Explore Quotes on Suffering

If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering . . . then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing?

True leaders must be willing to suffer for the sake of objectives great enough to demand their wholehearted obedience.

He who suffers wins in politics. The martyr does not obtain the victory personally, but his group, his successors, win in the long run.

Many soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from serious, long-term, physical and mental health problems, due to their service. It is unconscionable to cut the already limited health care benefits available to these brave men and women.

It is a sinful abomination for one part of the world's Christians to grow richer year by year while our brothers and sisters ache and suffer for lack of minimal health care, minimal education, and even—in some cases—enough food to escape starvation.

I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, "God" always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language.

There is no space wider than that of grief.

Some day when I lose you, will you still be able to sleep, without me to whisper over you like a crown of linden branches?

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you.

Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

Loss is the great unifier, the terrible club to which we all eventually belong.

Time heals many wounds but this loss becomes the defining sadness of your life.

I feel that much of the world's sorrow comes from people who are this, yet allow themselves to be treated as that.

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.

Suffering ignites the spark of contact with the sublime and offers proof of humanity.

There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.

When you die of sorrow it's as if you've broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That's sorrow.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us.

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.