Quotes About Suffering

I don't know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.

Now, even as you completed your conquest of Wife One, our friendship grew. It would outlast all my other friendships. It would bring me intense happiness. And I felt lucky; I had suffered, but unlike others I never got my heart broken. (Didn't you? a therapist once goaded me. Wife Two was not the only one who found something unhealthy about our relationship, not was the therapist the only one to wonder if it hadn't been a factor in my remaining single all these years.)

Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

But compared to Germany, the U.S. might as well be in the Third World, especially if we're talking about health care. Why did every other advanced country get through the pandemic so much better than the U.S.? Maybe you don't feel it so much here in the sticks, but out there people are still really suffering.

Stevie Smith calling Death the only god who must come when he's called tickled you pink, as did the various ways people have said that were it not for suicide they could not go on.

Why do I think you did it? Because you were trapped upside down in a tankful of water. Because you were weak and in pain. Because you were tired of fighting.

Weren't there millions upon millions of people suffering from various humanitarian crises that millions upon millions of other people simply chose to forget? Why could we not turn our attention to the teeming sufferers already in our midst? And here, perhaps, was a last chance for us to redeem

And if that's what he had to do in order not to suffer, on top of everything else, the pain of guilt, that's all right with me. That's all right with me.

Why do people often find animal suffering harder to accept than the suffering of other human beings?

Then it occurred to me that many of these people had suffered more than Christ himself. "I pondered this until I felt that my heart and mind would burst. But finally I received the light that I had prayed and begged for. And I realized that just as they had suffered, so should we all have the courage to suffer. Who would be so foolish not to accept pain and torment if this was the way to a faithful and steadfast bridegroom who waits with open arms, his breast bloody and burning with love.

No, God had not forsaken her. In His mercy, He had heard her cries for help when she called on him as she sank more and more into her misery. - even when she called without believing she could be heard It felt as if the black sea were rushing over her; now the waves lifted her toward a bliss so strange and so sweet that she knew it would carry her out of life.

You are so good. So good, you're always feeling so much. And sometimes it feels like you're gonna bust wide open from all the feeling, don't it? People like you are the best in the world, but you sure do suffer for it.

An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat-shop or the concentration camp and the death march.

Quien no haya concebido jamás su propia anulación, quien no haya presentido el recurso a la cuerda, a la bala, al veneno o al mar, es un recluso envilecido o un gusano reptante sobre la carroña cósmica.

No puedo luchar más. Sé que te estoy destrozando la vida ... Verás que no siquiera esto puedo escribirlo bien. No puedo leer. Cuanto quiero decirte es que toda la felicidad de mi vida te la debo a ti.

I was reminded of an African proverb: when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world.

Because it was the ugliness that drew him to her: it told him that she had suffered and been ruined by the war just like him. For her the damage was visible, whereas for him it was hidden beneath the surface. But they were still the same—casualties, walking wounded, carrying on without hope of recovery, separated from the rest of the population by an experience that they could neither share nor explain.

God must have been on leave during the Holocaust.

Forgetting is something time alone takes care of, but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision

Look,' he said, 'those Jews died quickly, they did not suffer as i do—though they were not as guilty as I am.

Los hombres eran endurecidos en Rabka para que no se derrumbaran tras unas pocas semanas de servicios y tenían que hacerse insensibles a la sangre, a los gritos de agonía de mujeres y niños, debiendo realizar el trabajo con el mínimo ruido y la máxima eficacia

The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.

I was very fond of Lagneau's phrase: "I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.