One of the hardest things about breaking up (besides actually doing it) is feeling like you're now on the official track to Feeling So Much Happier, and if you're not in that place fast enough, you're doing something wrong.
Sure, inspiring quotes can help, as can knowing that you will absolutely bounce back, but sometimes the narrative of immediately being empowered and improved can feel a lot like pressure—right at the moment where you especially just want to be left alone in your feelings. So if you just want to be sad right now, all while feeling completely understood, here are 35 breakup quotes that 1,000 percent sum up those feels:
- "This is what it felt like to have a broken heart. It felt less like a cracking down the middle and more like she had swallowed it whole and it sat bruised and bleeding in the pit of her stomach." – Wendy Wunder, The Probability of Miracles
- "What kind of man loves like this?
To let me dangle at a cruel angle
Oh my feet don't touch the floor
Sometimes you're half in and then you're half out
But you never close the door" – Florence + The Machine, "What Kind of Man?" - "How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode." – W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
- "Painted a picture; I thought I knew you well
I got a habit of seeing what isn't there
Caught in the moment, tangled up in your sheets
When you broke my heart; I said you only wanted half of me" – Ariana Grande, "in my head" - "He looked at her as a man might look at a faded flower he had plucked, in which it was difficult for him to trace the beauty that had made him pick and so destroy it." – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
- "Baby, it's so weird to me now that it's over
The space where you used to be
Your head on my shoulder
All of the plans we made that never happened
Now your scent on my pillow's faded
At least you left me with something" – Robyn, "Missing U" - "In the middle of the block, she opened the door of a coffee shop, but they were playing one of the songs she had heard with Carol everywhere, and she let the door close and walked on. The music lived, but the world was dead. And the song would die one day, she thought, but how would the world come back to life?" – Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt
- "Nothing else ever seems to hurt like the smile on your face
When it's only in my memory, it don't hit me quite the same" – Beyoncé, "Pray You Catch Me"
istockphotoADVERTISMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW ↓ - "But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.” – Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
- "Cause I remember the rush, when forever was us before all of the winds of regret and mistrust now we sit in your car and our love is a ghost" – Lorde, "Hard Feelings"
- "Do you think I am an automaton? A machine without feelings? And can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you." – Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
- "Take these old used memories from the past
And these broken dreams and plans that didn't last
I'll trade them for a future, I can't use them anymore
I've wasted love but I still have some more" – Dolly Parton, "The Bargain Store" - "If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But when it's in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn't mean it's no longer love.” – Ayobami Adebayo, Stay with Me
- "No apologies, he'll never see you cry,
Pretends he doesn't know that he's the reason why
You're drowning, you're drowning, you're drowning
Now I heard you moved on from whispers on the street
A new notch in your belt is all I'll ever be" – Taylor Swift, "I Knew You Were Trouble" - "What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn't live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him." – Elena Ferrante, The Days Of Abandonment
- "Clipped wings, I was a broken thing
Had a voice, had a voice but I could not sing
You would wind me down
I struggled on the ground
So lost, the line had been crossed
Had a voice, had a voice but I could not talk
You held me down
I struggle to fly now" – Sia, "Bird Set Free" - "I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine." – Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
- "I don't believe, I don't believe it
You left in peace, left me in pieces
Too hard to breathe, I'm on my knees
Right now" – Selena Gomez, "Same Old Love" - "I married him against all evidence. I married him believing that marriage doesn't work, that love dies, that passion fades, and in so doing I became the kind of romantic only a cynic is truly capable of being." – Nora Ephron, Heartburn
- "Found you when your heart was broke I filled your cup until it overflowed" – Halsey, "Without Me"
- "What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?" – Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
- "I'm sitting eyes wide open and I got one thing stuck in my mind
Wondering if I dodged a bullet or just lost the love of my life" – Zayn & Taylor Swift, "I Don't Wanna Live Forever" - "A bruise is tender
but does not last,
it leaves me as
I always was.
But a wound I take
much more to heart,
for a scar will always
leave its mark.
And if you should ask me
which you are,
my answer is—
you are a scar." – Lang Leav - "I put you high up in the sky
And now, you're not coming down
It slowly turned, you let me burn
And now, we're ashes on the ground" – Miley Cyrus, "Wrecking Ball" - "What if pain—like love—is just a place brave people visit?" – Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior
- "All along it was a fever
A cold-sweat hot-headed believer
I threw my hands in the air, said, 'Show me something'
He said, 'If you dare, come a little closer'" – Rihanna, "Stay" - "How strange it is to realize now that although I was frightened of the emptiness between us, that emptiness was not his fault but mine: I was waiting to see what he would give me, how he would entertain me. And yet I was incapable of being profoundly interested in him or, maybe, in anyone. Just the reverse of what I thought at the time, when it seemed so simple: he was too callow, or too cautious, or just too young, not complex enough yet, and so he did not entertain me, and it was his fault." – Lydia Davis, The End of the Story
istockphotoCONTINUE READING BELOW ↓watch now - "Hey girl, is he everything you wanted in a man?
You know I gave you the world
You had me in the palm of your hand" – Justin Timberlake, "What Goes Around" - "Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.” – Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things
- "Turn my sorrow into treasured gold you'll pay me back in kind and reap just what you sow" – Adele, "Rolling in the Deep"
- "We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!" – André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name
- "I tried to be everything you'd ever want
And sometimes I even stood on my heart and stomped
Now I'm finally alone and dressed for the show
But going nowhere
They don't need to see me crying" – Sara Bareilles, "Little Black Dress" - "Talkin' in my sleep at night
Makin' myself crazy
(Out of my mind, out of my mind)
Wrote it down and read it out
Hopin' it would save me
(Too many times, too many times)
My love, he makes me feel like nobody else
Nobody else
But my love, he doesn't love me" – Dua Lipa, "New Rules" - "In our own ways we all break. It is okay to hold your heart outside of your body for days. Months. Years. At a time." – Nayyirah Waheed, Salt.
- "In time I won't care what you say
In time, but time takes time, you know" – Ben Folds, "Time"
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This article originally appeared on Cosmopolitan.com. Minor edits have been made by the Cosmo.ph editors.
