Quotes About Suffering

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.

And I want out of this life on drugs.

Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow sufferers, to raise public awareness, to give a voice to their pain. None of them would ever admit that it was all about ratings and voyeurism and lurid, grotesque curiosity.

The words madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony.

And I always feel so stupid sitting in therapy talking about my problems because, Jesus Christ, so what? I can't equate the amount of pain and misery and despair I have suffered and endured as a depressive with the events of my life, which just seem so common.

Depression is a very narcissistic thing, it's a self involvement that is so deep and intense that it means the sufferer cannot get out of her own head long enough to see what real good, what genuine loveliness, there is in the world around her.

that I don't want to feel better in the morning, how that way of life is wearing me out, that what I really want is to not feel this way in the first place.

Pass the pills and fancy plants/ Give us this day our daily trance.

No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain would get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.

Our suffering is small compared to our misunderstandings with others, how they fail to give us a break, know what it's like, judge us fairly, see the world the way we do.

It was a long time before I came to the realization that it is in our acceptance of what is given that God gives Himself. Even the Son of God had to learn obedience by the things that He suffered . . . And His reward was desolation, crucifixion.

Infants were tossed up in the air and used as the targets for machine guns

But there are some born to do penance by nature. Maybe they lift the load for some of us who take it quite comfortably that we're humankind, and not angels.

make medicines against pain, the chief enemy of man. Pain, and the absence of sleep, which is the most beneficent remedy for pain.

Their tongues were swollen with thirst

They had had no sleep for almost eighty hours, and their bodies had been drained by exposure

A still small voice spake unto me,"Thou art so full of misery,Were it not better not to be?"

In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands.

That's the penalty we have to pay for our acts of foolishness - someone else always suffers for them.

World War I killed upwards of fifteen millions, wreaked immeasurable physical, social, and psychic damage, and left most of the citizens of the belligerent powers with a deep conviction that war must in some way be prohibited.

A cada uno su pena, pero a todos la alegria

For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier.

O splendid and sterile Dolores,Our Lady of Pain.

What ailed us, O gods, to desert youFor creeds that refuse and restrain?Come down and redeem us from virtue,Our Lady of Pain.