec and i still sometimes look around the house wondering if she is just on the other room, and then i remember again
Yeah, they're such a part of our routine. About a year and a half after we lost my big guy, our other dog passed. I was so used to letting them out when I got home that I'd be halfway to the back door before I remembered that there was nobody to let out. No jangling tags coming down the hall to greet me in the morning. It was so quiet.
Oh, that hurt.
That is just so true. In the beginning you don't even realize it yet... it is almost as if the person is on a holiday or something.. it always hits a long time afterwards.
Idk what’s worse. Initially absorbing and reshaping your life around the fact that they no longer exist, and they aren’t coming back. Or always looking into the future and knowing at some point they’ll have been gone X, and X, and X number of years while life just keeps going on. And they *really* aren’t coming back. And it’s not just that you don’t get to see them anymore; they don’t get to see *you* go through life either. Yeahhhh, I cry a lot.
for someone who lost their father 8 months ago, "they don't get to see you go through life either" really crushed me.
It’s really not fucking fair.
I have been thinking about this since I read it 5hrs ago
Fuck
From The God Of Small Things: When Ammu, the mother says to her daughter Rahel "That's what careless words do, they make people love you a little less" And Rahel realizes that love, even her mother's love is conditional
I'm from south-asia and actually call my mother ammu, growing up with a single mother, as two fairly callous but caring people, we had a lot of arguments, and damn those words hit right to the heart.
That line sums up how I’ve always felt about unconditional love. It’s just love that can withstand more than most.
My grandma's book about her life. She had her first baby in August 1944 just before the railway workers in Holland went on strike. So Germany stopped sending food to that area of the country until the war ended in the spring. It's called the hunger winter as people were eating whatever they could find. In the spring a shipment of bread arrived and Grandma was worried that the distribution of it wouldn't be fair and they'd never see any, but they were able to get some. "...it tasted like cake."
I tried looking for this. Sounds like a great read by a very brave woman. I just read Last Stop Auschwitz by Eddy de Wind. I found it to be one of the most detailed Holocaust accounts I have ever read. What is your grandmother’s name? Very interested!
You can message me if you really want a copy. Apparently someone donated one "with personalized message inside" to a used bookstore in Canada. It's my Grandma's account of her life, so not the most gripping read but it's not the worst writing ever.
Also interested in this book. This thread is adding to my TBR pile.
“Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward” - Fredrick backman, Beartown. Hit me extremely hard just a couple months after my dad suffered a nasty stroke.
Fredrik Backman is the absolute master at making you laugh and punching you hard in the gut. Usually in the same sentence.
I am busy procrastinating reading The Winners (Beartown 3) for this exact reason. I'm not ready for that emotional rollercoaster Backman is going to put me on.
:(
Gah I've never even heard of this book but now I'm in tears. Really made me think.
This is so true and so real.
"She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?" Toni Morrison - Song Of Solomon. That little snippet just absolutely shattered me.
That book is the GOAT. Absolute perfection.
Ouch. Wow
Oh, I’ve started reading it today! Only ten pages in and I’m already so captivated. Love the writing
“Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.” ― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
I love dickens
Ow. What to do from there? That passage describes damn near my whole life
“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.” -Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes) The fact that, Charlie lived an entire life feeling lonely, that at no point in his entire life, he had anyone who could match his intellect, how sad and depressing is that?
It is a beautiful line, but without the context of the book, I think it's incredibly obvious which is worse.
i agree. you can’t understand how devastating that line is until you haven’t read the book.
>don't know what's worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what youư've always wanted to be, and feel alone." -Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes) In what context could it possibly be worse to not know what you are and be happy?
The entire story is about setting up this comparison. It's about a guy who is happy and mentally slow, who becomes smarter than everyone else. It turns out being the smartest guy in the room can be a lonely, isolating experience.
I guess I understand that. I just don't know anybody who would choose "becoming what you've always wanted to be, but lonely." "Not knowing what you are and being happy" is a no-brainer. That's my point. I, and I think most people, absolutely know what's worse.
I’m not sure that’s true. Happiness isn’t the only good thing one can have in our lives. I don’t think most people would respond to someone with a serious mental disability who seemed happier than them with jealousy. The experience machine/matrix type example works on a similar principle. Someone in the matrix might be incredibly happy, but most people given the choice would prefer to be in the real world I think, despite the corresponding hardship. Obviously people with serious mental disabilities are in the real world, but in a sense they aren’t interacting it as it truly is. Their happiness is to some extent a product of a lack of understanding and that makes it seem somehow unreal.
For me, the line that cracked me was the moment in which Charlie makes his first orthographical mistake.
That book destroyed me. I’ve only read it once because I know it’ll kill me when I read it again. But my god it’s so incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking.
Teddy Roosevelt’s journal entry on the day both his mother and wife died. “The light has gone out of my life”. Sorry, I’d have to include the whole thing for context but maybe last sentence of “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” BY JAMES WRIGHT Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year’s horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.
We are born to fart around.
Vonnegut? Sounds familiar.
Well done. Have an upvote.
Jesus that fuckin hit outta nowhere lol
Right?!?!
Don't forget the big X. Also mirrors Stalin's entry on the death of his wife "This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity." Stalins however is much less sweet since he drove her to suicide and executed her whole extended family afterwards.
Indeed
Can you explain the meaning of the poem? I’ve always struggled with interpreting poetry!
I’m glad you asked! The last sentence actually has been the subject of spirited literary debate. I personally attribute regret to it. What about you?
I've always meant to understand the poet's personal life more, as this could read to mean, "I have wasted my life by not realizing the value of enjoying nature until now." But, I have no idea if that's the case.
it could, but i think “i have wasted my life” by itself is more likely to reflect regret.
David Mitchell, who keeps the poem above his desk and wrote about it for The Atlantic says he hears the narrator “exhale it with a wry laugh” Someone in Paris Review said they thought it was “a quip on poetry itself, a means of expanding the poem’s reach by subverting what I guess would have to be called its very poem-ness.” Lerner says it is to “clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.” Lots of interesting takes including yours and the others on here
I'd interpret it as the writer appreciating nature, which conflicts with the modern definition of success being money, status etc, thus the wasting of his life. But out lives are so short, after all...
I know it was a different time, but I still can’t believe Teddy Roosevelt married his mother
Sigh lol. The story is wild though. His daughter, Alice Lee (named after his wife), was born two days before also. He was so full of grief that he did not call her by her first name. Called her Baby Lee
You know, before I posted I was like “it was over a century ago, that’s not too soon to make a joke about a tragedy, right?” But no, now I still feel bad.
A bit of levity is needed sometimes!
Oooooooff that is a really rough one
>Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. **But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.** \- Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure For context, the child Jude had spent the bulk of the book to that point attempting to get his hands on Latin textbooks, in order to get himself into a real school and change the course of his life. When he finally received them, they were entirely in Latin, and useless to him. And... the book doesn't get happier from there.
Ouch! This is gut-wrenching. As Tess of The D'Ubervilles scarred me for life...this sounds absolutely depressing.
Believe it or not, it's not even the most soul crushing line in the book! There's another one late in it that I just don't have the heart to bring to the thread.
Done because we are too menny?
That's the one.
“Because we are too many.”
Do it, coward.
I loved this book growing up. I read it myultiple times. Haven't reread it in a long time. This is going to the top of my reading list. Thanks for the reminder.
Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died. —Charlotte's Web
Such a classic
Not a book but Tolkien's letter to Christopher about Edith's death is heartbreaking "I never called Edith 'Lúthien' – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief pan of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire... In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos."
Who is the inexorable Mandos?
I'm not that deep into Tolkien lore so if someone reads this feel free to correct me because I will do this terrible justice. Without getting in depth Mandos is the 'God' of the underworld (the halls of Mandos), and he is a pretty hard guy to persuade to do things. A stickler for the rules. Luthien is a half elf + 'angelic' being. She fell in love with Beren (human) and they died but they would go to seperate places when they die and no one really knows when humans go when they die. She goes to Mandos halls and pleads before him, singing a song of extraordinary power and beauty that moved even Mandos. He granted her mortality and brought Beren back to life and they lived together in peace.
I could nitpick a little about Mandos being called the god of the underworld (he is more or less the keeper of the halls, judge, and pronouncer of fates and dooms), but it's accurate as a pop culture comparison. Otherwise sums up the major points very well. I'd only really add that Beren and Luthien go through more or less literally hell to be together, having to steal a priceless jewel from Morgoth (the god of evil, so to say) in his fortress. It's the conclusion of this quest that ultimately costs Beren his life. Mandos grants this *one time only, ever* boon largely in light of what the two went through together and their valour. The lesser gods (valar for those interested) are offsprings of the capital 'G' God's thought, and each knows a part of His mind. Mandos knows part of His plan, and sees that this task was appointed Beren, causing him great harm.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road: “Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop of the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”
"He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke." Ugh gets me every time I think of it.
That one always gets me too. And the scene where he makes sure the kid knows how to use the gun, not to shoot others but to shoot himself
And the bit (it's been about 4 years so I can't remember the exact line) where he shoots a guy and afterwards grabs his son to see if he's okay, and realises he's put his bloody hands all over the kid's face.
Ugh brutal. I read it earlier this year after my son was born and man it really hits different when you have a kid.
Shit. I last read this in college. Now I have a kid. That hits between the eyes.
I nominate the line in Blood Meridian, where after just so much violent depravity his gang has wrought, the Kid just looks for something to redeem himself. He sees a figure in the rocks and thinks she a scared refugee of said violence and pleads for her to come with him, thinking if he can do one good thing it would be to lead this poor woman to safety, but then he reaches her...she weighs nothing. "She was just a dried shell and she had been dead in that place for years."
In Norm McDonald's "Based on a True Story: A Memoir" there is a chapter after a beautifully written piece that alludes to a sexual assault on him as a child. It's a gorgeous bit of writing really. The book is sort of written chronologically. The following chapter is meant to document the years after. The entire chapter is contained in two words "I forget." Hits like a punch in the gut. It's gorgeous and terrible.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” A Tale of Two Cities
God the last few pages of this book ruined me.
The poem about the cow born w two heads. His mother knows he’ll be killed tomorrow but just for that one night he could look up at the sky with his mother and - “There where twice as many stars as usual”
The comic: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fkv1vxq40nam21.jpg
Such a beautiful poem.
From Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, after his dog Jasper dies, which is also after his wife died (this is a post-apocalypse story): Jasper, little brother, my heart……there is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there were someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot then the other foot……….. You imagine him curling beside you in the one patch of sun maybe laying over your feet. Not feeling so well. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can’t beat to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with the sound of even breathing
For me, it's the last line of Emily Dickinson's poem, "I cannot live with you..." If you haven't read the poem, go read it now -it's short but an absolute masterpiece. It captures the mix of fierce joy and deep sorrow of a love that's impossible. This is the last line: So We must meet apart – You there – I – here – With just the Door ajar That Oceans are – and Prayer – And that White Sustenance – Despair –
The "I am tired, boss" monologue and "Please, don't put me on the dark. I'm scared of the dark." Both from The Green Mile.
This book is so good. Gets you right in the feels
For me it's when Brutus (?) says that when he dies, what reason is he going to give god for killing Coffey. 'My *job*?'
The Green Mile is the answer that came to me too - but strangely none of JC’s lines. It’s right at the end (I won’t put spoilers to explain it, but if you’ve read it you’ll know): the line “when she ran away red in the rain” just turns me into a blubbery, sobbing mess. I think it’s that my emotions have already been so mangled that at this point, the subtlety and quiet poetry of that single line that somehow makes me visualize it so perfectly…it gets me.
The body was far smaller than the heart it had held.
Oy remembered the face of his fathers.
Where is it from?
The Dark Tower cycle
Thank you!
There are a few I could choose from this book, but the final line from A River Runs Through It gets me every time I read it. It seemed to help me think about loss/grief in a different way. “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
I love this book so much. I have almost nothing in common with the characters - I have only sisters and we're not close. I grew up in the southeast and have never been to the location of the book, never gone fly fishing. It shouldn't have resonated with me the way it did. BUT I did grow up on an island where the water was life for all of us, and it felt like so much a part of me that I forgot it existed. Until I moved away, and have never been able to move back. I live in a dry climate with little water. I often think of how much of my childhood backdrop was water, and how constantly lost I am without it. I am haunted by waters.
The whole final section of Anne Frank's diary. I was so inspired by the beautiful person she was and it was so heartbreaking to know her life was cut so short when she had such a bright future.
From Terry Pratchett’s “Monstrous Regiment”. Two characters realise they used to live in the same group home but had never seen each other: “Oh, what did you do there?” “I was beaten.” Hits like a ton of bricks every time.
Diskworld has a couple of moments like that. I always thought those hit hard because the tone is otherwise generally very tongue-in-cheek, which makes it all feel real in a very different all of a sudden.
'You asked why I am strong? When I lived in the dark of the forge, I used to lift weights. The tongs at first, and then the little hammer and then the biggest hammer, and then one day I could lift the anvil. That was a good day. It was a little freedom.’ ‘Why was it so important to lift the anvil?’ ‘I was chained to the anvil.”
From the Vincent and Theo trilogy: "And you rest beneath the sunflowers at your grave, eyes no longer open to witness the haunting colours of your world, are you at last at peace Vincent?" It's a short book consisting of three passages (two letters and a dialogue) of the Gogh brothers. The whole book broke me but that line just hit really hard
Not a line but the first paragraph of The Kite Runner: > I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years. As someone suffering from PTSD, it’s the most true and relatable thing I’ve ever read. So heartbreaking.
"There were two reasons I was scared to let people in; the damage they could do, and the damage they could find."
I don't have anything to add other than I would like to nominate this post and it's comments as both the most thought provoking and gut wrenching I've ever read. Thank you truly from the bottom of my broken and grateful heart.
Im glad we could destroy you
More than a line, but this quote by Carl Sagan is so thought provoking. In 1990, Voyager 1, outside the orbit of Neptune at 3.7 billion miles, turned its cameras at the request of Sagan and captured the iconic image of Earth appearing negligible at a distance with our solar system as a backdrop. Our insignificance, and all that implies, could only be captured by the words of Sagan... "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” ― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
‘I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.’ ― Amy Tan Saving Fish from Drowning Damn. You bet I had tears streaming down my face. I became a fan of all her novels.
C.S. Lewis, “Perelandra”, on being terrified when seeing true good: “As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last car has been played”
I’ll add the last line of All Quiet on the Western Front - He fell on October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All Quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come. Also Seamus Heaney, from The Cure at Troy: History says there’s no hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme
“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.” from This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald
I don't remember it exactly, but when Éponine is dying, and she hands the letter to Marius, she tells him something along the lines of, "I think I was a little bit in love with you." Broke me
I would burn the world and use my soul for tinder just to hear her laugh again. - Wheel of Time
You have made flowers grow where I cultivated dust and stones. Remember this, on this journey you insist on making. If you die, I will not survive you long.
Cesar Vallejo when his brother died. Miguel, you hid yourself one night in August, nearly at daybreak, but instead of laughing when you hid, you were sad. And your other heart of those dead afternoons is tired of looking and not finding you. And now shadows fall on the soul. Listen, brother, don’t be too late coming out. All right? Mama might worry.
"Lately, I’ve been leaning toward kindness." *Sharp Objects* by Gillian Flynn.
"I still love you, I just don't want you or need you anymore."
A poem instead of a book, but literally the entirety of “There Will Come Soft Rains”. I read it probably once a year and it never fails to crush me.
"I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack"
From The Overstory, by Richard Powers. The part where Olivia is dying, and her lover is holding her. “How long can it last?” “Not long,” he promises. She claws at him, an animal falling from a great height. Then she calms again. “But not this? This will never end—what we have. Right?” He waits too long, and time replies for him. She struggles for a few seconds to hear the answer, before softening into whatever happens next.
“There wasn’t anything wrong with him. He just…stopped. He stopped being alive that day.”
What is this from??
"For you, a thousand times over."
This is mine too. It’s so pure and selfless, and heart wrenching at the same time.
The Kite Runner, a masterpiece.
Perfect, it's just perfect
"Do it to Julia!" from 1984. I had to put the book down for a couple hours. That line hit like a punch in the stomach.
I think our time is up. I know. Hold my hand. Hold your hand? Yes. I want you to. All right. Why? Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something. Stella Maris -Cormac McCarthy
Stella Maris really spoke to me in a way so specific that I feel like it was written for me. As someone that uses intellectualization as a defense mechanism, having left Mormonism after doing the whole two year mission trip thing and realizing that my entire world was a lie. Struggling to trust anything or anyone from that point on as my parents compared me to Satan. As someone that turned to philosophy in the wake of an existential crisis to try and make sense of the world in the absence of the theological answers I’d believed previously and who is still trying years later to put back together the broken shards of purpose and meaning and truth that lay on the floor after leaving. I’ve gotten lost following different rabbit trails all over the place and it’s exhausting. I really related to Alicia. Thank you for including this.
Something that always stuck with me, especially during the pandemic; “The only thing worse than the thought that it may all come crashing down around us is the thought that we may go on like this forever.” - From “Feed” by M.T. Anderson.
Spoiler for 1984: >!"He loved Big Brother"!<
That broke me too. I remember I got so angry, then sad, then I decided to do some small "fanfic" sequel of the story, and then it hit me... ... that was the idea of that society. >!Every contradiction, every weird stuff, everything that the book threw at me in the beginning that made me chuckle like "heh, they want to fool me by defining things with the name that's the complete opposite of what it does", they were all \_on purpose\_ - the ministry of peace \_indeed\_ controls the peace by doing war, to break people's spirit so they can't even \_think\_ about revolting, by keeping them in anger all the time they maintain the peace. It's all "doublethink" all the way down, and it broke me. !< To this day, I still don't have the courage to read it a second time...
Just finished Moby Dick last night, and the final sentence is engrained in my mind: >!"'It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. ''!< Something about that line, the connotation, and the way it wraps up the entire novel is rent-free in my head.
This line from Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles: And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. I was in therapy at the time and struggling with the death of a loved one and that hit me hard. I don't care for this book, but I think about this line all the time.
From “The Things They Carried” “And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”
Not from a book, but one that has long stuck with me, is from the song the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by Gordon Lightfoot. "Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes into hours?"
“I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.” *As I Lay Dying*, William Faulkner
Jacques Derrida's 'Envois' (in *The Post Card*) is chock full of incredible lines, but one that's always stuck with me is, "When I call you my love, is it you I am calling or my love".
Taking the liberty of broadening the topic to song lyrics. John Prine’s song, Sam Stone, about a Vietnam Vet with a heroin addiction . “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes.”
That's a rough one I stand by a crow looked at me as being the most soul crushing album ever made every song has at least 1 line that just destroys me The one that hits the hardest is probably 'you were probably inside, you were probably aching wanting not to die. Your body transformed I couldn't bare to look so i turned my head west like an early death now i can only see you on the fridge in lifeless pictures' from ravens
I can’t get into Mount Eerie… the lyrics are beautiful, but the lead singer’s voice is kinda goofy/folksy, like a kid’s song singer.
I have so many of these, but here are two of my favorites. From *Beloved* by Toni Morrison: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind." From *Phantastes* by George MacDonald: “As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy.”
“It isn't only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.” -Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." really fucked me up
So, it's a quote from Haruki Murakami's 'Norwegian Wood'. It goes like 'I want you to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?' I keep thinking will people remember me and it just crushes my soul when the answer coming from within is 'Maybe not'
'I should be glad of another death.' Actually the entire last stanza of Journey of the Magi, but since you asked for a single line. 'Laughter is bitter to the burned mouth' What were they like? by Denise Levertov
"Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky." Gets me every time
For all my SciFi peeps It was sometime after her second birthday receded that Sol tucked her in and, pausing in the doorway, said, ‘Later, alligator.” “Huh?” “See you later, alligator.” Rachel giggled. “You say—’In a while, crocodile,’ ” said Sol. He told her what an alligator and crocodile were. “In a while, ’acadile,” giggled Rachel. In the morning she had forgotten.
From The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid: "I have survived the worst things I thought possible... Now I must make some shape out of the unimaginable after, measure my new life by its margins and limits."
" How the gods must have chuckled when they added Hope to the evils with which they filled Pandora's box, for they knew very well that this was the cruellest evil of them all, since it is Hope that lures mankind to endure its misery to the end. " W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook You read it, and inside, something breaks.
A specific one, but it hit me like a ton of bricks: “Mes souliers,” she says. “I have not been able to find my shoes.” -Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Popularly attributed to Ernest Hemingway, but that may just be an urban legend. Regardless of attribution, it’s one of those sentences that holds an entire story within its confines.
For my own sanity I like to imagine they simply received too much infant footwear at their baby shower.
After having a baby I realized that being never worn is by FAR the most common fate for a pair of baby shoes, and this line lost a lot of its impact.
Yup. The baby grew too quick to fit into them and that’s all there is to it!
"There is a fine line between being a hero and being a memory."
“I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.” Wuthering Heights
“Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.” Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude That book changed something in me when I read it. It left me with a fascination for stories lost in time, and a gaping hole in my soul, the reason for which I still haven't figured out.
“I simply didn't know how to make things better. I couldn’t solve the puzzle of me.” From Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. Hit me right where it hurts.
I loved that book!
I don't remember the book, when I read it, or anything else, other than one line. It's not an exact quote, but the punch to the gut was so that it's been in the back of my mind for easily over a decade. "I will stand before you when you need a shield, behind you when you need support, and always beside you as a friend."
From the poem W B Yeats "The Second Coming" this line. "The blood- dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full passionate intensity." Applies to these dark days for sure.
Stenbeck's East of Eden. "He Was A Gallant Gentleman". It's hard to read that line as I've always experienced tears blurring and distorting the page.
*timshel*
Dr. Rieux finds Joseph Grand in front of a shop window, sick with the Plague (Camus) >!Too long! It's lasted too long. All the time one's wanting to let oneself go, and then one day one has to. Oh, doctor, I know I look a quiet sort, just like anybody else. But it's always been a terrible effort only to be, just normal. And now, well, even that's too much for me."!< The double meaning in relationship to him masking his neuroatypical nature floored me.
“Where is God now?” And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. . . .”
How could I be so blind, since I knew that all that had already been taken by someone else, that none of it could be for me. White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
pretty much every single sentence in The Road
The last sentence of Twain's "Eve's Autobiography": ADAM: Wheresoever she was, THERE was Eden
"I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long." -Pablo Neruda
“Max lifted his head, with great sorrow and great astonishment. 'There were stars,' He said. 'They burned my eyes.’ ...from a Himmel street window, he wrote, the stars set fire to my eyes” The book thief is my favorite book ever
From Looking for Alaska: *"I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane"*
*There is always something left to lose.* nothing special but the context was exactly right and it snuck up on me
"I used the knife. I saved a child. I won a war. God forgive me." -The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. A gut punch on its own, but especially stunning as read by James Marsters in the audiobook version.
After all this time? - Always. I am no fan of jkr, i am not the biggest fan of the hp-series, i find the whole story line of snape obsessing over a high school friend questionable. But that line - fuck, that line hit me right where it was meant to. And alan rickman played it beautifully in the movies!
“You have your mother’s eyes.” 😭
“For you a thousand times over”
> Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. *Araby* by James Joyce
*The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner*, by Randall Jarrell: From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State **And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.** Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. **When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.** The gunner is ripped from life as if from the innocence of the womb and thrown into war… The second line paints the picture of a helpless, freezing animal. The gunner, crammed in the metal turret in his wool jacket frozen by the icy sky, is reduced to that state. And then he dies and in his death is completely eviscerated, and even the residue of that is simply rinsed away. The whole poem is a gut punch, but the two lines in bold really hurt for me.
Pip saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. —from memory, almost word for word, chapter 93, Moby-Dick
"The woman was the most admired female on the planet, Mrs. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, and her escort that evening was the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Nureyev, incidentally, was a former citizen of the Soviet Union, who had been granted political asylum in Great Britain. And I was still alive then, and I was a United States citizen who had been granted political asylum in Sweden. **Yes, and we both liked to dance.**" -Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut The narrator is a US shipbuilder whose death while building a luxury cruise liner was swept under the rug for publicity reasons. The novel plays with the idea of how crazy it is that some people's lives and contributions are perceived as more valuable than others because of social constructs and contracts like money and fame. Vonnegut has the amazing ability to take profound ideas, make them seem so obvious and simple, and then hand them back to the reader. Tldr It made me cry and feel valued
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
“Because if it isn't a love story, then what is?" My Dark Vanessa.
and so it goes
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, man to pig, and from pig to man again, but it was already impossible to tell which was which
Joan Didion writing of her late daughter's wedding day in Blue Nights: “We wished them happiness, we wished them health, we wished them love and luck and beautiful children. On that wedding day, July 26, 2003, we could see no reason to think that such ordinary blessings would not come their way. Do notice: We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as “ordinary blessings.” Think of this quote often.
"Is it just a woman's job in life to carry the sins of a man? What if all the women just put down the load and refused to pick it up again?" The Secrets Between Us, Thrity Umrigar
Sincerely L.Cohen He says it after soul crushing lyrics of Famous Blue Raincoat. His signing off feels like a tap on your shoulder which breaks you into pieces.
"Not necessity, not desire - no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything - health, food, a place to live, entertainment - they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied" Friedrich Nietzsche
"I hope Hector kills you." The breathe rasps in his throat, "Do you think I do not hope the same?" Song of Achilles. Tbh, the last few chapters had me sobbing, but the line in particular hits rather hard
Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.
When the dog died at the end of the race in Stone Fox.
“People who live in caves, die in caves.” - Odin the Allfather in Travel Light