Saddest book quotes from various literary works. These quotes encapsulate themes of loss, longing, and the melancholy aspects of the human experience as depicted in literature.
Saddest Book Quotes
1. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”
2. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
— Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities”
3. “He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.”
— Mary Shelley, “Frankenstein”
4. “I am haunted by humans.”
— Markus Zusak, “The Book Thief”
5. “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
— J.K. Rowling, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”
6. “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
— Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World”
7. “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”
— Lewis Carroll, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
8. “It’s a lot easier to be lost than found. It’s the reason we’re always searching and rarely discovered—so many locks, not enough keys.”
— Sarah Dessen, “Lock and Key”
9. “We accept the love we think we deserve.”
— Stephen Chbosky, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower”
10. “She was lost in her longing to understand.”
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Love in the Time of Cholera”
11. “There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights.”
— Bram Stoker, “Dracula”
12. “There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.”
— Dante Alighieri, “Inferno”
13. “I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
— Sylvia Plath, “The Bell Jar”
14. “It’s the possibility that keeps me going, not the guarantee.”
— Nicholas Sparks, “The Notebook”
15. “Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
— Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
16. “Sometimes the silence was more painful than the noise.”
— Heather Brewer, “Ninth Grade Slays”
17. “How wonderful it is, to be silent with someone.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, “Mother Night”
18. “We live and breathe words.”
— Cassandra Clare, “Clockwork Prince”
19. “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.”
— Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina”
20. “The only way to survive eternity is to be able to appreciate each moment.”
— Lauren Kate, “Fallen”
21. “Time does not heal all wounds. It makes some of them more distant, but it doesn’t actually heal them.”
— Veronica Roth, “Allegiant”
22. “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”
23. “We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.”
— Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell to Arms”
24. “The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
— John Green, “The Fault in Our Stars”
25. “I have nothing but all the time in the world to do nothing but fall.”
— Gregory Maguire, “Wicked”
26. “You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, “Everything Is Illuminated”
27. “The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with.”
— John Green, “Looking for Alaska”
28. “It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.”
— J.K. Rowling, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”
29. “What a terrible feeling to love someone and not be able to help them.”
— Jennifer Niven, “All the Bright Places”
30. “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”
31. “How can you regret never having found true love? That’s like saying you regret not being born a genius. People don’t have control over such things.”
— Douglas Coupland, “Shampoo Planet”
