Hearbreak Quotes

“I laid myself fucking bare last night! I put it all out there, and you shut me down. Rightfully so. I get that I shouldn’t have said any of that stuff to you. But now here I am trying to find a way to come out of this with just a little fragment of pride so I can look you in the eye when this is all over, and you won’t even let me have that. You broke my heart last night, all right? Is that what you want to hear?”
― Jenny Han, We'll Always Have Summer

“Sink into morbid, cynical reflection on how much romantic heartbreak is to do with ego and miffed pride rather than actual loss”
― Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary

“I have loved and lost in so many different ways. And I have died endless deaths… So when I ask myself, the question today, who am I? My answer is…I do not know.”
― Patti Roberts, Progeny of Innocence

“Everyone leaves me worst than when they found me”
― sandesh hukpachongbang

“There were things she never named,
only folded
like laundry too wrinkled to iron smooth.
I grew up watching her close windows before the wind came.
Grief, she believed, should never be given an open door.
She never raised her voice,
but the quiet she wore had weight.
It pressed against the walls.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“I used to think I was different.
But I trace her storms in the way I love
always bracing for ruin,
always sleeping with the lights off,
as if that’s how you keep the house from burning.
I started having dreams in her accent.
Started pausing before I spoke, like her.
Started carrying umbrellas even when the sky looked clear.
I mistook her quiet for peace.
It was survival.
A hush that had teeth.
Now, when I cry, it rains in my daughter’s room.
The wallpaper peels in the same corner it did in mine.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“I don’t cry anymore
it’s quieter than that.
A kind of erosion,
like cliffs losing pieces to the sea
slowly, constantly,
without anyone noticing.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“The soil doesn't forgive,
but it does forget.
It has forgotten your name,
but not the way I knelt that summer,
pleading with it
as if growth could be bartered
with longing.
My hands are a little earth now
lined, calloused,
carrying the scent of what almost was.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“But the river.
The river keeps its grief.
To hide what was never meant to surface.
It remembers the way the world shifted,
how hands once tossed a coin
and whispered promises,
leaving the air heavy with words
no one ever heard.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“The shelf is full now.
Heavy with what-ifs and nearlys,
with truths I dressed as jokes
and funerals I disguised as patience.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“It’s strange,
we expect the dead to make noise,
as if their silence isn’t enough to fill the space.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“There is a version of me
on a bench that doesn’t exist,
beside someone who never arrived,
hands folded like questions without answers.
We do not speak.
Still, the silence grows roots between us.
The kind that twist around ankles,
that make it hard to stand and leave.
I do not know their name,
only that I’ve mourned them
like I mourn cities I’ve never seen
with a longing that makes no sense
and still doesn’t stop.
Somewhere in the unlived life,
we are laughing.
Here, I just keep glancing sideways
at the absence that fits too well
into the shape of a stranger.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“I miss her
the girl who wore too much hope
and not enough armour.
Who danced barefoot on sharp things
because she believed pain was proof of living.
I see her in old photos,
smiling like she didn’t know what was coming.
'Sometimes I wish I could go back.
Sometimes I’m glad I can’t.'
Some versions of you
have to die
so you can breathe.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“Love didn’t leave loudly.
It left in teaspoons.
One forgotten kiss,
one unsaid thing at a time.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“Hospitals are quiet in the wrong way.
Not the kind of quiet that soothes
but the kind that holds its breath.
Metal beds with stiff sheets,
monitors that blink like half-truths.
I watch grief drip slowly from IV bags,
measured, saline, polite.
There’s a chair near the window I never sit in.
It knows too much.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“The pencil marks on the kitchen wall
still show our heights at age seven.
He’s twenty now.
We haven’t spoken in five.
There is no equation for that kind of distance.
Only a shelf of fractions,
and an ache
still growing
against the wall.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“Grief makes you a strange kind of collector.
Of last texts,
of receipts,
of songs he skipped on the playlist.
Memory is cruel.
It returns in detail.
And I hold him in artefacts
proof that we happened.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“I think love lives
in her hands
the way they hold broken things
without asking them
to become whole again.
Sometimes I think
she’s made of night and mercy
and when I fall apart,
she lays the broken pieces
on her bedside table
like a poem she’s promised
never to forget.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“The eggs expire.
The towel still smells like you.
And love,
it doesn’t leave: it rots gently in the fridge,
beneath all the things
I thought we’d share again.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“There’s still sand in my shoes from august.
the kind that clings, stubborn and golden
like you did.
Love was loud then.
It dripped down our backs like sweat,
sweet and impossible to hold.
We kissed like we were trying to memorize the shape of
goodbye
before it even arrived.
And still
I’d follow the hum of locusts, the scent of sun-warmed citrus,
every blistered street and blooming ache
if it meant one more evening where your name
didn’t taste like leaving.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“Last week,
I opened a drawer and found
a grocery list in your handwriting.
The word “cinnamon”
written like a secret
you meant to keep sweet.
And I stood there,
fist around the paper,
wondering how something so small
could still hurt so much.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“There are days now
when I water my plants
and feel I’m growing everything
you never asked to leave behind.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“There’s a bobby pin, two receipts,
and my mother’s voice trapped in a voicemail
I haven’t had the courage to delete.
my lipstick sits there too
the one I wore the day I didn’t cry.
No one asks why I keep
a drawer full of matchboxes and apology notes.
Sometimes, when I can’t sleep,
I trace the ring mark left by an old mug
and imagine it’s a constellation.
I tell myself the bedside table is not clutter
it’s just the only place I keep remembering
to live.
Some days, I organize it.
Most days, it organizes me.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“Grief, when it comes like this,
arrives without a knock.
It wraps around the wrist
when I hear a song I don’t skip fast enough.
It sits in the passenger seat
when I pass a street I swore I’d never return to.
Some feelings never got spoken.
Some wounds were too polite to bleed.
I let them rot quietly
like fruit forgotten in a fridge corner,
sweetness gone sour,
but still too familiar to throw away.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“That afternoon, I cleaned our cupboard.
Found a dried petal between two pages
from a flower I don't remember keeping,
but I must have.
I must have.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“Do you still feel it
in some happy elsewhere,
a quieter version of us
sits cross-legged on the kitchen floor,
arguing over groceries,
your hand reaching for mine
between apples and oat-milk.
Sometimes, I imagine running into you
as a stranger.
Your eyes flicker with almost-recognition,
like they remember the weight
of my name in the dark.
We smile, polite.
You walk away.
I fall in.
I don’t know if the abyss
was always meant to feel like home.
But I keep its door half open
just in case
you ever want to return
as someone new.
Or worse
as someone real.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“I didn’t cry when you left.
I saved that for the day I found your name
scribbled in the margins of a book
we never got around to finishing.
It was underlined twice.
Like you knew one day
I’d need to remember you were real.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“The garden stretches out before us,
every leaf a promise,
every flower a quiet rebellion.
I remember when we planted the first seed,
its smallness
fragile like hope.
Now, the tomatoes hang heavy,
bright with the fullness of summer,
and I wonder if we’re not so different from them.
How many seasons of patience did we need.
How many days did we water the soil with regret
until love
finally bloomed.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“Cemeteries stutter like broken radios
static and memory,
all at once.
Not quiet.
Never quiet.
Just my father’s voice trapped between stations,
trying to reach me across years
he never learned how to carry.
The way he would clear his throat
before telling me things I wasn’t ready to hear.
My mother didn’t cry at burials.
She folded her grief
into the corners of her saree,
tucked them between recipe books,
let the scent of cardamom
mourn in her place.
Grief is not an echo.
It’s the bruise on a peach.
It’s turmeric beneath the nails.
It’s calling out names in a cemetery
and flinching when no one turns.
Some days I mistake sidewalks for gravestones.
Some days I pour tea for the silence at the table.
Some days I mistake dust
for the breath of memory.
Some days I say “I miss you”
to the crack in the wall near the kitchen sink,
to the kind of quiet that doesn’t leave.
But grief never finishes its tea
it just stains the cup and walks away barefoot.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said

“Hope, these days,
looks like a letter
I still haven’t sent.
Folded, re-read,
creased at the corners
not because I’m afraid you won’t reply,
but because
some part of me still believes you will.”
― Maimoona Abidi, A Shelf of Things I Never Said