Elizabeth Strout Quotes

Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.

The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.

So that's what I'm here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven't felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.

There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in times of misery.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish.

There is no worse sorrow than remembering happiness in the day of sorrow.

And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

There is something in the pang of change More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.

There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery

The only time I get a tear in my eye is when I think of what I can possibly miss.

All the best songs have an element of sadness.

What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two: melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.

The melancholia of everything completed!

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more

I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you.

So sad, so fresh the days that are no more.

But what of life whose bitter hungry sea Flows at our heels, and gloom of sunless night Covers the days which never more return? Ambition, love and all the thoughts that burn We lose too soon, and only find delight In withered husks of some dead memory.

It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.

It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.