Quotes About Suffering

To the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering. It is only for others, as a symbol, that suffering takes on any meaning or purpose. No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is.

It hurts just as much as it is worth.

But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain.

As a rule of social etiquette, when confronted with a pixelated screen of a dozen people, all of them inquiring, somewhat half-heartedly, as to "how you are," it is appropriate to make the expected, decent and accurate claim that you are fine and privileged, lucky compared to so many others, inconvenienced, yes, melancholy often, but not suffering.

But that never was true. Glenn was as sane as I am, and, my dear, that's pretty sane, I'll have you remember. But he must have suffered some terrible blight to his spirit--some blunting of his soul.

A craftsman must probe to the very bottom of cruelty.

But that I should have ended up in a place like this seems too custom-made a nightmare to be the work of mere ill fortune.

Depression, in Karla's experience, was a dull, inert thing - a toad that squatted wetly on your head until it finally gathered the energy to slither off. The unhappiness she had been living with for the last ten days was a quite different creature. It was frantic and aggressive. It had fists and fangs and hobnailed boots. It didn't sit, it assailed. It hurt her. In the mornings, it slapped her so hard in the face that she reeled as she walked to the bathroom.

If you're silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

Life, inexhaustible, goes on. And we do too. Carrying our wounds and our medicines as we go. Ours is an amazing, a spectacular, journey in the Americas. It is so remarkable one can only be thankful for it, bizarre as that may sound. Perhaps our planet is for learning to appreciate the extraordinary wonder of life that surrounds even our suffering, and to say Yes, if through the thickest of tears.

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped... Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

Kossula was no longer on the porch with me. He was squatting about that fire in Dahomey. His face was twitching in abysmal pain. It was a horror mask. He had forgotten that I was there. He was thinking aloud and gazing into the dead faces in the smoke. His agony was so acute that he became inarticulate. He never noticed my preparation to leave him. So I slipped away as quietly as possible and left him with his smoke pictures.

Perhaps it is natural for the god of the poor to be akin to the god of the dead, for there is something about poverty that smells of death

It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshipers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshiped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshiped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.(138-139)

But we see something else: the nobility of a soul that has suffered to the point almost of erasure, and still it struggles to be whole, present, giving. Growing in love, deepening in understanding. Cudjo's wisdom becomes so apparent, toward the end of his life, that neighbors ask him to speak to them in parables. Which he does. Offering peace.

my people had sold me and the white people had bought me.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

the nobility of a soul that has suffered to the point almost of erasure, and still it struggles to be whole, present, giving.

The icy sword of the square-toed one had cut off his breath and left his hands in a pose of agonizing protest.

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom.

All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped.

the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle; with sorting and feeding and starvation and suffocation and pestilence and death; with slave ship stenches and mutinies of crew and cargo; with the jettying of cargoes before the guns of British cruisers; with auction blocks and sales and profits and losses

Tea Cake went out and wandered around. Saw the hand of horror on everything. Houses without roofs, and roofs without houses. Steel and stone all crushed and crumbled like wood. The mother of malice had trifled with men.