Grief & Loss · what is gone, and stays gone
What to say to someone who is grieving
Words for loss — for a sympathy card, for a friend, or for yourself.
One verified literary line a day. A private place to write what it brings up.
When someone is grieving, comfort can sound hollow. Often the kindest words are the ones that admit how much it hurts. These writers buried parents, children and lovers, and wrote down what it was actually like.
“When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”
This is one line. The rest of the Grief & Loss thread is inside Saudade — one line a day, chosen by a person, with a private page to write what it brings up. Over the weeks, your pages become a book of your own.
Read tomorrow’s lineWriters in this thread
- Madame de Sévigné on grief and memory
- Paul Laurence Dunbar on melancholy and nostalgia
- Søren Kierkegaard on memory and sorrow
- Emily Dickinson on grief and melancholy
- William Ernest Henley on nostalgia and melancholy
- Christina Rossetti on melancholy and memory
- Charles Dickens on grief and memory
- Sara Teasdale on memory and sorrow
- Edgar Allan Poe on melancholy and memory
- Marcus Aurelius on memory and disappointment
- A. E. Housman on nostalgia and memory
- Sarojini Naidu on melancholy and sorrow
- Charles Baudelaire on melancholy and nostalgia
- Mary Wollstonecraft on melancholy and grief
- E. Pauline Johnson on melancholy and grief
- Katherine Philips on grief and sorrow
- Vincent van Gogh on melancholy
- José Asunción Silva on melancholy and memory
- Toru Dutt on nostalgia and grief
- Adelaide Anne Procter on grief and nostalgia
- Robert Frost on nostalgia and grief
- Saadi on grief and sorrow
- William Wordsworth on nostalgia and memory
- Harry Houdini on grief and disappointment
- Giacomo Leopardi on melancholy and nostalgia
- Lady Sarashina on melancholy and grief
- Jean Toomer on nostalgia and melancholy
- Antonio Gómez Restrepo on nostalgia and memory
- Mary Elizabeth Coleridge on memory
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson on grief
- Luís de Camões on sorrow and memory
- Rudyard Kipling on nostalgia
- Ivan Turgenev on melancholy and nostalgia
- Paul Verlaine on melancholy and sorrow
- Dora Sigerson Shorter on grief
- Luis G. Urbina on grief and memory
- Rufino Blanco-Fombona on memory
- William Stanley Braithwaite on memory and grief
- Arna Bontemps on nostalgia and memory
- Anne Bradstreet on memory
- Fanny Greville on melancholy
- Charlotte Smith on melancholy and nostalgia
- Anne Hunter on nostalgia
- Alice Dunbar-Nelson on memory
- Helene Johnson on melancholy
Their lines arrive one a day, inside the app.
For readers, writers and artists
For readers, poetry lovers, and anyone who keeps a short private writing habit. Every day’s line can be a prompt: writers can use it to find a place to begin, poets a first line, painters and illustrators a mood. Nobody reads your page but you.
Try this
Describe one thing they left, as you remember it, and as it actually was.
Why these lines
Every line in Saudade is chosen by a person, quoted word for word from the original book, and carries its author, source and year. Nothing is generated, paraphrased or scraped. Never AI.
Most quote sites are full of lines nobody ever said. Ours you can look up.