All Time Great Sad Book Quotes

Here are some poignant and sad book quotes.

Sad Book Quotes

1. “‘Claire,’ he said quietly. ‘Tomorrow I will die. This child … is all that will be left of me—ever. I ask ye, Claire—I beg you—see it safe.’ I stood still, vision blurring, and in that moment, I heard my heart break. It was a small, clean sound, like the snapping of a flower’s stem.”
— Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber

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

3. “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
— J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

4. “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

5. “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

6. “The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself. As if the things we’d done were less real and important than they had been hours before.”
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

7. “My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will never stop grieving Bailey because I will never stop loving her. That’s just how it is. Grief and love are conjoined, you don’t get one without the other. All I can do is love her, and love the world, emulate her by living with daring and spirit and joy.”
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

8. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
— Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

9. “I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.”
— Augusten Burroughs, Dry

10. “Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.”
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

11. “I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.”
— Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning

12. “There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.”
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

13. “And Percy was shaking his brother, and Ron was kneeling beside them, and Fred’s eyes stared without seeing, the ghost of his last laugh still etched upon his face.”
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

14. “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

15. “People think being alone makes you lonely, but I don’t think that’s true. Being surrounded by the wrong people is the loneliest thing in the world.”
— Kim Culbertson, The Liberation of Max McTrue

16. “The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke it’s back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.”
— Toni Morrison, Beloved