Quotes About Suffering

I had more emotion than I had room for. I had no place to put the pain.

It hurt. It hurt like hell. But it didn't matter, if no one knew.

And yet she hadn't the air of a woman whose life had been touched by uncertainty or suffering. Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people. Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.

Have you ever stopped to think, Clare," Irene demanded, "how much unhappiness and downright cruelty are laid to the loving-kindness of the Lord? And always by His most ardent followers, it seems.

I never consented to this body I've been charged with dragging until my death—

O the chimneysOn the ingeniously devised habitations of deathWhen Israel's body drifted as smokeThrough the air—Was welcomed by a star, a chimney sweep,A star that turned blackOr was it a ray of sun?

He had met him before, that certain down-at-heel vet growing stooped from carrying a thirty-five-pound monkey on his back.

There's people in hell who want ice water.

The devil lives in a double-shot", Roman explains himself obscurely. "I got a great worm inside. Gnaws and gnaws. Every day I drown him and every day he gnaws. Help me drown the worm, fellas.

If Jesus Christ treated me like you do, I'd drive in the nails myself.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

Turn to Second Corinthians, chapter one, and read with me starting at verse three." He waited a few moments. "Paul's speakin' here when he writes, 'God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us. For the more we suffer for Christ, the more God will shower us with his comfort through Christ.

Anna's illusion of control had been smashed years before with the sudden, meaningless death of her husband. In the years since, she'd made an effort not to give in to the need to put the pieces back together, but to see and know and accept with some degree of grace that life is meaningless. There is no Grand Plan. Everything doesn't happen for the best. One can knock till one's knuckles are bloody and the door may not be opened.

My life is a Stephen King novel," she whispered. "Everything gets worse. And worse. And worse. When it finally can't get any worse, everybody dies.

When things like this happen there's just nothing to be done about it; even suffering itself is a mere waste of time.

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.

For there the Babe is born in joy That was begotten in dire woe; Just as we Reap in joy the fruit Which we in bitter tears did sow." — William Blake

We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn't endure the certainty of suffering.

hardship had been part of history for so long it had become a condition of life. There was no expectation things could, or would, be otherwise. You got on with it, and through faith, family and character accommodated as best you could whatever suffering and misfortune was yours.

Listen, here's a human being who has suffered for love. It said Here's a heart aching, and that ache was large enough, urgent and familiar enough, for you all to feel it and by feeling participate in something you yourself were either too timid, closed or unlucky to have known personally, or had known in the long ago of your own innocence over which you had since grown the skin necessary to tolerate the loss and stay living.

It's hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You're all the time living in the future. In the future things will be better, you hope, and you'll feel better and you won't wake up feeling like someone has been taking the life of you drip by drip while you slept.

When your spirit is uneasy, stillness can be a kind of suffering. And when you're young, the unlived life in you, all that future, urgent and unreachable, can be unbearable.

The nobleman fell to his knees. 'Sir, come down to my son ere he die.' His old face. His love for his son. None of us spoke, the old man kneeling so. I watched your eyes. The pity that pooled, this love of the father. 'Go thy way; thy son lives,' you said. And he raised his face to you, and we could see that he believed.

It's hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You're all the time living in the future. In the future things will be better, you hope, and you'll feel better and you won't wake up feeling like someone has been taking the life out of you drip by drip while you slept.