Quotes About Suffering

A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watch a Christ go up in flames, smiling, as if he were a hooked fish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned. His charred body gives off light--a halo burns out of him. His face is scorched featureless; the hair matted to the scalp like feathers. One man stands with his hand on his hip, another with his arm slung over the shoulder of a friend, as if this moment were large enough to hold affection.

Todas as famílias felizes se parecem, cada família infeliz é infeliz à sua maneira.

What I think about vivisection is that if people admit that they have the right to take or endanger the life of living beings for the benefit of many, there will be no limit to their cruelty.

I think quite often a fate worse than death is life - for lots of people.

Being poor is a little like having an earache over a Bank Holiday. All you can think about is the pain and how long it will be before a healing hand can be found to take away the anguish.

Of course, for a lot of people, death was a welcome change. Grinding poverty takes the edge off most things, including life.

All my life I have felt myself to be on the edge of things. All my life I have suffered from bad dreams. All my life I have had difficulty in knowing whether I am awake or in a nightmare.

Until recently, she never suggested suffering any sense of exclusion.

Surviving is much more painful than death.

I cannot help thinking that, if mine and Ellis's book exists, there might be men, even if it is only a handful, who read it, and see that they must never marry. Or there might be grown-up children who read it, and forgive their fathers. I don't think it is silly of me, to wish to spare people pain. The book may not change the law, not on its own, but it may spare people pain.

Some people suffer quietly, while others suffer loudly. Who do you prefer to be around? Which are you?

Mother Teresa said: "The dying, the crippled, the mentally ill, the unwanted, the unloved - they are JESUS IN DISGUISE...

The drinking is only a Band-Aid to cover his hurt, his loneliness, his anger, his frustration, or whatever. If we simply take the bottle away, John, will find another external "solution" in attempt to fill that need.

I'm not at all interested in the brave who fight against the odds and win. I am interested in those who accept their lot, as that is what many people in the world are doing. They do their best in ghastly conditions.

Oftentimes, reality is much worse than what you can put in a movie.

There is only one thing I want. I would like to be seriously ill, and to hear nothing more about him for at least a week. Why doesn't something happen to me? Why do I have to go through all this? If only I had never set eyes on him!

I have friends who remember seeing fish hauled onto a boat's deck and beaten to death.

A couple of back operations didn't cure anything, but instead, things got worse and worse and worse.

For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you. To those who are in prison tears are a part of every day's experience. A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy.

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.

But we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering ? curious as it may sound to you ? is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity.

Do you think that I would not have let you know that, if you suffered, I was suffering too: that if you wept there were tears in my eyes also: and that if you lay in the house of bondage and were despised of men, I out of my griefs had built a house in which to dwell until your coming, a treasury in which all that man had denied to you would be laid up for your healing, one hundredfold in increase?

I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.

but love is not fashionable anymore, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about it that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once-but no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past.