A Single Tear Quotes & Sayings

Grasping the doorknob, Tengo turned around one last time and was shocked to see a single tear running down from his father's eye. It shone a dull silver color under the ceiling's fluorescent light. To release that tear, his father must have squeezed every bit of strength from what little emotion he still had left. — Haruki Murakami

And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend. — Jane Hirshfield

We're tear-stained savages, sharing a single breath of life, death, and love. — E.K. Blair

Life is too short to hold in a single tear, a single laugh, a single breath. Biology is how we exist. Emotions are how we live. — Jewel E. Ann

The Bible teaches that the human struggle happens within a single entity - the human heart. The main human struggle is not between the heart and something else, but between forces that tear it in different directions. The great battle is deciding to what your heart's greatest love, hope, and trust will be directed — Timothy Keller

And somewhere in heaven, Versace sheds a single, perfect tear. — Rachel Caine

Go! dive into the Southern Sea, and when
Th'ast found, to trouble the nice sight of men,
A swelling pearl, and such whose single worth
Boasts all the wonders which the seas bring forth,
Give it Endymion's love, whose ev'ry tear
Would more enrich the skilful jeweller. — William Davenant

Life pulls down every person to the least possible negativity and thrusts them outward to shine. It is the fight that matters; when you reach the bottom, you are left with no choice but to pick yourself up and climb every difficult step. Feeling down
and letting situations tear you apart proves that we all are human and nothing more or less. So, there is no need to worry about the devastating moments; there will come a moment
when you will be forced to stand for your rights and make one single move that will pull you into the world of success. Seize the moment and grow, that's all you can do and that's why you are born. — Kavipriya Moorthy

I will never, ever regret stopping you from walking out of my life a second time, Kyle," she said in an emotional voice. "And I can prove it."
She reached for the buttons on her trench coat and undid them, one at a time. Then she opened the coat and let it drop to the floor.
And even if she didn't say a single word more, Kyle knew he would never again doubt the way Rylann felt about him.
She was wearing his flannel shirt.
"You kept it," he said softly. "All this time."
She nodded. "For nine years, I've held on to this darn shirt, literally dragging it across the country and back."
Kyle touched her cheek, gently brushing away a tear with his thumb. "Why?"
She paused hesitantly, and then with a tender smile, finally put it all on the line, too. "I guess I always hoped you'd come back for it someday. — Julie James

I've read there is no such thing as a single tear, that old poetic trope. And perhaps there isn't, since hers was simply a companion to my own. — Elizabeth Kostova

Be the man who has the spirit of a ruthless tiger, ravaging every dusty corner of my soul.
Be the man for whom I will tame myself voluntarily..
Be the man who can make me forget my birth date in moments of utter dellusion.
Be the man whose arms are my harbor, whose lips are my shore, and whose name is my only salvation.
Be the man who erases my past and draws my future with trails of roses and kisses.
Be the man who makes me sigh behind the windows of Poetry, longing to be written.
Be the man whose cigarette's ashes are confounded with mine.
Be the man whose voice moves mountains inside me.
Be the man whose eyes devour the innocence within me with every piercing glance.
Be the man for whom I will transform exceptions into rules.
Be the man who will dare to tear this poem from my hands.
The man who will rewrite with the uncertainty of the futur every single one of my verses. — Malak El Halabi

He looked ... very alone then, a single human in a monster-infested world, a fading bright spot surrounded by shadow. And despite my best intentions, my determination not to be a monster, I was part of the world that he feared. Part of the darkness that would drag him down and tear him apart.
I'm sorry Zeke — Julie Kagawa

It was the simplest of acts, the smallest of gestures, yet no one had taken the time to do something kind for her in a very long time. No one had made her feel special. Unbeknownst to her, a single, unfamiliar tear fell down her cheek as her worn and wounded body fell into a deep, safe slumber. — Madison Thorne Grey

To accept what is bitter; acceptance must not be allowed to project itself on to the bitterness and lessen it; otherwise the force and purity of the acceptance are proportionally lessened. For the object of the acceptance is to taste what is bitter, as such, and not anything else. (St. Thomas on the suffering of Christ.) - To say like Ivan Karamazov: nothing can possibly make up for a single tear from a single child. And yet to accept all tears, and the countless horrors which lie beyond tears. To accept these things not simply in so far as they may admit of compensations, but in themselves. To accept that they should exist, simply because they do exist.
To accept that event because it exists, and by this acceptance to love God through and beyond it. To accept that it should exist, because it does exist, what exactly does this mean? Is it not simply to recognize that it is?
When one loves God through and beyond evil as such, it is indeed God whom one loves. — Simone Weil

My soul is utterly frantic for that single place of perfect refuge from which I can clearly see the winds rip and hear the tempest tear, yet despite the ferocity of the tumult I rest in such a sublime peace it is as if neither existed at all. And if I have not yet found such a place, it is because I have not yet found God. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

That day, so many wept. Young and old, friends and strangers, black and white, men and women wept. The angels wept. Jesus wept. Coach Gabe Lewis, though, with his eyes on the lilies, shed not a single tear. — Nathan Barber

One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma. — Henri Frederic Amiel

A single tear forms, just in the corner of one eye, but it doesn't roll down my cheek; it merely crystallizes in the cold air, it grows and grows into a second giant globe that doesn't want to orbit with the world - it breaks off from the planet and plunges into infinity. — Ingeborg Bachmann

It was then that she realized she still had God. He was the only one who hadn't left her. He knew who she was, even if she didn't. A single tear formed in the corner of her eye as she thanked God for not abandoning her - especially when she needed Him most. — J.E.B. Spredemann

Shadows ran all around her and someone was talking to her but it was all just white noise. Goodbye solo she would never perform. Goodbye perfect night that never got the chance to end in Garrett's arms. Garrett, oh god. Goodbye love of her life, she had loved him and with the thought of never seeing him again her body gave up a single tear. It escaped her eye and coursed through the blood and dirt on her cheek making a single clean streak as the blackness took over. — Renee Jean

And Emily had yet to shed a single tear. It troubled her all the way back to the city, and she rode with one hand sandwiched between her cheek and the cool, shuddering glass of the limousine window, as if that might help. She tried whispering 'Daddy' to herself, tried closing her eyes and picturing his face, but it didn't work. Then she thought of something that made her throat close up: she might never have been her father's baby, but he had always called her 'little rabbit.' And she was crying easily now, causing her mother to reach over and squeeze her hand; the only trouble was that she couldn't be sure whether she cried for her father or for Warren Maddock, or Maddox, who was back in South Carolina now being shipped out to a division.
But she stopped crying abruptly when she realized that even that was a lie: these tears, as always before in her life, were wholly for herself - for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing. — Richard Yates

I tear down Baxter, which loops around the last mile down to Back Cove.
And then I stop short. The buildings have fallen away behind me, giving way to ramshackle sheds, sparsely situated on either side of the cracked and run-down road. Beyond that, a short strip of tall, weedy grass slants down toward the cove.
The water is an enormous mirror, tipped with pink and gold from the sky. In that single, blazing moment as I come around the bend, the sun - curved over the dip of the horizon like a solid gold archway - lets out its final winking rays of light, shattering the darkness of the water, turning everything white for a fraction of a second, and then falls away, sinking, dragging the pink and the red and the purple out of the sky with it, all the color bleeding away instantly and leaving only dark.
Alex was right. It was gorgeous - one of the best I've ever seen. — Lauren Oliver

The human mind is a powerful thing in many ways, but in others it's endlessly fragile - it takes only a single moment of pure terror to tear a hole in it, like a finger through a cobweb, leaving you forever just a shadow, a half-person. — Alexander Gordon Smith

Death is deceitful, pretending that peace is on the horizon. The truth is that chaos is left in its wake, claiming the souls of those stranded in life. Death is the enemy of love in its purest form. It's the one thing that can tear our souls out and rip our hearts to pieces. The miraculous part of this process is that all it needs to do is extinguish a single, solitary breath. That's all it takes to steal the future of someone; someone who deserves to live more than all the others. If only I could capture that breath before it was taken to replace it with my own. — J.D. Stroube

Shall I ask again?" wondered Xaro. "No, I know that smile. It is a cruel queen who dices with men's hearts. Humble merchants like myself are no more than stones beneath your jeweled sandals." A single tear ran slowly down his pale white cheek. — George R R Martin

Try to remember some details. For the world
is filled with people who were torn from their sleep
with no one to mend the tear,
and unlike wild beasts they live
each in his lonely hiding place and they die
together on battlefields
and in hospitals.
And the earth will swallow all of them,
good and evil together, like the followers of Korah,
all of them in their rebellion against death,
their mouths open till the last moment,
praising and cursing in a single
howl. Try, try
to remember some details. — Yehuda Amichai

And I don't want to talk about it, because one day his name will brush against my lips in her presence, and through and involuntary blushing of the cheeks, a misting of the eyes, a breath drawn too tightly, or a single tear, the secret I'm supposed to keep locked up forever will be revealed — Sarah Ockler

Men like Caesar and Pompey
they're not heroes, Meto. They're monsters. They call their greed and ambition "honour," and to satisfy their so-called honour they'll tear the world apart. But who am I to judge them? Every man does what he must, to protect his share of the world. What's the difference between killing whole villages and armies, and killing a single man? Caesar's reasons and mine are different only in degree. The consequences and the suffering still spread to the innocent (Gordianus the Finder to his son Meto) — Steven Saylor

Rome wasn't built in a day, and we won't replace fossil fuels with clean energy based on the events of a single week, either. But the important thing to remember is that, once they happen, clean energy victories are irreversible. No one will tear down wind farms because they are nostalgic for fracking in our watersheds. And nobody will pull down their solar panels because they miss having mercury in their tuna or asthma inhalers for their kids. Because once we leave fossil fuels behind, we are never going back. — Michael Brune

Yes, I'm a hermit. Mostly I brood," Mad Rogan said. "Also, I'm very good at wallowing in self-pity. I spend my days steeped in melancholy, looking out the window. Occasionally a single tear quietly rolls down my cheek. — Ilona Andrews

If you took every tear cried by everyone on earth on one single day and put them in a container, how big would that container need to be? Could you fill a water tower? Three water towers? It's one of those unknowable things. There has to be an answer, but we'll never know what it is. — Rebecca Stead

Most of the girls held a single candle, and the combined glow danced among the tear-streaked faces. They were so young, these girls: children. Kathy Torrance had particularly loathed that about Lo/Rez, the way their fan-base had refreshed itself over the years with a constant stream of pubescent recruits, girls who fell in love with Rez in the endless present of the net, where he could still be the twenty-year-old of his earliest hits. — William Gibson

Thought of Riordan. Thought of a big hand wrapping around my shaft, sliding up and down, pumping hard ... harder. The head of my cock leaked a single salty tear to slick my own hand's efforts. Yikes. Think of Bruce. Yeah. Better. Safer. Saner ... — Josh Lanyon

The heavy infantry stood. The heavy infantry held the trench. Even as they died, they backed not a single step. The Nah'ruk clawed for purchase on the blood-soaked mud of the berm. Iron chewed into them. Halberds slammed down, rebounded from shields. Reptilian bodies reeled back, blocking the advance of rear ranks. Arrows and quarrels poured into the foe from positions behind the trench.
And from above, Locqui Wyval descended by the score, in a frenzy, to tear and rend the helmed heads of the lizard warriors. Others quickly closed to do battle with their kin, and the sky rained blood. — Steven Erikson

Hulk sat there silently for a moment, playing with the empty shot glass in his hand. "Well, I love you, too," Hulk mumbled quietly as he quickly stood and walked toward the kitchen, put the shot glass in the sink, and went to his bedroom. Clint watched in amazement as the big cop left the room. Even though he knew it to be true, Clint was shocked that Hulk had actually said it. As he sat there letting it sink in, he felt a single tear roll down each cheek. Little did Clint know that in Hulk's bedroom, the tears were flooding the big man's eyes as he buried his face in his pillow and bawled as he hadn't done since he was a boy. — William T. Prince

A Silent Cry Doesn't Have Any Single Drop of Tear — Rahman Mostafiz

Congratulations," he said, his voice dry. "You finally managed to find a woman as tragically noble as yourself. I didn't think one existed."
"I'm not tragic."
Kaldar held up his hand. "Spare me. Some children are born wearing a silk shirt; you were born wrapped in melancholy. When they slapped you to make you cry, you just sighed heavily and a single tear rolled from your eye." He dragged his finger from the corner of his left eye to his cheek. " Your first words were probably 'woe is me.'"
"My first words were 'Kaldar, shut up!' because you talked too much. Still do. — Ilona Andrews

Haven't shed a single tear, but I'm hurtin' down inside. — Capital STEEZ

My family was made of good people who did good things with what they were given. What fairness does life show in a time like this? But life is not fair and that is nothing new, so I bottled the pain and loss, and released them through a single tear rolling down my cheek. — B.M. Tolbert

When your parents turn you in to the Juvenile Authority - and they will - I will not shed a single tear for you, Connor Lassiter. — Neal Shusterman

And this time as the lashes come, try to think about the pain, instead of against it, because there is not one single aspect of life, past, present, or future, that does not tear your reason from you, to think on it. So think about the pain. This pain after all has its limits. You can chart its passage through your body. It has a beginning, middle, end. Imagine if it had a color. The first cut of the lash is what, red? Red, spreading into a brilliant yellow. And this one again, red, red, no yellow, and then white, white, white, white ... Why have you incarcerated yourself in this palazzo of torture chambers, why do you not leave this place? Because you are a monster and this is a school for monsters, and if you leave here, then you will be completely, completely alone! Alone with this!
Don't weep in front of these strangers. Swallow it down. Don't weep in front of these strangers! Cry to heaven, cry to heaven, cry to heaven. — Anne Rice

They began work at 5:30 and quit at 7 at night. Children six years old going home to lie on a straw pallet until time to resume work the next morning! I have seen the hair torn out of their heads by the machinery, their scalps torn off, and yet not a single tear was shed, while the poodle dogs were loved and caressed and carried to the seashore. — Mary Harris Jones

We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire. — George Sand

She knew the minute HE arrived. Felt the warm blanket of comfort reach out to her frozen soul ... He made his way down the isle and sat next to her ... he didn't reach out, didn't touch her ... a single tear slid out from her closed lids and she blindly reached for his hand. He took her hand in more, gathering her close, arms coming around her warm and strong as her head sank down unto his shoulder and the tears finally came soaking the lapel of his wool suit. He offered her a perfectly white handkerchief ... she stared at it and wondered who carries that type of thing anymore? He looked back at her and explained, I'm old fashioned. — D.B. Reynolds

It had begun to occur to me that perhaps it was okay that I hadn't spent my days on the trail pondering the sorrows of my life, that perhaps by being forced to focus on my physical suffering some of my emotional suffering would fade away. By the end of that second week, I realized that since I'd begun my hike, I hadn't shed a single tear. — Cheryl Strayed

I believe you should do three things every single day of your life," he said. "One, you should laugh. Two, you should think. Pause and think about your life. And third, you should cry. Get yourself into a state of emotion where you shed a tear. If you do all three of those things - laugh, think, and cry - well, that's one heck of a day." Eight — John Feinstein

Sometimes there a hundred lies behind a smile and not a single truth behind a tear. — Saahil Prem

A single tear rolls down her cheek like a star dropping from the tired sky. — Addison Moore

Lily wants to tell him it's because she makes terrible decisions when it comes to men, that she doesn't completely understand them and it's all because her mother fed her some fantasy about finding a prince who would always be faithful and good. Instead, a single tear escapes and trickles down her face. — Vivian Winslow

He closed his eyes, and a single tear crawled down his cheek. I knew I was asking him to do the impossible, and it was tearing me apart that Ash was suffering. But at least I would make it right in the end. I'd promise him that much. — Julie Kagawa

You really are a pain in the ass," he laughs. I swat him playfully, laughing too as a single tear rolls down my cheek. He wipes it away and tucks my hair behind my ear, "But you're my pain in the ass. — Kandi Steiner

A faint tear wet Meiko's eye, so slight a bit of moisture that it passed unseen by Yasuko. Yet all the anguish of which she never spoke was compressed into that single drop — Fumiko Enchi

For the first time in your conscious memory; for the first time in fact, since your were a baby; a single tear, full and warm, rolled down your right cheek and you fell into a very deep and entirely dreamless slumber. — Dave Sim

Abuse manipulates and twists a child's natural sense of trust and love. Her innocent feelings are belittled or mocked and she learns to ignore her feelings. She can't afford to feel the full range of feelings in her body while she's being abused - pain, outrage, hate, vengeance, confusion, arousal. So she short-circuits them and goes numb. For many children, any expression of feelings, even a single tear, is cause for more severe abuse. Again, the only recourse is to shut down. Feelings go underground. — Laura Davis

It suddenly occurred to both Driggs and Lex, in that very same instant, that neither of them wanted anything more in the world than to tear off every single piece of each other's clothes and make wild, passionate, messy adolescent love under the radiant glow of the full moon.
Their chests rose and fell. A few seconds passed.
"I'm going to sleep," Driggs panted, clambering off the roof.
"Me too," Lex huffed, right behind him.
And without another word they fled to their rooms, slammed the doors, and threw themselves into bed, where they both spent the next five hours dazedly contemplating their respective ceilings. — Gina Damico

We have a saying that time has no single measure, that time can be like frost or lightning or a tear or siege or storm or sunset, or even like a rock. — James Clavell

The robot learns to love. A single, oily tear leaks down his cheek. We don't know whether he's crying or just needs maintenance. — Andrew Miller

I had these made special. The design is raised instead of carved in. Can you feel it?" Dillon asked.
Hunter ran his fingertip over the outside of the ring. He nodded as a tear formed in the corner of his eye.
"Can you tell me what it is?" Dillon asked quietly.
Hunter nodded and his voice choked. "Two people ... "
"Two men," Dillon corrected.
"Two men," Hunter said, "pulling each other into the center of a circle."
Dillon watched his single tear slip and start sliding down his cheek. "Would you step into that circle with me, Hunter?"
Hunter nodded, a small sound escaping him. "Yes. — Brandon Shire

I don't hate you," I tell her. And I honestly don't. Because love can't be faked when magic's involved. Ivy didn't push me out of the way just to gain a soul. She didn't force anything. It was all her choice to save and love me.
From her wide eyes, she can't believe what I've said. "Rea-really?"
"Yeah." I grin despite the waterworks. "Because I know you love me. Just like I love you."
"I do," whispers Ivy. A single tear escapes her eye. "I love you, Rylan. And thank you for letting me hear that...once in my lifetime." — Colleen Boyd

In every corridor Parwana would see men's eyes snapping to attention when Masooma passed by. She saw their efforts to behave matter-of-factly, but their gazes lingered, helpless to tear away. If Masooma glanced in their direction, they looked idiotically privileged. They imagined they had shared a moment with her. She interrupted conversations midsentence, smokers mid-drag. She was the trembler of knees, the spiller of teacups. Some days it was all too much for Masooma, as if she was almost ashamed, and she told Parwana she wanted to stay inside all day, wanted not to be looked at. On those days, Parwana thought it was as though, somewhere deep inside, her sister understood dimly that her beauty was a weapon. A loaded gun, with the barrel pointed at her own head. Most days, however, the attention seemed to please her. Most days, she relished her power to derail a man's thoughts with a single fleeting but strategic smile, to make tongues falter over words. — Khaled Hosseini

They were walking beside the stream and the Lion went before them: and he became so beautiful, and the music so despairing, that Jill did not know which of them it was that filled her eyes with tears.
Then Aslan stopped, and the children looked into the stream. And there, on the golden gravel of the bed of the stream, lay King Caspian, dead, with the water flowing over him like liquid glass. His long white beard swayed in it like water-weed. And all three stood and wept. Even the Lion wept: great lion-tears, each tear more precious than the Earth would be if it was a single solid diamond. — C.S. Lewis

What is the weight of a tear? The single tear falls when the buckets have stopped, when dry eyes and a slightly raised chin sometimes let it slip, like a prayer. It carries the weight of a lifetime. — Wendy Murray

The drying up a single tear has more, of honest fame, than shedding seas of gore. — Lord Byron

I try to swallow back emotion as he catches my tear with his thumb. "You're not going to stop until you've claimed every single piece of my heart, are you?" I whisper. He ghosts his fingers along my jaw, tilting his head to the side with a gripping intensity to his eyes. "I'm not going to stop until I feel your soul take my last breath." I think his just took mine. — Jewel E. Ann

Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them
just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept. — Ayn Rand

I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this:
The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.
Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right? — Jesse Andrews