Quotes About Suffering

If she wanted to go,' Bonnet continued, 'there's not a thing you – or anyone else – could have done to stop her. If it's any consolation, she won't have suffered. Pills, all very peaceful. Just gone to sleep and not woken up. It's what she chose.

She knew that doting on the dream made the pain worse, but she could not stop herself.

The thought of him was a smoky cloud from hell that moved and crept in her head.

For the only time in my life I would be living with a chain-smoking semi-invalid whose chief point of pride in life was his membership in the Ku Klux Clan.

The conquering army had perpetrated untold atrocities. The Japanese had occupied my home and twice forced us to leave the land I loved.

After the woods our good cheer was quelled by the faint first whiff of a real battlefield, a gagging combination of shit and gunpowder, gas and blood, decaying flesh and muddy rot.

I knew I could count on President Wilson to refrain from pious claptrap. "Human beings," he said, millet crunching in his beak, "seem powerfully invested in the notion that suffering improves or ennobles the sufferer. This is, of course, childish nonsense.

Among the men, only Whit kept his face clean-shaven; how he did it in the absence of privacy and clean water, I'll never know. I also knew that our major kept up a strong front during the day, his cheer unflagging, but wept uncontrollably while asleep in his funkhole.

You will see only that your own people are troubled. You will not see that a few must suffer for the millions to be saved.

Why am I begging you, who parades your suffering over the ruins like a king in order to ensure that you will never be touched deeply, you who're always laughing.

But she'd seen beyond his indifferent mask. She'd realized he was hiding his pain - she understood, because she hid her own. Not behind sullen ennui but by trying to stay quiet, unnoticed. Invisible.

Life in a Communist country is an intellectually empty life and we suffered the constant pangs of intellectual starvation.

Dylan Thomas was lying in a coma under an oxygen tent in St. Vincent's Hospital. He had been lying there, unshaven, for three days. The precise cause of the coma was obscure, though he had been heard making the extravagant claim that he had eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern the night before he collapsed.

Not loving you—that would hurt more.

Profound melancholia is a day-in, day-out, night-in, night-out, almost arterial level of agony.

I understood very little of what was going on, and I felt as though only dying would release me from the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and blackness that surrounded me.

Given that, it turned out to be unnervingly easy to keep my friends and family at psychological bay: "To be sure," wrote Hugo Wolf, "I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable..... But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a strong medicine. As John Donne has written, it is not so abstract as one might have thought and wished, but it does endure, and it does grow.

Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it; an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.

To be sure," wrote Hugo Wolf, "I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.

Time finally did bring relief. But it took its own, and not terribly sweet, time in doing so.

They can try acupuncture, they can try ECT, they can try a frontal lobotomy, none of it will work. I am a hopeless case. I have lost my angel. I have lost my mind. The days are too long, too heavy; my bones are crushing under the weight of these days.

It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it; an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.

The colonel nodded. Our childhood seems so far away now. All this - he gestured out of the vehicle - so much suffering. One of our Japanese poets, a court lady many years ago, wrote how sad this was. She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown. Well, Colonel, it's hardly a foreign land to me. In many ways, it's where I've continued to live all my life. It's only now I've started to make my journey from it.