Letting Go · unclenching the hand
Quotes about letting go and moving on
For what you can’t change, and the hand that won’t unclench.
One verified literary line a day. A private place to write what it brings up.
Letting go is not forgetting. The writers here wrote about acceptance the hard way — after the loss, after the argument, after the life that turned out otherwise.
“We often make life unhappy in wishing things to have turned out otherwise than they did, merely because that is possible to the imagination, which is impossible in fact.”
This is one line. The rest of the Letting Go 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
- Rabindranath Tagore on acceptance and faith
- Thomas à Kempis on letting go and faith
- Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa) on acceptance and letting go
- Lao Tzu on letting go and acceptance
- Alexander Pope on letting go
- Giovanni Boccaccio on acceptance and letting go
- Marie Bashkirtseff on faith
- Amado Nervo on faith and acceptance
- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester on acceptance
- Chuang Tzu on letting go and acceptance
- James Weldon Johnson on letting go
- Algernon Charles Swinburne on letting go
- Helen Maria Williams on letting go and acceptance
- Clarissa Scott Delany on acceptance and faith
- Epictetus on letting go
- Guillermo Valencia on faith
- Walter Pater on letting go
- Anne Brontë on faith
- Constantine Cavafy on acceptance
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
Write down what you are holding on to. Read it out loud. Then throw it away. Then write what you want.
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.