If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another. If you wish to know that you are safe, cause another to know that they are safe. If you wish to better understand seemingly incomprehensible things, help another to better understand. If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another.
Glen Hirshberg's stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content -- the stories themselves haunt, they stick around, they linger, inhabiting a little corner of the reader's brain and resurfacing to evoke mystery or sadness or longing. It's a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg's storytelling skills in American Morons.
Gentle lady, do not sing Sad songs about the end of love; Lay aside sadness and sing How love that passes is enough. Sing about the long deep sleep Of lovers that are dead, and how In the grave all love shall sleep: Love is aweary now.
I used to analyze myself down to the last thread, used to compare myself with others, recalled all the smallest glances, smiles and words of those to whom I’d tried to be frank, interpreted everything in a bad light, laughed viciously at my attempts ‘to be like the rest’ –and suddenly, in the midst of my laughing, I’d give way to sadness, fall into ludicrous despondency and once again start the whole process all over again – in short, I went round and round like a squirrel on a wheel.
The dreamer's valuation of a thing lost - not another man's - is the only standard to measure it by, and his grief for it makes it large and great and fine, and is worthy of our reverence in all cases.
Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.
Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
What is the source of sadness, but feebleness of the mind? What giveth it power but the want of reason? Rouse thyself to the combat, and she quitteth the field before thou strikest.
Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.
The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.
There is no chance for the welfare of the world unless the condition of woman is improved. It is not possible for a bird to fly on only one wing.
There is no hope for that family or country where there is no estimation of women, where they live in sadness. For this reason, they have to be raised first.
I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together. If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn't be real.
On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, Musing in solitude, I oft perceive Fair trains of images before me rise, Accompanied by feelings of delight Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed.