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1 " Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split the frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you that that is beautiful, and a part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough. "
― Paul Harding
2 " The reason writers are such fragile beings, Marcus, is that they suffer from two sorts of emotional pain, which is twice as much as a normal human being: the heartache of love and the heartache of books. Writing a book is like loving someone. It can be very painful. "
― Joël Dicker , La Vérité sur l'Affaire Harry Quebert (Marcus Goldman, #1)
3 " I know of few families today that aren’t touched to some extent by the heartache of divorce, including our own. "
― Billy Graham , Billy Graham in Quotes
4 " With unsteady hands, Phillip yanked on the mare’s bridle straps while trying to loosen one of the stubborn buckles. She snorted at his rough handling.Totka appeared beside him. “Let me.”Phillip gratefully released the task, an unexpected sense of brotherhood filling him. If anyone knew the heartache of separation, it was the man whose deft brown hands readied Phillip’s mount for the long road ahead.Totka’s own road had been lengthy. And yet, after two years, he somehow managed to continue to place one foot in front of the other. His breath still entered and left his body in the same monotonous pattern. How? When already several times over the half-day since Grayson had ridden out with Milly, Phillip had wondered if his chest might explode with the effort of expanding and contracting without her. "
5 " That’s why all of those records from high school sound so good. It’s. It that the songs were better- it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now. Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we’ve lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something- survived it, experienced it- is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living though something. Though hard to grasp, nostalgia is elating to bask in- temporarily restoring color to the past. It creates a sense memory that momentarily simulates context. Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; it doesn’t require the difficult task of negotiation, the heartache and uncertainty that the present does. "
― Carrie Brownstein , Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
6 " He prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another, and out of this Saeed felt it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity's potential for building a better world. "
7 " If you ignore the red flags, embrace the heartache to come. "
― Amanda Mosher , Better to be able to love than to be loveable
8 " At the beach, fifty years later, the old man understands finally that much of what he disavowed in himself before recognizing its irretrievable value, most of the heartache he caused himself and those who chose to love him, came out of that repudiation of his true self.Such is the power of denial, the old man now realizes: a comforting ally in our struggles for survival, a fierce foe in our quest for ourselves. Denial finds us when we feel most alone, and only alone can we banish this demon that bars the long way home. "
― Lionel Fisher