#sorrow

I wanted to share the risks the digger in Afghanistan took every day. Whenever I could I joined patrols ‘outside the wire’, walking the same dusty tracks and fields as the ordinary soldiers. I did everything in my power to keep them alive, I failed. In that year I lost ten soldiers under my command, killed in action. I personally identified the remains of each of them, sending them home to their families. More than sixty of my soldiers were wounded, some horribly. ↗

— Major General John Cantwell

#ptsd #sorrow #war #family

The point of life isn't to avoid pain. The point of life is to be alive! To feel things. That means the good and the bad. There'll be pain. But also joy, and friendship and love. And it's worth it, believe me. ↗

— John Stephens

#life #love #pain #sorrow #the-fire-chronicle

All things, even the deepest sorrow or the most profound happiness are all temporary. Hope is fuel for the soul, without hope, forward motion ceases. ↗

— Landon Parham

#hope #inspirational #life #profound #sorrow

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining; Behind the clouds is the sun still shining; Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall ↗

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#life #sorrow #life

I’ve noticed in my life that the people who act as my angels are not some strange angelic creatures that seem almost untouchable, but are more real than that. They are people who have tasted sorrow, who have felt pain, and in a way, that makes them capable of being an angel. In their darkest moments they have become strong. ↗

— The Hippie

#sorrow #strength-through-adversity #life

Be like a branch of a tree; flex your body to face 'wind of sorrow'; flex little harder to dance in the 'wind of happiness'. ↗

— Santosh Kalwar

#happiness #life #sorrow #tree #life

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane; But last year's bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide! There are a hundred places where I fear To go,--so with his memory they brim! And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, 'There is no memory of him here!' And so stand stricken, so remembering him! ↗

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

#sorrow #yearning #love

She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer. ↗

— T.H. White

#longing #love #pain #sorrow #unrequited-love

How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#despair #ignorance #insight #loneliness #love

Then I played the song that hides in the center of me. That wordless music that moves through the secret places in my heart. I played it carefully, strumming it slow and low into the dark stillness of the night. I would like to say it is a happy song, that it is sweet and bright, but it is not. ↗

— Patrick Rothfuss

#music #sadness #music