Quotes About Suffering

Seth envied them that freedom as his naked body hung lankly from the ceiling, with his hands shackled over his head. He'd been in this position for so long that his wrist bones protruded through the open cuts the manacles had worn through his flesh. He was sure it had to hurt, but that pain blended in nicely with all the others so that he couldn't tell where one ache began and another throb ended. Who knew torture could have benefits?

Life is ever a complicated symphony of catastrophes. Ever seeking to lay us low and lift us higher.

His hatred for the world was carved into his heart.

What can I do, to stop your hurt? Nothing more, she said. You do everything, and you make me all right. Thank you Very gently, he touched her sooty cheek. If there was a way, he said, I'd take your hurt and carry it for you.

He, who considered himself a man, had become, with his first wife, vulnerable as an intimidated child. She acted on him like a wasting disease: all healthy links to life were infidelities to be rescinded.

They saw me at once, and I thought of them rotting away and curling in pain and crying out loud; I wanted them doubled up and crying on the ground in front of me.

I must say, John, I never expected to find you all so nervous," Mrs. Montague said. "I deplore fear in these matters." She tapped her foot irritably. "You know perfectly well, John, that those who have passed beyond expect to see us happy and smiling; they want to know that we are thinking of them lovingly. The spirits dwelling in this house may be actually suffering because they are aware that you are afraid of them.

Their tongues will burn, I thought, as though they had eaten fire. Their throats will burn when the words come out, and in their bellies they will feel a torment hotter than a thousand fires.

It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, it is a place of contained ill will.

She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair.

God has given me blood to drink.

Only human beings and rabid animals turn on their own kind; gratuitous pain is unknown in nature.

She had done so much to preserve herself from this kind of captivity and had taken inevitably one of the many roads which would lead her to the same torment; she was helpless among people who hated her and showed it by holding her motionless until they should choose to release her.

You've no idea the messages I've gotten from nuns walled up alive.

Tell me yourself—rather than suffering because of daughters, as Tevye has, is it not a thousand times better to lie in the ground and bake bagels?

Like they say: suffer with your own. You get the picture? But complete strangers? Must I bear the brunt of their troubles? Have I deserved a fate like that? What wrong have I done?

The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away—until you're blue in the face, and you won't be any the wiser. What's that you say? Philosophizing is like chewing straw? My very words!

Poor people were dying of cold, they were swelling up with hunger. The children were falling like flies. But it wasn't so terrible, because only the poor were dying. May God not punish me.

The wise man blesses the whip that flogs him," says my mother.

My brother-in-law—may my life be as long as his was short!—has died of the toothache. Of course, his health wasn't too good before that.

As my mother says, "God is a father. He punishes with one hand and heals with the other." That's something I don't get. Why punish and then heal? You could save yourself the trouble by skipping both.

Send us the cure—the affliction we already have.

The worse heartache," says my mother, "is the one you can't bare.

A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, Why is there so much suffering? Suzuki Roshi replied, No reason.