Sadness Poetry Quotes & Sayings

Dolor
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces. — Theodore Roethke

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you. — Rainer Maria Rilke

...and when we die
we die alone
I cry, I cry alone
Like a piece of stone
I am thrown
into the wavy ocean of life
to atone...to atone
Only to atone... — Munia Khan

Birds shouldn't be able to find tears
They are the definition of freedom — Maddy Kobar

And they can't understand, what hurts more - Missing the other person, or pretending not to. — Khadija Rupa

I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role. — Kevin Hart

If love and beauty were easy to find, they would not exist.
Chaos and sadness exist in order for you to find the love and beauty in them. So that love and beauty mean something.
It's meant to be hard. — Pleasefindthis

Everything is all right,
When you're here,
When you're right next to me,
When my hand is in yours,
Don't leave me,
Don't leave me empty handed. — Elizabeth Brooks

In my dream the shadings of your soul are the dark tincture of rain ... — John Geddes

We weep,
tears of blood,
we weep,
In despair, crying,
we weep;
the sun forever has stolen
the light from his eyes.
No more his face do we see,
no more his voice do we hear,
nor will his affectionate gaze
watch over his people. — Jane Bierhorst

I Am!

I am - yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes -
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live - like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange - nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below - above the vaulted sky. — John Clare

I think I'm comfortable making myself, or my speaker, larger than life if I can then cut myself off at the ankles. The way, in "My Major Prize," the speaker does this drippy performance of sadness and poetry for some unnamed prize committee, only he lets us know that it's all a wry game. — Randall Mann

Give me another Chance
Then,
You will Get
Less than I Gain... — Hasil Paudyal

May be its mine bad-luck
Or yours not to get me
But I still have hope
Of being yours — Hasil Paudyal

It is so dark now with the sadness of
people
they were tricked, they were taught to expect the
ultimate when nothing is
promised
now young girls weep alone in small rooms
old men angrily swing their canes at
visions as
ladies comb their hair as
ants search for survival
history surrounds us
and our lives
slink away
in
shame. — Charles Bukowski

And did with sighs their fate deplore,
Since I must shelter them no more;
And if before my joys were such,
In having heard, and seen too much,
My grief must be as great and high,
When all abandoned I shall be,
Doomed to a silent destiny. — Aphra Behn

The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden. — Thomas Mann

The window of her sadness was so vast that it almost opened a path to her soul. — Ondjaki

I will learn your anger. I will lick your sadness.
I will feast on your hunger. — Caitlyn Siehl

the opening,
the breaking,
the falling apart
is always so quick.

the hurting,
the healing,
the putting back together
is always too long. — AVA.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

holding
the evening
tremblingly close
to me

i weep
into
the sun

letting
the burden
of hope
lift off my chest

i realize

this is what
it means
to be free. — Sanober Khan

Tonight
A parapet of breeze
tonight on which to lean
my melancholy — Giuseppe Ungaretti

All's taken away: my love and my power.
The body, thrown into city it hates,
Finds no joy in the sunlight. With every hour
The blood grows colder in my veins. — Anna Akhmatova

Gone

She had only meant
to go to sleep
but the sea;
it rocked her
and in its waves
she drowned
in a sadness
so sweet
it engulfed her
(4:22AM) — Mae Krell

The monsters were never
under my bed.
Because the monsters
were inside my head.


I fear no monsters,
for no monsters I see.
Because all this time
the monster has been me. — Nikita Gill

I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science. — Lorrie Moore

A Lament
O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more
Oh, never more!
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight;
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more
Oh, never more! — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It was quite a sad thing,
the way I watched you sleep like nothing could go wrong and I did not want to harm it, I did not want to blur it, but how could I not
when everything I've ever known has slowly gone away. — Charlotte Eriksson

February. Get ink, shed tears. Write of it, sob your heart out, sing, While torrential slush that roars Burns in the blackness of the spring. Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas, Race through the noice of bells and wheels To where the ink and all you grieving Are muffled when the rainshower falls. To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal, A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees, Fall down into the puddles, hurl Dry sadness deep into the eyes. Below, the wet black earth shows through, With sudden cries the wind is pitted, The more haphazard, the more true The poetry that sobs its heart out. — Boris Pasternak

Everything that drowned me taught me how to swim. — Jenim Dibie

Sadness is an invitation to God. — Kamand Kojouri

I love you in my very own way.
Like a stone loves the mosses around it
Like a sea loves the pebbles in it
Like a coincidence ...
Taking you as the way you are,
With all the bruises, scars and broken parts all around you and your heart.
I love you in my very own way
By throwing the stone, the mosses, the sea and the pebbles to your head
Like i want to kill you.
Just because of envying the love
That my heart spend on you. — Arzum Uzun

Someone's sent
a loving note
in lines of returning geese
and as the moon fills
my western chamber
as petals dance
over the flowing stream
again I think of you
the two of us
living a sadness
apart
a hurt that can't be removed
yet when my gaze comes down
my heart stays up — Orson Scott Card

I'm a poet,' the young man said, 'And it's my job to remember the sadness of things. — Clive Barker

My mind is like a sea
You will only drown,
If you think you can swim
There are things that devours me,
No love can ever save me. — J. Limbu

Consider in his spiritual martyr this being who lies with closed eyes, dislocated like the victim of a brutal accident who no longer requires care or rescue. Count the stabbing wounds of the hideous disappointment in the human imagination. Auscultate this pensive desert where alternate the rale and the silence. Feel pity for the grief that calls not only for death, but for a disgracied death, and receive, o World, this weight of trampled dream in the paradise with no conscience of your vain eternity ! — Anna De Noailles

This empty shell holds nothing but the echoes of what was. — Jenim Dibie

No one can usurp the heights ...
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest. — John Keats

Life has sadness, joy, beauty, like poetry.
So be passionate and write a great story. — Debasish Mridha

They don't know I only speak in runaway train stations
and everybody is always a few minutes too late to the platform.
No one has ever gotten the chance to get too close
because it is never romantic to fuck the girl who makes love to her own sadness every single night. — Katelin Wagner

Sometimes
the things that make you cry
are more beautiful
than the things
that make you laugh. — Sanober Khan

Dreaming of getting you
I loosed everything
Cheerfulness of smile
And all the dreams of life — Hasil Paudyal

Lies I've told my 3 year old recently
Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.
When nobody is looking, I can fly.
We are all held together by invisible threads.
Books get lonely too.
Sadness can be eaten.
I will always be there. — Raul Gutierrez

The world is thinning
and the earth...it's still spinning

my world is thinning
and it's all because
of one person I'm missing. — Sanober Khan

Streets paved with opal sadness,
Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy,
And jazz. — Bob Kaufman

I can't sleep alone anymore
and I get used to
company
too quickly. You're always gone too soon. — Charlotte Eriksson

I know that some night
in some bedroom
soon
my fingers will
rift
through
soft clean
hair

songs such as no radio
plays

all sadness, grinning
into flow. — Charles Bukowski

I've reached the vanishing point
without you.
Here my heartache begins with your pain
trying to find an unborn start
in this fatal disappearance

From the poem 'Me with the Vanishing Point — Munia Khan

Maybe tranquility is the dirt under my nails. I know it's there but I never feel like digging it out. — Casey Renee Kiser

I'm falling apart, one part after another. Falling down on the world like snow. Half of me is already on the ground, watching from below. — Ashly Lorenzana

You can't break up with a soul mate. — Christina Strigas

there's always been a little sadness inside my happiness.

i've never been able to separate the two. — AVA.

And now I am the way she walks, and now I am the way he smiles. I am the wind that blows and now I am the sun that shines. I am the laughter in your voice, I am the sadness of your soul. And now I am the careless wind and now I flow like the lost river. — Preeti Bhonsle

No poetry lives which reflects only the cheerful emotions. Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought. We can bring harmony out of melancholy; we cannot banish melancholy from the world. And the religious utterances, which are the highest form of poetry, are bound by the same law. There is a deep sadness in the world. — Leslie Stephen

for we all have
our own

twilights
and mists
and abysses

to return to. — Sanober Khan

and sadness clung to me
because she did not know
how to be alone. — AVA.

through the rose glass window in their beautiful new home, you stare at the love you gave away. — AVA.

When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea. — Matthew Zapruder

And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shallot. — Alfred Tennyson

Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works. — Michael Leunig

In that silence, I dream to be. — Khadija Rupa

The stars, like the hollow eyes of a god forgotten, marry the sadness of the exhausted hour and inspire a little chaos, a little gentleness, to those below.

I look up at the sky and see everything I've ever lost,
waiting for me. — Marlen Komar

Rebuke

Obstinate regression
bringing untold paths
of deep dark foreboding
depression... — Muse

It ... whatever 'it' is, has swallowed me and I lie here in the pit of its cold dark stomach being eaten alive by its bile and I ... I don't even know if I want to be saved. — Kellie Elmore

Do not trap yourself into an owl's hooting sound
where sad nights linger through the blackness of a hound — Munia Khan

absence
looks like a lake bed flooded with sky
sounds like cotton howling
tastes like tear-stained pillows
smells like churning bile and burnt hair
feels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying — Beth Morey

I enjoy melancholic music and art. They take me to places I don't normally get to go. — Criss Jami

In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,
But all the sadder tums, the more he knows! — H.P. Lovecraft

Only tears can hear the sound of pain
when warm blood reddens discolored stain — Munia Khan

You are alone,
So alone,
You speak back to silence.
People call it loneliness,
You call it solitude,
Different words,
Meaning the same pain. — Jenim Dibie

I keep breaking things, as if to see what's going on inside of me. — Jenim Dibie

Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despair
Of not being able to express
With a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,
The bleeding of my heart. — Fernando Pessoa

I do not just want you at your best.
I almost do not care
where your Happiness lives,
but please,
let me visit your pain?

Take me to the place
where your sadness goes,
and show me the tragedy
that no one knows. — Meraaqi

I love the autumn for its sense of melancholy seems to strike my need for sadness. There is poetry in the dying of the year and mystery as well. — Kyffin Williams

I have these knives in my chest that can't become words. — Jenim Dibie

One need not be a chamber to be haunted. — Emily Dickinson

It was more than a string of letters put together
it was a thick cloak in the cold
and a strong defense against an enemy
It was more than the naked heart on paper
it was a way to undress sadness ... and sins
and an olive branch for the desperate
Writing was her prayer
and the words were felt. — M.J. Abraham

On Beauty

No, we could not itemize the list
of sins they can't forgive us.
The beautiful don't lack the wound.
It is always beginning to snow.

Of sins they can't forgive us
speech is beautifully useless.
It is always beginning to snow.
The beautiful know this.

Speech is beautifully useless.
They are the damned.
The beautiful know this.
They stand around unnatural as statuary.

They are the damned
and so their sadness is perfect,
delicate as an egg placed in your palm.
Hard, it is decorated with their face

and so their sadness is perfect.
The beautiful don't lack the wound.
Hard, it is decorated with their face.
No, we could not itemize the list.

Cape Cod, May 1974 — Zadie Smith

Tongue on your words to taste you there
Couldn't read what you
had never written there
Played your message over
feeling bad
Played your message over it was all I had
To tell me what and wherefore
this is what it said:
I'm tired of you asking me why
I'm tired of words like the chatter of birds
Give me a pass, let me just get by — Adrienne Rich

I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget about gravity for an hour. — Charlotte Eriksson

Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh. This truth, which is banal enough, unravels time and the face, holds up a mirror to me in which I cannot see myself without being overcome by a profound sadness that undermines one's whole being. The mirror has become the route through which my body reaches that state, in which it is crushed into the ground, digs a temporary grave, and allows itself to be drawn by the living roots that swarm beneath the stones. It is flattened beneath the weight of that immense sadness which few people have the privilege of knowing. So I avoid mirrors. — Tahar Ben Jelloun

most of the times
it's the hardest
to say
what I love more

you

or

your memory. — Sanober Khan

What a hypocrite I am; I spend my whole life reading books that allude to happiness, when I refuse to experience it. Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don't even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains. How hard we strive for happiness, and once we finally have the elusive feeling in our grasp, we hold it briefly, like water as it trickles through our fingers. I don't want to hold water. I want to hold something heavy and solid. Something I can understand. I understand sadness, and so I trust it. We are meant to feel sadness, if only to protect us from the brief spiels of happiness. Darkness is all I'll ever know; maybe the key is to make poetry out of it. — Tarryn Fisher

What I want to know is how you go on when you look around
and don't see anywhere you want to go without the only person
you can't have. — Charlotte Eriksson

One day when I ventured into the garden to regard its bloom,
My eyes beheld on a bower a withered rose.
When I inquired what had caused the blight,
"My lips for a moment opened in a smile in this garden," it replied. — Musharraf Ali Farooqi

there's nothing to
discuss
there's nothing to
remember
there's nothing to
forget

it's sad
and
it's not
sad

seems the
most sensible
thing
a person can
do
is
sit
with drink in
hand
as the walls
wave
their goodbye
smiles

one comes through
it
all
with a certain
amount of
efficiency and
bravery
then
leaves

some accept
the possibility of
God
to help them
get
through

others
take it
staight on

and to these

I drink
tonight. — Charles Bukowski

I'm pretty lost in becoming all this frost. Bitter, like Winter. Strung-out like a string of pearls. — Ashly Lorenzana

The parts of me that hurt the worst want me to write something for them, but I can't. I don't know what to say. I'm lost in all this sadness, and so are they. — Ashly Lorenzana

I left smiles on your wordless lips
The night roads- dismal and narrow,
dream's path remains shadowy wide
as our lone hearts felt that arrow

From the Poem 'My Tomorrow — Munia Khan

I stood in your doorway this morning
dreaming you'd turn around
you'd tilt your head
you'd softly whisper "stay"

or that you'd grab my arms
to shake me while asking
what the hell are we doing
we love
each other
and this is not right
so we will make this work
now stay!

You poured your coffee. Stirred the spoon like a crystal man
with your back to me and not a sound. the fridge humming elegies while the clock ticked on
and the streets are so clean here people rushing to work
and maybe I should be too
by now
at this age
this stage
this town.

I will stand in that doorway
dreaming
for many nights to come. — Charlotte Eriksson

Pain
Waves are the sea's white daughters,
And raindrops the children of rain,
But why for my shimmering body
Have I a mother like Pain?
Night is the mother of stars,
And wind the mother of foam
The world is brimming with beauty,
But I must stay at home. — Sara Teasdale

Now, standing here, it is clear as day: more than anything else, you want to find words for what you feel and think and everything that is dark. And then this terrifying thought hits you: Yes, your father wrote poetry to find a language for his wounds. Yes, you in your own way have become your father. — Bilal Tanweer