Most Heartbreaking Quotes & Sayings

A Lucky Child is an extraordinary story, simply and beautifully told. Heartbreaking and thrilling, it examines what it means to be human, in every good and awful sense. Perhaps most amazingly of all, Thomas Buergenthal remembers and renders the small mysteries and grand passions of childhood, even a childhood lived under the most horrific circumstances. — Elizabeth McCracken

From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes 'responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.' It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, 'the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home? — Albert Camus

The most heartbreaking thing of all is how we cheat ourselves of the present moment. — Pema Chodron

Just seven minutes after most of Murphysboro was leveled, the Tri-State Tornado hit DeSoto at 2:48 P.M. No town in the path would proportionally suffer a higher fatality rate than this tiny village in which sixty-nine people died. Thirty-three of them were children buried in the burning ruins of the DeSoto Schoolhouse, a heartbreaking record that remains the single worst tornado-related death toll for a school in US history. One in four DeSoto children who walked off to school that day would never come home to supper. — Geoff Partlow

None of it made any sense to her - the deceit, the betrayal, the sheer chutzpah of it. Like something from a movie. Who in real life acted this way? But then she remembered this had happened in India, and India was not real life. The most heartbreaking, most desperate, most bizarre stories she had ever heard all came from India. Every story was epic; every emotion was exaggerated; every action was melodramatic. Desperate love, mad obsessions, outbursts of rage, bizarre self sacrifice, self immolation. Young women eat rat poison, jumping off buildings, or burning themselves alive. Young men throwing themselves onto railroad tracks in the path of oncoming trains. And all this self destruction over issues that in the West would be solved by a simple elopement or estrangement from one's parents or a move to a different city. — Thrity Umrigar

We have witnessed the most extraordinary devastation. The magnitude of the situation is unbelievable. It's just heartbreaking. — Kathleen Blanco

Death was the greatest villain, no matter how it got you; it always had the same outcome. It chewed you up and spit you out. It went on a war path, destroying everything. No one was ever happy after death came around. there was always sadness and pain. Death was the most selfish and heartbreaking vulture. Death disgusted me. — Holly Hood

There is one thing I've learned about people: they don't get that mean and nasty overnight. It's not human nature. But if you give people enough time, eventually they'll do the most heartbreaking stuff in the world. — Jennifer Mathieu

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats. — B.C. Forbes

Don't worry about the water," said a man with a nervous grin. "This is hardwood, it won't ruin. You'll have this chair into your old years. How much do you have? I'll take anything. My children need to eat."
A few of the businessmen like Mister Mangochi bought things they later gave back. But most people had no money. They simply shrugged and shook their heads. — William Kamkwamba

One truth that has helped me accept some of the most difficult moments and heartbreaking decisions in my life is that I already have all for which I ask. I am blessed! I am delivered from my worries! — Carlos Wallace

Philip Galanes makes his debut with a novel that is both heartbreaking and deftly comic, the story of a young man struggling with his most primitive desires
wanting and needing. It is a novel about the complex relationships between parents and children, a story of loss and of our unrelenting need for acknowledgment, to be seen as who we are. And in the end it is simply a love story for our time. — A.M. Homes

It doesn't matter what you do. In the end, you are going to be judged, and all the times that you're not at your most dignified are the ones that will be recalled in all their vivid, heartbreaking detail. And then of course these things will be distorted and exaggerated and replayed over and over, until eventually they turn into the essence of you: your cartoon. — Dan Chaon

Matt Mason must be declared the poet laureate of the Midwest! No other native son celebrates the overlooked America, its unsung citizens (from the anonymous poets to the part-time English teachers), and its expansive indigenous landscape, as well as he does. Mason's poetry is humorous when he wants to be quirky, heartbreaking when he wants to be eloquent, and though he moves effortlessly into other moods and geographies, he always returns to his first and most enduring love (and to what he knows best)-his homeland. — Rigoberto Gonzalez

I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school, they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button. — Francis Ford Coppola

It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying. — Aspen Matis

It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed. — Rose Macaulay

With The Good Lieutenant, Whitney Terrell has unwound the myths of one of our most encrusted literary forms - the war novel - and remade it to be humane and honest, glowingly new and true. Terrell knows his facts on the ground, but this is emphatically, triumphantly a work of imagination and literary ingenuity. It opens in conflagration - everything having gone wrong for Lieutenant Emma Fowler in one explosive instant - and from there the mystery of how we got to this disastrous moment unfolds backwards, Memento-like, as we watch Emma become more innocent, her life more full of hope and possibility, with each day less of war that she has experienced. This is brilliant, bold, heartbreaking storytelling for material that demands nothing less. — Adam Johnson

Aren't all the heartbreaking days always the most beautiful ones? — Dorothy Speak

She'll be a fierce woman, that one. It'll take a hell of a man to love her right. Be like living with a thunderstorm. Same as her mother. A fierce woman. Force of nature. The kind of woman you just hand on for the ride. The most exciting and the most heartbreaking woman you could ever meet. They don't know their own minds most of the time, but their hearts are so damn big it hurts em inside. — Brian Doyle

We've all changed," he said. "By coming here. By going through the trials that we're all going through, we've all been changed. When we go back, none of us will be the people we were before. The tragedy and the loss and the sense of wonder changes what it means to be human. Do you know what I mean?" Oddly, Anna thought she did. Being a minister meant being in the middle of people's lives. Anna had counseled dating congregation members, presided over their weddings, baptized their babies, and in one heartbreaking case presided over the infant's funeral a year later. Members of the congregation included her in most of the important events of their lives. She was used to it, and mostly enjoyed the deep connection to people it brought. Charting the course of a life was making a map of the ways each event changed the person, leaving someone different on the other side. Passing through the Ring and the tragedies it had brought wouldn't leave any of them the same. — James S.A. Corey

Siken occasionally locates a poem in loss as enacted, not implicit, event. These are among his most beautiful poems, their capitulations heartbreaking in the context of prolonged animal struggle against acknowledgement. — Louise Gluck

Taking what was the most raw and broken inside us and offering it to the other as a show of what we can't heal on our own. It's the most simple and heartbreaking of vulnerabilities ... to admit that you need someone else. — Katie McGarry

I was terrified, lost. Like most moments of intense personal tragedy, it was both heartbreaking and a little bit ridiculous. — Rainn Wilson

Opening Yulia Koroleva's uterus was the most heartbreaking thing I'd ever done. When I saw that perfect fetus, when I took it in my hands, my vision clouded over with tears and my professional reserve fell away...[he] had fully formed organs each in its correct location, without any abnormalities. The foot length told me he had been nineteen weeks old, exactly halfway through gestation. I returned him to his mother's body, to be buried with her. — Judy Melinek

I can be both of us at once so no one will have to miss her, most of all me. I I — Jennifer Niven

Most people go through their lives believing in things that they never have much contact with - the police, lawyers, judges, and courts. They have an unstated belief in the system; that it'll be impartial, fair and just. But then there's the moment when it comes to them that the police, the courtroom, and the laws themselves are just human, vulnerable to the same shortcomings as all of us, that they're a mirror of who we are, and that's the heartbreaking dichotomy of it all - that the more contact you have with the law, the less belief you have. — Craig Johnson

What is most heartbreaking to me is the young women who don't report [being raped] because they were drinking, and they feel like it was their fault that they were drinking. I mean, that is so common. — Claire McCaskill

Do you think because you can't see my scars that they don't exist? ...
Most People have their pain deep inside them, in places no one ever goes. Not until it's too late. — Karina Halle

Lysley Tenorio is a writer of sly wit and lively invention - these are stories bursting with wonders (from monster movies and leper colonies, to faith-healers and superheroes) - but most wondrous of all is his intimate sense of character. Each story is a confession of love betrayed, told with a mournful, austere tenderness as heartbreaking as it is breathtaking. — Peter Ho Davies

Who's got the most heartbreaking voice? I don't know. Tough question. — J. Robbins

A father's death is the most important event, the more heartbreaking and poignant loss in a man's life. — Sigmund Freud

I knew I could write infinitely about relationships. That's the most beautiful, most confusing, most rewarding, most heartbreaking thing in our lives - and not just romantic relationships: that's all relationships. — Spike Jonze