Quotes About Suffering

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.

But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse

What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way. [Interview, The Wall Street Journal , Nov. 20, 2009]

Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesn't fire? It has to fire. Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?

He said that even the damned in hell have the community of their suffering and he thought that he'd guessed out likewise for the living a nominal grief like a grange from which disaster and ruin are proportioned by laws of equity too subtle for divining.

You wear out, Ed Tom. All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it. Your grandad never asked me to sign on as deputy with him. I done that my own self. Hell, I didn't have nothing else to do. Paid about the same as cowboyin. Anyway, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.

People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming.

Love makes men foolish. I speak as a victim myself. We are taken out of our own care and then it remains to be seen only if fate will show to us some share of mercy. Or little. Or none.

She looks like her face caught fire and they beat it out with a rake

Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.

See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed & the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history & will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns & cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?

Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

People will tell you it was Vietnam brought this country to its knees. But I never believed that. It was already in bad shape. Vietnam was just the icin on the cake. We didn't have nothin to give to em to take over there. If we'd sent em without rifles I dont know as they'd of been all that much worse off. You can't go to war like that. You cant go to war without God. I dont know what is goin to happen when the next one comes. I surely dont.

Your old man called me. He wanted you to call home. People in hell want ice water.

If people saw the world for what it truly is. Saw their lives for what they truly are. Without dreams or illusions. I don't believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible.

White: We were born in such a fix as this. Suffering and human destiny are the same thing. Each is a description of the other. Black: We aint talkin about sufferin. We talkin about bein happy. White: Well you cant be happy if you're in pain. Black: Why not?

Sites that have been host to extraordinary suffering will eventually be either burned to the ground or turned into temples.

The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be.

By midmorning eight of the horses stood tied and the other eight were wilder than deer, scattering along the fence and bunching and running in a rising sea of dust as the day warmed, coming to reckon slowly with the remorselessness of this rendering of their fluid and collective selves into that condition of separate and helpless paralysis which seemed to be among them like a creeping plague.

Those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished.

The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin.

He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

There's data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness. You dont know what's down there if you havent been down there. Joy on the other hand hardly even teaches gratitude. A thoughtful silence.