Quotes About Suffering

In this torment, my mother learned not to hold onto the things she loved because then no one could take them away from her.

Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

Our tendency in the midst of suffering is to turn on God. To get angry and bitter and shake our fist at the sky and say, "God, you don't know what it's like! You don't understand! You have no idea what I'm going through. You don't have a clue how much this hurts." The cross is God's way of taking away all of our accusations, excuses, and arguments. The cross is God taking on flesh and blood and saying, "Me too.

A mother should sacrifice herself. The world is a happy place when it can sacrifice mothers on the altar of unconditional love. . . . I can take the blame. All the blame! I'm designed for it. I'm like the village witch who gets burned when the child gets sick or the crops fail . . . If you can't blame the weather, blame the mother. Welcome to womanhood.

Prendergast's ribs spread open with a wet crack.

Pain represents 10 percent of the problem, while suffering, which is not wanting to feel the pain, represents 90 percent of the problem.

our resistance to the inevitable pain of life is what really causes us to suffer, not the pain itself.

Falling in love with Renee was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-a-long.

Love dies in many different ways, and it's natural for the grass to seem greener on the other side. But it's not a competition; there's plenty of pain to go around.

Everyone has something in their life, in their world, that can break them.

I had no real idea how ugly the subject of punishment would become when I began this study, and it has been enough to bear me down at times. What people will do to other people is indeed a hell in our midst.

We spend our lives drowning in the sea of things we never wished to experience.

To consent to paradox is to consent to suffering that which is greater than the ego. The religious experience lies exactly at that point of insolubility where we feel we can proceed no further. This is an invitation to that which is greater than one's self.

We have the assurance of the enlightened beings that reality is goodness, that reality is freedom from suffering, that reality is bliss. So we should never fear to open ourselves to reality, to cast aside our preconceptions and biases, and to open more and more to whatever turns out to be real. You can have faith in enlightenment, faith in evolutionary potential, faith in infinity, faith in your infinite self. (p. 222)

When it becomes more difficult to suffer than to change... you will change.

under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.

Hell: A sumptuously provisioned banquet hall full of hungry people with locked-strait elbow joints who can't feed themselves because their unbendable arms won't allow it. Heaven: Everything's the same except people are feeding each other.

scapegoaters, but rather on the side of the scapegoated victim.

A real hangover is nothing to try out family remedies on. The only cure for a real hangover is death.

The only cure for a real hangover is death.

One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels,One more wrong to man, one more insult to God!

Man's inhumanity to man.Makes countless thousands mourn!

[Diseases] crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, shrivel them up like old apples, make them so many anatomies.