pain Quotes

“Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.”

“Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.”

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

“The more we diminish our own pain, or rank it compared to what others have survived, the less empathetic we are to everyone.”

“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.”

“...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”

“These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.”

“Without pain, how could we know joy?′ This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.”

“The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.”

“Augustus nodded at the screen. ‘Pain demands to be felt,’ he said, which was a line from An Imperial Affliction.”

“They have never known pain, he thought. The realization made him feel desperately lonely.”

“The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”

“I said I would not hurt him. But I never for a moment said he would not suffer pain. You will do the actual tormenting.”

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding.”

Time only blunts the pain of loss. It doesn’t erase it.

“She knew this pain would fade again; like a sunburn, it would heal itself and leave her slightly more protected from the glare.”

“When someone refuses to tell me a certain piece of information, it only makes me that much more determined to find out the truth. I hate being ignorant. For me, a question unanswered is like a thorn in my side that pains me every time I move until I can pluck it out.”

“Pain is pain. It needs no description.”

“You have allowed yourself to become angrier than you should . . . Anger has its place, but it will not help you here. The way of the warrior is the way of knowing. If that knowledge requires you to use anger, then you use anger, but you cannot wrest forth knowledge by losing your temper. Pain and frustration will be your only reward if you try.”

“[Y]ou cannot wrest forth knowledge by losing your temper. Pain and frustration will be your only reward if you try.”

“When I knew my mother would be dead in a few months, I had two choices . . .” She looked at him. “I could distance myself from the pain or get closer to it. Maybe because I’d lost my dad without getting a chance to tell him what he meant to me, I decided to get closer. I got so close, her pain and fear became my own. We shared everything and loved each other like we never had when death was some distant thing.”

“In my experience, this is the hardest lesson of them all. After a certain age, we are all walking around this world in bodies made of secrets and shame and sorrow and old, unhealed injuries. Our hearts grow sore and misshapen around all this pain - yet somehow, still, we carry on.”

“Dealing with the pain was a day-by-day ordeal.”

“I’m jus’ pain covered with skin.”

“Take pains. Be perfect.”

A short time before Christmas, the discontented fir-tree was the first to fall. As the axe cut through the stem, and divided the pith, the tree fell with a groan to the earth, conscious of pain and faintness, and forgetting all its anticipations of happiness, in sorrow at leaving its home in the forest.

[S]he made haste to light the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother there. And the matches glowed with a light that was brighter than the noon-day, and her grandmother had never appeared so large or so beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and they both flew upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God.

He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.

“Good luck to you, even so. Farewell! But if you only knew, down deep, what pains are fated to fill your cup before you reach that shore.”

“Ah how shameless -- the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes, but they themselves, with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share.”

“For never can true reconcilement grow Where wounds of deadly hate have peirc’d so deep.”

There is nothing alive more agonized than man of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions.

Does the general anguish of our fellow creatures lessen our own private and particular anguish?

Does the open wound in another’s breast soften the pain of the gaping wound in our own?

Pain, anguish and suffering in human life are always in proportion to the strength with which a man is endowed.

I’ve lived too long with pain. I won’t know who I am without it.

“My life was lived through falling rain so call on me if there be pain.”

“As long as some suffer The River Flows Forever As long as there is pain The River Flows Forever As strong as a smile can be The River will Flow Forever”

What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist?

“What could I become if I stopped worrying about death, about pain, about anything? If I stopped trying to belong? Instead of being afraid, I could become something to fear.”

“And when she gained the privacy of her own little shack she stayed on her knees so long she forgot she was there herself. There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought. Nanny entered this infinity of conscious pain again on her old knees.”

“If you hold back on the emotions—if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.”

“Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in . . . terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

“Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion. Once pain has roused him, he knows that he is in some way or other ‘up against’ the real universe: he either rebels (with the possibility of a clearer issue and deep repentance at some other stage) or else makes some attempting at an adjustment, which, if pursued, will lead him to religion.”

“I must add, too, that the only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all. ”

“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself. ”

“I knew the human exaggeration for sorrow—a broken heart. I’d always thought of it as a hyperbole. I wasn’t expecting the pain in my chest.”

“Let’s tell the truth to people. When people ask, ‘How are you?’ have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avoiding you because, they, too, have knees that pain them and heads that hurt and they don’t want to know about yours. But think of it this way: If people avoid you, you will have more time to meditate and do fine research on a cure for whatever truly afflicts you.”

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

″All addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can’t stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain. In fact, the rampant materialism that we see in the world stems from this moment. There are so many ways that have been dreamt up to entertain us away from the moment, soften its hard edge, deaden it so we don’t have to feel the full impact of the pain that arises when we cannot manipulate the situation to make us come out looking fine.″

″Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly.″

″Whoever got the idea that we could have pleasure without pain? It’s promoted rather widely in this world, and we buy it. But pain and pleasure go together; they are inseparable. They can be celebrated. They are ordinary. Birth is painful and delightful. Death is painful and delightful. Everything that ends is also the beginning of something else. Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.″

“I promised him!” he screamed, realizing even as he did so that his voice was laced with something wrong. Almost insanity. “I promised I’d save him, take him home! I promised him!”

Pain was a fascinating horror.

“stay strong through your pain grow flowers from it you have helped me grow flowers out of mine so bloom beautifully dangerously loudly bloom softly however you need just bloom”

“the world gives you so much pain and here you are making gold out of it - there is nothing purer than that”

“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”

“Halleck turned away to hide his emotions. Something burned in his eyes. There was pain in him -- like a blister, all that was left of some lost yesterday that Time had pruned off him. ”

“You see, though nothing mattered to me, I could feel pain, for instance. If any one had struck me it would have hurt me. It was the same morally: if anything very pathetic happened, I should have felt pity just as I used to do in old days when there were things in life that did matter to me.”

“‘MY DEAR FOXY!’ cried Badger. ‘What in the world has happened to your tail?’ ‘Don’t talk about it, please,’ said Mr. Fox. ‘It’s a painful subject.‘”

″The more people are into quick fix and focus on the acute problems and pain, the more that very approach contributes to the underlying chronic condition.″

“Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.”

“I want to confess everything, to hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to someone else.”

“... after the initial euphoria has passed, there is so much unhappiness, so much pain in intimate relationships. They do not cause pain and unhappiness. They bring out the pain and unhappiness that is already in you.”

“There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain - this is what I want to talk about now.”

“I felt anger and fear and pain coming from him, but I didn’t back away, I stayed right there, and knew I had done the right thing when he buried his face in my neck and cried some more.”

“Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.”

“What scared Stanley the most about dying wasn’t his actual death. He figured he could handle the pain. It wouldn’t be much worse than what he felt now. In fact, maybe at the moment of his death he would be too weak to feel pain. Death would be a relief. What worried him the most was the thought of his parents not knowing what happened to him, not knowing whether he was dead or alive. He hated to imagine what it would be like for his mother and father, day after day, month after month, not knowing, living on false hope. For him, at least, it would be over. For his parents, the pain would never end.”

“Without warning, the statue squirmed and bit the side of his thumb. Yelling in surprise, Seth dropped the figurine and the flashlight onto the carpeted floor.”

“It is so sharp that it slips in very quickly. But, Much-Afraid, I have already warned you that Love and Pain go together, for a time at least. If you would know Love, you must know pain too.”

“She bent forward to look, then gave a startled little cry and drew back. There was indeed a seed lying in the palm of his hand, but it was shaped exactly like a long, sharply-pointed thorn… ‘The seed looks very sharp,’ she said shrinkingly. ’Won’t it hurt if you put it into my heart?”

“But I know what it’s like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can’t. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.”

“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

“It’s not a question of whether you will hurt, or of how much you will hurt; it’s a question of what you will do, and how well you will do it, while pain has her wanton way with you.”

“[My father] taught me with silence. . .to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. . . . One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain … by turning inside oneself. . . . It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe.”

“We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe.”

“When all you can see is your pain, perhaps then you lose sight of me?”

“Feeling pain is still better than not feeling, isn’t it?”

“And then she groaned, deep in her chest, her mouth still closed. It was a sound so painful, Conor could barely keep himself from putting his hands over his ears.”

“Harry, suffering like this proves you are still a man! This pain is part of being human … the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength.”

“It was the worst hurt he had ever known.”

“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain.”

“Much of your pain is self-chosen.”

“I thought she might change her mind, or at least tell me when she was leaving. But she did neither of those things. She left me a letter which explained that if she said good-bye, it would be too terribly painful and it would sound too permanent. She wanted me to know that she would think of me every minute and that she would be back before the tulips bloomed.”

“How will I teach this mind what it is to have a soul? How will I teach this mind to understand pain? How will I teach it to want to take on another person’s suffering?”

“But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow. I don’t envy the pain.”

“THROUGH me you pass into the city of woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain: Through me among the people lost for aye. Justice the founder of my fabric mov’d: To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom, and primeval love. Before me things create were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I endure. All hope abandon ye who enter here.”

“She talks of the pain, grief, and horror of the past four years; of learning to cope with being the wife of a man so violent and unpredictable his touch made her skin crawl and of thinking, until quite recently, that she’d finally managed to do that. And then, finally, of how my appearance had forced her to realize she hadn’t learned to cope at all.”

“The hard work of sowing seed in what looks like perfectly empty earth has, as every farmer knows, a time of harvest. All suffering, all pain, all emptiness, all disappointment is seed: sow it in God and he will, finally, bring a crop of joy from it.”

″ One of the most interesting and remarkable things Christians learn is that laughter does not exclude weeping. Christian joy is not an escape from sorrow. Pain and hardship still come, but they are unable to drive out the happiness of the redeemed.”

“She is dying Sara. She will die, either tonight or tomorrow or maybe a year from now if we’re really lucky. You heard what Dr. Chance said. Arsenic’s not a cure. It just postpones what’s coming.’ My eyes fill with tears. ‘But I love her,’ I say, because that is reason enough.”

“All the running, the hiding, the lies, the killing, for what? The endless circle of revenge: answering pain by inflicting pain. Why did I do it?”

“It was hard to let go of that; to let go of the life I had before, but the truth was, it was harder for me to stay there inside the pain. I wasn’t strong enough to live there no matter how much I wanted to.”

“Patients with complex PTSD often come to doctors with vague complaints - intractable insomnia, unrelenting aches and pains, or stubborn depressive symptoms - so the link between their trauma and the present situation is not clearly identifiable.”

“Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning – because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ‘cause the world done whipped him so! When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.”

“It’s strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.”

“Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn’t feel anything at all.”

“Move out or grow in any dimension and pain as well as joy will be your reward. A full life will be full of pain.”

“I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m off-putting in some way. It’s not just that I’ve put on weight, or that my face is puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move.”

“It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually. When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve. It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.”

“If the rings [of the stovetop] ever go against something like a dish towel or our clothes even, flames would run all over with orange tongues and burn Room to ashes with us coughing and choking and screaming with the worst pain ever.”

“And I kept trying to find the little pieces of joy in my life. That’s the only way I managed to make it through all of that death and change.”

“Even so, I rather think they understand one thing—fear. The fear of pain and the fear of death.”

“No there’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem—well, like, you. Like you did something, all right, and now you’re suffering for it.”

“You got to take the crookeds with the straights. That’s what Papa used to say.”

“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”

“He just screamed and screamed and all that time we didn’t know that he was screaming because he hurt.”

“Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.”

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

“You can’t visit the sins of the father upon the child.”

“People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.”

“Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him. As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him. We will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy.”

“That we should establish ourselves in a sense of GOD’s Presence, by continually conversing with Him. That it was a shameful thing to quit His conversation, to think of trifles and fooleries.”

“For when youth passes with its giddy train, Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils, Pain, pain for ever pain; And none escapes life’s coils. Envy, sedition, strife, Carnage and war, make up the tale of life. Last comes the worst and most abhorred stage Of unregarded age, Joyless, companionless and slow.”

“Years ago, a wise friend told me that no one ever changes until the pain level gets high enough.”

“It hurts to look at the clouds, but it also helps, like most things that cause pain.”

“I’d once been fascinated by his legend - all the stories I’d heard before I met him. Now I can feel that same sense of fascination returning. I picture his face, so beautiful even after pain and torture and grief, his blue eyes bright and sincere.”

He growled and grimaced as they came to him, and clenched his fists in pain and anger. “Unusual name,” commented Mogget. “More of a bear’s name, that growl.

“The fruit of Soothfastness is true and sweet; The fruit of lusts is pain and toil; the fruit Of Ignorance is deeper darkness The elements, the conscious life, the mind, The unseen vital force, the nine strange gates Of the body, and the five domains of sense; Desire, dislike, pleasure and pain, and thought Deep-woven, and persistency of being; These all are wrought on Matter by the Soul!”

“It quickly became my way out; my escape from captivity. I didn’t have to live inside my pain anymore.”

“No matter how depressed you are or how much pain you’re in, you have to return to your routine, daily life.”

“He could make me feel better and, for a second, I seriously contemplated it. But I knew that taking the easy way out - escaping into Dominic and leaving this unbearable pain and darkness behind me - was only a temporary fix.”

“Those eyes, ’neath which my passionate rapture rose, The arms, hands, feet, the beauty that erewhile Could my own soul from its own self beguile, And in a separate world of dreams enclose, The hair’s bright tresses, full of golden glows, And the soft lightning of the angelic smile That changed this earth to some celestial isle,— Are now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows. And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn, Left dark without the light I loved in vain, Adrift in tempest on a bark forlorn; Dead is the source of all my amorous strain, Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn, And my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.”

“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture or violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. ”

“Accept the pain, but don’t accept that you deserved it.”

“Tedium is the worst pain.”

“As more and more footage rolls, showing the marble façade of the courthouse explode into dust or a diamondglass wall withstanding a fireball, part of me feels happy. The Silvers are not invincible. They have enemies, enemies who can hurt them, and for once, they aren’t hiding behind a Red shield.”

“He saw it in her eyes. The anguish, the frustration. The terrible nothing that clawed inside and sought to smother her. She knew. It was there, inside. She had been broken. Then she smiled. Oh, storms. She smiled anyway. It was the single most beautiful thing he’d seen in his entire life.”

“The ancient code of the Knights Radiant says “journey before destination.” Some may call it a simple platitude, but it is far more. A journey will have pain and failure. It is not only the steps forward that we must accept. It is the stumbles. The trials. The knowledge that we will fail. That we will hurt those around us.”

“‘I’m fine.’ It’s a lie. I am not fine. My head is a symphony of pain, a sadistic master maestro conducting an opus of excruciating, devastating perfection.”

“Everyone wants happiness. No one wants pain. But you can have a rainbow without a little rain.”

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness.”

“A minister is not a doctor whose primary task is to take away pain. Rather, he deepens the pain to a level where it can be shared. ”

“There was the woman I was before my mom died and the one I was now, my old life sitting on the surface of me like a bruise.”

“When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.”

“It was the exercise of my power that attracted me most.”

“ ‘Ha, ha, ha! Next you’ll be finding pleasure in a toothache!’ you will exclaim, laughing. ‘And why not? There is also pleasure in a toothache,’ I will answer.”

“Fear is caused by whatever we feel has great power of destroying or of harming us in ways that tend to cause us great pain.”

“If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.”

“The idea was to create a sort of lasagna of pain.”

“Then one day I realized that my heart was withering, and in it there was nothing but pain. And that my beliefs, that I once held so passionately, had completely disappeared.”

“They called it battle fatigue, and they said hallucinations were common with malarial fever.”

“Thank you for seeing the stars within my soul when all I saw was pain, scars, and darkness”

“The pain means you’re alive. The scars mean you’ve survived.”

“Pain or love or danger makes you real again...”

“Tessa Kelly is a man-eater. She’s like Medusa, but without the whole “freezing to stone” bit. Because that’s not her style. That’s not painful enough for her. She’d much rather draw you in with her blinding beauty, and then rip your heart out and eat it in front of you. And then she’ll stand over you and watch you slowly die at her feet.”

“A warrior doesn’t seek pain, but if pain comes, he uses it.”

“Does a woman’s broken heart ever truly heal or do you simply become stronger and find better ways to conceal the pain? You see, I might not know your name, but you can’t fool me with the lines, telling me you don’t care about him anymore, but I can see it in your eyes that he hurt you. Don’t be ashamed of the pain: embrace it. Don’t turn your back on the pain: face it. Let it all out and release it to the wind and when you’ve gotten it all out, there will be just enough room in your heart for you to finally love again.”

“Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells—our hair, our fingernails—can’t feel pain; they cannot feel anything.”

“When we understand that, our question will change from, ‘Why do we have to feel pain?’ to ‘What do we do with our pain so that it becomes meaningful and not just pointless empty suffering?‘”

“For many of us, we will come to the point where death will be the only healer for the pain which our lives will have come to contain.”

“Unk, old friend—almost everything I know for sure has come from fighting the pain from my antenna […] Whenever I start to turn my head and look at something, and the pain comes, I keep turning my head anyway, because I know I am going to see something I’m not supposed to see. Whenever I ask a question, and the pain comes, I know I have asked a really good question […] The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of the pain now, Unk, but you won’t learn anything if you don’t invite the pain. And the more you learn, the gladder you will be to stand the pain.”

″ ‘There it is—friend,’ he said to his memory of Rumfoord, ‘and much consolation may it give you, Skip. Much pain it cost your old friend Salo. In order to give it to you—even too late—your old friend Salo had to make war against the core of his being, against the very nature of being a machine.’ ”

“You’re only human. And as humans, we can’t expect to shoulder all of our pain.”

“Sometimes we have to share it with the people who love us so we don’t come crashing down from the weight of it all. But I can’t help you unless I know you need it. Ask me for help. We’ll get through this, I know we can.”

“It takes an astronomical amount of pain and courage to disrupt a familiar pattern.”

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.”

“She stares awkwardly down at the kitchen counter. Then, quietly, she tells me about four other children I never knew existed.”

“So what if he’s alone. We’re all alone.”

“Lord Jesus, You know the struggle that Tony has. You know the indecision, the shame, the pain of his choices. I pray You would remind him right now of whose child he is. And that when You look at him, You see the perfection of Your Son, Jesus. Thank You that You have conquered sin. Thank You that the evil one is not in control. Give Tony the courage to do what You’re asking him to do, in Your timing.”

“And then one day, after the longest (and somehow, shortest) nine months of your life you get to take part in a miracle. It’s a blur of pain (which you promptly forget) and joy (which you remember forever). And then, suddenly, you’re cradling a tiny bundle in your arms.”

“Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire….Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It’s real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you’ve suddenly become an idiot. There’s no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.”

“Hurt people hurt people more skillfully. An expert heartbreaker knows the effect of each incision. The blade slips in barely noticed, the pain and the apology delivered at the same time.”

“So in order to feel something through the numbness, I decided to perpetuate on my soul and hers the equivalent of quenching cigarettes on my paralyzed limbs. My hope was that if I registered pain, it would be welcomed as a sign of life.”

“The pain involved in a premeditated broken heart would easily compare with a case of assault, and yet no court of law would recognize it as a crime. A broken arm heals.”

“I hadn’t expected physical pain. A burning sensation in my chest as if a large smoldering boulder had somehow lodged there overnight. A king of drawn-out slowly unfolding panic. The exact opposite of excitement.”

“Pain is certain, suffering is optional.”

“One well-aimed punch is not just painful; when the person who has been in shock starts to put the weight back on, the heart remains bruised, and this can lead to aortic fibrillation. It’s not life threatening, but it is uncomfortable.”

“It’s like an ache, a pain that never ceases.”

“And yet she hadn’t the air of a woman whose life had been touched by uncertainty or suffering. Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people. Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.”

“I wake up thinking of yesterday. The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday.”

“The ultimate answer, then, to the problem of pain is a person. It’s God himself.”

“And so, irritants, it is with this that I leave you. You are spared so that you can think of what it really is to live in a world that engenders a pain for which there is no comfort. Here is your product! You have the rest of your lives to think of this. And I suggest you think quickly, for a long life is never a guarantee.”

“Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.”

“Remember: The pain isn’t the enemy. Pain is the indicator that brokenness exists. Pain is the reminder that the real enemy is trying to take us out and bring us down by keeping us stuck in broken places. Pain is the gift that motivates us to fight with brave tenacity and fierce determination knowing there’s healing on the other side.”

“No good can ever come from deviating from the path that you were destined to follow. You will be assailed by varieties of hidden pain. Most often you deviate because of the lure of money, of more immediate prospects of prosperity.Because this does not comply with something deep within you, your interest will lag and eventually the money will not come so easily.”

“If you don’t learn the easy lessons, they get harder. (Pain is one way the universe gets your attention.)”

“I can bear pain, myself, but I couldna bear yours. That would take more strength than I have.”

“Maybe it was simply that falling in love wasn’t something Lori would ever be able to turn away from, regardless of just how much pain she knew would be coming down the pike. ”

“Your pain and anger will pass, but the guilt would remain with you for always.”

“The things that break your heart when you think there’s nothing left to break.”

“Kiss a lover, Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure. Face your life, It’s pain, It’s pleasure, Leave no path untaken.”

“Don’t you know a Sand-fairy when you see one?” It looked so grieved and hurt that Jane hastened to say, “Of course I see you are, now. It’s quite plain now one comes to look at you.” “You came to look at me, several sentences ago,”

“Root tilted his polymer wings, hugging the underside of a fogbank. There was no need to be careful. With his shield activated, he was invisible to the human eye. Even on stealth-sensitive radar he would be no more than a barely perceptible distortion. The commander swooped low to the gunwales. It was an ugly craft, this one. The smell of death and pain lingered in the blood swabbed decks. Many noble creatures had died here, died and been dissected for a few bars of soap and some heating oil. Root shook his head. Humans were such barbarians.”

“I stubbed my big toe on a very hard rock...”

“The pain made him focus.”

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

“There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.”

“There is no pain you can inflict that I cannot endure.”

“Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.”

“The pain will always be there. So will the fear. But the pain and fear are no longer my life. They’re only moments.”

“I’m becoming an angry person with no tolerance for anyone. I’m aware of this shift and yet have no desire to change it. If anything, I want it. It’s armor. It’s easier to be angry than to feel to pain underneath it.”

“It is not the intensity but the duration of pain that breaks the will to resist.”

“Doctor De Soto was especially popular with the big animals. He was able to work inside their mouths, wearing rubbers to keep his feet dry, and his fingers were so delicate, and his drill so dainty, they could hardly feel any pain.”

“The next morning, promptly at eleven, a very cheerful fox turned up. He was feeling not a particle of pain.”

“Pain doesn’t last. And when it’s gone, we have something to show for it. Growth.”

“In the place of my pain, I felt the stirring of determination. I would not give up. I would not turn myself in. No matter what the Nazis did to me, no matter what they took from me, I would survive.”

“Sometimes it seems to stand still. Like you’re in a bag and you can’t get out and somebody’s always telling you that it will get better with time and time just seems to stand still and laugh at you and your pain.”

“Show up for people in pain and don’t look away.”

“I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”

“I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life’s precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband’s pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children’s skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations.”

“Pops told me the other day that grief something we all gotta carry. I never understood that till now. Feel like I got a boulder on my back. It weigh down my whole body, and I be wanting to cry out to make the pain go away. Men ain’t supposed to cry. We supposed to be strong enough to carry our boulders and everybody else’s.”

“She hesitated and glanced at her mother, fearful that she had said the wrong thing, the thing that would bring the pained look to her mother’s face.”

“Staying here, blaming them, and forever defining your life by what they did will only increase the pain. Worse, it will keep projecting out onto others. The more our pain consumes us, the more it will control us. And sadly, it’s those who least deserve to be hurt whom our unresolved pain will hurt the most.”

“There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.”

“Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.”

“with grief? There is no dealing; he knows that much. There is simply the stubborn, mindless hanging on until it is over. Until you are through it. But something has happened in the process. The old definitions, the neat, knowing pigeonholes have disappeared. Or else they no longer apply. His eyes move again to the calendar. Wednesday, November fifth. Of course. Obvious. All the painful self-examination ; the unanswered questions. At least he knows what is wrong today. Today is Jordan’s birthday. Today he would have been nineteen.”

“It’s like seeing her for the first time: the human behind the maji. Fear embedded in the pain. Tragedy caused in Father’s name.”

“Some truths only tragedy can teach. The first one I learned is that when people acknowledge your pain, they want your pain to acknowledge them back. They need to witness it in real time, or else you’re not doing your part.”

“When being in love means being in pain we are loving too much.”

“We cannot protect the young from harm. Pain must and will come.”

“Pain is a partner I did not request; This is a dance I did not ask to join; whirled in a waltz when I would stop and rest, Jolted and jerked, I ache in bone and loin. Pain strives to hold me close in his embrace; If I resist and try to pull away His grasp grows tighter; closer comes his face; hotter his breath. If he is here to stay Then must I learn to dance this painful dance, Move to its rhythm, keep my lagging feet In time with his. Thus have I a chance To work with pain, and so may pain defeat. Pain is my partner. If I dance with pain Then may this wedlock be not loss but gain.”

“My disbelief paralyzes me temporarily as I stare at the sight of my arm vanishing into an implausibly small gap between the fallen boulder and the canyon wall. Within moments, my nervous system’s pain response overcomes the initial shock. Good Christ, my hand. The flaring agony throws me into a panic, I grimace and growl a sharp “Fuck!” My mind commands my body, “Get your hand out of there!” I yank my arm three times in a naive attempt to pull it out. But I’m stuck.”

“The pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

“The theme is connection. We are all things. And we connect to all things. Human to human. Moment to moment. Pain to pleasure. Despair to hope.”

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.”

“No one has a harder time than the lazy. No one experiences more pain than the glutton. No success is shorter lived than the reckless or endlessly ambitious.”

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

“So much of the pain I’ve experienced in my life has been tied to love. To love is to accept pain, to take it in, to grow from it, and to love again.”

″‘Life is pain,’ he said, sadly. ‘But it’s also magic, Papa.‘”

“There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.”

“Simon felt the duke’s rejection in his very bones, felt a peculiar kind of pain enter his body and creep around his heart. And, as hatred flooded his body and poured from his eyes, he made a solemn vow. If he couldn’t be the son his father wanted, then by God, he’d be the exact opposite…”

“Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain.”

“He suspected a lot was broken. His arm maybe as well as a rib or two. But my spine, my legs? His goos arm worked for him. It gave leverage to his back. There was pain, but not agony. Shift your legs. Try them. Go on, move. They muscles at first refused to co-operate. Am I paralysed?

“Do you not believe that animals know grief and fear and pain? The world of men is not an easy one for them.”

“Ken, you know the world is full of unpleasant things. Pain and operations and sickness and discomfort. You mustn’t mind. That’s just the way life is. Besides all that, there is health and goodness and soundness and fun and happiness, too, for horses as well as boys- much more of the good things then the bad- ”

“Your Majesty, please...I don’t like to complain. But down here below, we are feeling great pain. I know, up on top you are seeing great sights. But down at the bottom we, too, should have rights. We turtles can’t stand it. Our shells will all crack! Besides, we need food. We are starving!”

“There was a pain that came with constant disapproval; a sense of having lost something unnamed, unknown.”

“To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. Whether I like it or not, pain is the fuel of revolution.”

“All destruction eventually leads to construction, all death eventually leads to birth, all pain eventually leads to pleasure.”

“Pain doesn’t get easier. You just have to get stronger.”

“Your pain and anger will pass, but the guilt would remain with you for always.”

“Rossamund smiled woozily at the thought. Now he wanted to sleep but his aching face would not let him.”

“Rossamund groaned. He felt powerful, serious pains he had never felt before.”

“The telltale sound of Verline’s rustling skirts arrived well before her. When she saw Rossamünd stricken within the chalk ring, she gave a startled cry.”

“At last he could lie down, his head pounding, his cheek pounding—throb, throb—sharp, iron-tasting.”

“And you are right. There will be pain for us all; but it will not be all pain, nor will this pain be the last. We and you too—you most of all, my dear boy—will have to pass through the bitter water before we reach the sweet. But we must be brave of heart and unselfish, and do our duty, and all will be well!”

“You harrow up my very soul.”

“It is too deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony, as well as mine!”

“Nay,” rejoined the young minister, putting his hand to his heart, with a flush of pain flitting over his brow, “were I worthier to walk there, I could be better content to toil here.”

“Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears bitter enough for it,”

“He has felt an influence dwelling always upon him like a curse.”

“Yea, indeed!—he did not err!—there was a fiend at his elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment!”

But, as matters stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity there originally was in me, all of God’s gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual torment.

“That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin.”

“He will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion.”

Jo devoted herself to Beth day and night, not a hard task, for Beth was very patient, and bore her pain uncomplainingly as long as she could control herself.