Quotes on Pain

We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.

I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period, for the loves, friends, habits and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from them without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long.

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.

I used to wonder why Lucy liked those songs so much. You know what I mean? She sits in the dark and listens and cries. Music does that to her...I didn't understand for a long time. But I do now. The sad songs are a safe hurt. It's a diversion. It's controlled. And maybe it helps you imagine that real pain will be like that. But it's not. Lucy knows that, of course. You can't prepare for real pain. You just have to let it rip you apart.

Scars are just a treasure map for pain you've buried too deep to remember.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines...Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.

...This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed. Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died--like parents and marriages--kept hurting forever.

Nothing forces us to know What we do not want to know Except pain

I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only way I could get through to myself. I was demonstrating externally and irrefutably an inward condition.

Those who have hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment.

In all circumstances, I always look for the light and build around it, with little memory of pain.

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

There are two ways you can go with pain: You can let it destroy you or you can use it as fuel to drive you.

These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.

My pain may be the reason for somebody's laugh. But my laugh must never be the reason for somebody's pain.

She was in pain and I loved her, sort of loved her, I guess, so I kind of had to love her pain, too.

The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.