28 Of The Most Heartbreaking Lines In Literature

“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.” —Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.” —John Green, Looking for Alaska

“Depression is like a heaviness that you can’t ever escape. It crushes down on you, making even the smallest things like tying your shoes or chewing on toast seem like a twenty-mile hike uphill. Depression is a part of you; it’s in your bones and your blood.” — Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there’s no relief in waking.” – Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“Breathing is hard. When you cry so much, it makes you realize that breathing is hard.” — David Levithan, Love is the Higher Law

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?” —Jodi Picoult, 19 Minutes

“Guess that’s where the tears came from, knowing that there’s so much in this great big world that you don’t have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you’ll have one less heartbreak in your life.” — Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.” — Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” —Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“As the light begins to intensify, so does my misery, and I wonder how it is possible to hurt so much when nothing is wrong.” ― Tabitha Suzuma, Forbidden

“You can love someone so much…But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.” —John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it’s not that simple.” ― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“I always did what someone else wanted me to do. I’ve always been someone’s daughter or mother or wife. I’ve never just been me.” – Cheryl Strayed, Wild

“Just… isn’t giving up allowed sometimes? Isn’t it okay to say, ‘This really hurts, so I’m going to stop trying’?” – Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.” —Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns

“No one will know if you stay in bed all day. No one will know if you wear the same sweatpants for the entire month, if you eat every meal in front of television shows and use T-shirts as napkins. Go ahead and listen to that same song on repeat until its sound turns to nothing and you sleep the winter away.” — Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“When someone you love dies, and you’re not expecting it, you don’t lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time — the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers.” —John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“It’s hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we’re left with a fistful of ashes.” – Madeleine L’Engle, A Ring of Endless Light

“What we miss — what we lose and what we mourn — isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.” — Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

“You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“But maybe that’s the way of life…. To understand things only after they’d passed, only once it was too late.” — Etaf Rum, A Woman Is No Man

“He was suffering, and in a way, he could manage that; but he had caused others to suffer, and he did not know why he had to live now and recall the series of terrible choices that had not looked so terrible at the time. Was that how it was for most people?” — Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.” – Arthur Golden, Memoirs Of A Geisha

 “If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?” – Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

“You’re beautiful, but you’re empty. No one could die for you.” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince

“The weight of what has been lost is always heavier than what remains.” — Brit Bennett, The Mothers

“You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.” — Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar