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Quotes About Suffering

Flush likes civilised life, and the society of little dogs with turned-up tails, such as Florence abounds with. Unhappily it abounds also with fleas, which afflict poor Flush to the verge sometimes of despair. Fancy Robert and me down on our knees combing him, with a basin of water on one side! He suffers to such a degree from fleas that I cannot bear to witness it. He tears off his pretty curls through the irritation. Do you know of a remedy?
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
You will wonder at me, but these public affairs have half killed me. You know I can't take things quietly. Your complaint and mine, Fanny, are just opposite. For weeks and weeks, in my feverish state, I never closed my eyes without suffering 'punishment' under eternal articles of peace and unending lists of provisional governments. Do you wonder?
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My dearest sisters will be very grieved if we don't go to England, and yet how can I even try to persuade my husband back into the scene of old associations where he would feel so much pain? Do I not know what I myself should suffer in some places? And he loved his mother with all his power of loving, which is deeper and more passionate than love is with common men.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
ignores these wrongs, then may women as a sex continue to suffer them; there is no help for any of us — let us be dumb and die. I have spoken therefore, and in speaking have used plain words — words which look like blots, and which you yourself would put away — words which, if blurred or softened, would imperil perhaps the force and righteousness of the moral influence.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Robert has exhumed some French books, just now, from a little circulating library which he had not tried, and we have been making ourselves uncomfortable over Balzac's 'Cousin Pons.' But what a wonderful writer he is! Who else could have taken such a subject, out of the lowest mud of humanity, and glorified and consecrated it?
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
after all, spinal disorders do not usually attack life, though they disable and overthrow. The pain you endure is the terrible thing. Has a local application of chloroform been ever tried?
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If Fourierism could be realised (which it surely cannot) out of a dream, the destinies of our race would shrivel up under the unnatural heat, and human nature would, in my mind, be desecrated and dishonored — because I do not believe in purification without suffering, in progress without struggle, in virtue without temptation. Least of all do I consider happiness the end of man's life. We look to higher things, have nobler ambitions.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
My poor Flush has fallen into tribulation. Think of Catiline, the great savage Cuba bloodhound belonging to this house, attempting last night to worry him just as the first Catiline did Cicero. Flush was rescued, but not before he had been wounded severely: and this morning he is on three legs and in great depression of spirits. My poor, poor Flushie! He lies on my sofa and looks up to me with most pathetic eyes.
~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I only thought Of lying quiet there where I was thrown Like sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer her To prick me to a pattern with her pin, Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf, And dry out from my drowned anatomy The last sea-salt left in me.
~ Elizabeth Barrett-Browning
His breath hurt her lungs, in and out, in and out, as if he breathed the smoke and ash he saw.
~ Elizabeth Bear
Unhelmed by her remote masters, she limped along the beach, dragging one fused limb.
~ Elizabeth Bear
The world is a wheel, and we are all broken on it.
~ Elizabeth Bear
One cannot love dust. One might as well put the hook in one's heart oneself.
~ Elizabeth Bear
His heart filled up with something vast and terrible at the realization, a shadowy whirl of wings and storm and light, and he knew why men died for Elizabeth. He would have died for Elizabeth himself. And he understood as well that there were things bigger than Elizabeth, bigger than England, for all they were things for which he did not have a name. Faith. God. Liberty. None of it was enough. Worse things had been done in those names than Elizabeth's.
~ Elizabeth Bear
He stank of something bitter and sharp. His thumb moved across the scar on Cathoair's cheek, a sickening caress, and Cahey somehow got his hands up on Mingan's shoulders, and shoved. Mingan kneed him in the solar plexus, so if not for the Wolf's grip on his neck, Cathoair would have gone to the ground.
~ Elizabeth Bear
The Mebd is unimpressed by suffering.
~ Elizabeth Bear
They stripped him only to the waist, and left his feet free when they bound him standing between two pillars, and not helplessly prone on some clammy altar.
~ Elizabeth Bear
When has the Light ever been gentle to innocence?
~ Elizabeth Bear
We alleviated suffering, and I've lived with enough suffering to know that any time you can take the edge of it, repair it for even one creature, you are creating a net good in the universe.
~ Elizabeth Bear
He knew every inch of the thing's surface by now, had bloodied his fingertips with worrying at it, with picking at the spikes of the mouthpiece and exploring the curve and cheeks. It weighed as much as a small child in his arms, resting against his knees, and holding it close to his breast was the only thing that silenced the savage pain in his brands any more.
~ Elizabeth Bear
There are people, even now, who manage to elude rightminding to the point where they enjoy their pleasures more if somebody else suffers to provide them.
~ Elizabeth Bear
My identity, my selfhood. The person I'd been for nearly twenty ans. It dropped away, and I was left wrecked and retching, cramped, choking up a thin stream of bile.
~ Elizabeth Bear
She hadn't really done anything to me physically. This was just what a broken heart felt like.
~ Elizabeth Bear
I remembered what it felt like to have your heart peeled out of your body and handed to you by somebody you'd loved and allowed yourself to be vulnerable to.
~ Elizabeth Bear