Quotes about Suffering

Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?

We stood and watched as God abandoned us, and then we did the best we could.

I can hurt myself more than anyone else can, she told her sister. I can do it with my eyes closed.

As for me, sleep was a country I no longer visited, despite my incantation. When I did, I wished for my waking life, the hours when I didn't see the nightmare images of all that had happened and all I had become.

If we had no hurt and no sin to speak of, we'd be angels, and amgels can't love the way men and women do.

I had been blind to the pain of others until I had my own burden to carry.

Life was like a book, Jet thought, but one you would never finish. You would never know how people would wind up; the good often suffered and the wicked prospered and there was no explanation for the way in which fate was meted out as there was in novels.

What she feels for him is so deep, she aches. She supposes this is what people refer to when they say the pangs of love, as if your innermost joy cannot help but cause you anguish as well.

If we had no hurt and no sin to speak of, we'd be angels, and angels can't love the way men and women do.

Pain was something to get used to, to inure yourself against. I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.

We do not believe in heaven or hell...; we do not believe in eternal damnation. We believe only in the unavoidable horror of hurting others and of likewise being hurt.

To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.