Quotes About Suffering

Nothing left but hopelessness.' Say die and I will die. Say die and watch me die.

That's all you're waiting for, isn't it? But no, you must have the slow death, the bloodless killing that leaves no stain on your conscience. . . .

Nobody's hidden your dress, she said. It's hanging in the press. She lookked at me and said, I don't believe you know how long you've been here, you poor creature. On the contrary, I said, only I know how long Ihave been here. Nights and days, and days and nights, hundreds of them slipping through my fingers. But that does not matter. Time has no meaning. But something you can touch and hold like my red dress, that has meaning. Where is it?

Vi a Antoinette tendida en cama, absolutamente inmóvil. Como una muñeca. Incluso cuando me amenazó con la botella, había en ella cierta calidad de marioneta.

So much violence. If God existed, I'd have strangled him on the spot. Without batting an eyelid. And with all the fury of the damned.

Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.

I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

The truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. But love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. Love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be. How will you heal your heart when love has split it in two?

Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off.

It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.

I wasn't getting better. I was getting worse. I did not go to the doctor because I didn't want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.

I broke his Bible box into bits and lit a fire and laid his body beside it and felt where the bones were broken in his back and chest and legs and licked the blood from his mouth and tried to give him my breath and I would have given him one of my legs and one of my arms and one of my kidneys and half of my liver and four pints of my blood and all easy for I had already given him my heart.

Only humans can know what it means to strip a human being of being human.

The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and a glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

The dead are on their way to work, grey limbs rubbing together in an open grave, stack on stack in the metal containers of car, tube and train. The grisly carriages are painted bright colors, guillotine colors of tumbril and blade, execution-bright. Each man and woman goes to their particular scaffold, kneels, and is killed day after day. Each collects their severed head and catches the train home. Some say that they enjoy their work.

Even our best endeavors turn against us. A loom that can do the work of eight men should free eight men from servitude. Instead, seven skilled men are put out of work to starve with their families, and one skilled man because the unskilled minder of the mechanical loom. What is the point of progress if it benefits the few while the many suffer?

People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two realities. There is much pain here.

I am not a machine, there is only so much and no more that I can absorb of the misery of my kind, when my tears are exhausted a dullness takes place, and out of that dullness a terrible callousness, so that I look on suffering and feel it not.

Atlas, Atlas, Atlas. It's in my name, I should have known. My name is Atlas – it means 'the long suffering one'.

the nearness of the wound to the gift

I had a sense of myself as a haunted house. I never knew when the invisible thing would strike – and it was like a blow, a kind of winding in the chest or stomach. When I felt it I would cry out at the force of it. Sometimes I lay curled up on the floor. Sometimes I kneeled and gripped a piece of furniture. This is one moment . . . know that another . . . Hold on, hold on, hold on.

This voyage of ours is lonely--the more so if we find a companion, only to suffer the bitterest loss. In truth we are alone.

But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us. This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That's the problem--the awful thing is you.