Quotes About Suffering

How he had suffered . . . . I saw then, for the first time, that it was the mixture of strength and weakness in Garth's nature which made him so vulnerable to suffering. A weaker man would have bowed his head before the storm; a stronger man could have ridden it out. Garth was so fashioned that the storm twisted him, tortured him beyond bearing, left him maimed but still upright, still rebellious.

War is horrible," I said, trying to damp her down. "If you had lived through the war you wouldn't think it glorious. War is just agony. It's living under a dark cloud all the time and wondering if someone you love has been killed.

Silly people are often cruel," said Adam. "You know that yourself. People with no imagination are cruel because they don't realise what other people are suffering.

People who have suffered a great deal of unhappiness through death or loneliness are often beset by the fear of losing their dear ones.

They were all unhappy but I could do nothing to help them. Nobody could help them. Perhaps the worst part of it was their unkindness to one another—yes, that was the worst. I had never before met people like this: people who were bitter and unkind and hopeless, people who had no happiness in life nor any expectation of happiness

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, and the journey is always towards the other soul.

In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.

Do freshman philosophy classes nowadays debate updated versions of the age-old questions? Like, how could a merciful God allow AIDS, childhood cancers, tsunamis and Dick Cheney?

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

In addition to demanding answers and accountability from the Veterans Administration, Congress had to act to ensure veterans do not suffer because of the actions of a federal agency.

Veterans served this country because they wanted to prevent the suffering of others,and now too many are suffering themselves.

We've got to do more to help these veterans who are suffering from brain injuries and PTSD.

Like the suffering child, gang members act out of their despair, and their actions are all the more alarming now for our not having heeded their cry long ago. The shortsighted neglect that keeps us locked up in our outrage has also kept us from viable solutions.

Some loves are like a vice that has ceased to give pleasure.

The calls that I have received from President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the fact that there are other people that are suffering every bit as much as I am, and that our whole nation is going through a tragedy together, I think we have to think about those things.

There's this tendency to think of the individual and the collective are somehow at odds or separate. But I think that's really false. We're all both. And when the individual suffers, the collective suffers, and vice versa.

Quibbling over the definition of genocide does nothing but help obscure the long history of vicious racism and undeniable suffering of Indigenous people in this country. It's bad enough whatever you want to call it.

Brutality to an animal is cruelty to mankind - it is only the difference in the victim.

I have been the victim of heartless malice.

Here is the tragedy: when you are the victim of depression, not only do you feel utterly helpless and abandoned by the world, you also know that very few people can understand, or even begin to believe, that life can be this painful.

You can't come into this world without becoming its victim.

I always play what I call The Girl. The nice straight character. Sincere. Usually the victim. I'm put upon. I suffer.

The idea of somebody suffering is really painful to every human. In our collective language, we all too often see those who are suffering as a victim to be pitied, to be feared, and even sometimes to be despised. I want to redirect that narrative.

From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.