Quotes About Suffering

People endured horrors, and then they couldn't talk about them. The real stories of the world were bedded in silence.

The blood is intact in our bodies but we feel like we are bleeding into the earth.

Hunger takes away what you are. Everything we were was just nothing then.

What he must have suffered, in his lovely English privacy.

Life wants you to go down and suffer far as I can see. You gotta dance around all that. A child must come out to dance and dance around all obstacles and dance in the end the creaky quadrille of age.

I did not intend to cry out, but as you will see these small actions, associated in most people's minds with the ease and happiness of life, are to me still like knives in my heart to think of.

What would have comforted that writhing woman in a lost bed in the lost land of Strandhill I do not know. If I were a horse they would have shot me out of mercy.

We washed our shirts and trews and when we went out to get them off the bushes, they were as stiff as corpses in the cold. Some poor cows froze where they were standing like they had peered into the face of old Medusa. Men lost the wages of three years hence at cards. They bet their boots and then pled for the pity of the winner. The piss froze as it left our peckers and woe betide the man with an obstruction or hesitation to their shit, because soon they had a brown icicle on their arse

A savage sense entered me, of being of such small account in the world that I wasn't to be helped, that priest and woman and man had put out an edict that I wasn't to be helped, I was to be left to the elements, just as I was, a walking animal, forsaken. Maybe it was then that some part of me leapt away from myself, something fled from my brain, I don't know.

Morality has its own civil wars, with its own victims in their own time and place.

This is not a war, this is a test of how far man can be degraded

Hope is like a shard of glass. Tread on it, and you'll end up wincing with every step. The best policy is to tweezer it out. Sure, it will hurt like billy-o and the wound will take a while to heal, but after that you can walk again.

Denn Hoffnung ist nichts anderes als eine Scherbe im Fuß, hatte sie irgendwo einmal gelesen, die ewig schmerzt, bis man sie endlich herauszieht.

La esperanza es como una astilla de vidrio clavada en el pie. Mientras permanece clavada en la carne sientes dolor a cada paso que das, pero una vez que te la han extraído la herida sangra un poco y tarda un tiempo en cicatrizar, pero al final uno puede seguir caminando.

Martin wished he had less experience, hadn't looked into so many empty faces to know first hand that there was no scalpel or chemotherapy in the entire world able to completely remove the cancer-like tumour that had established itself in this girl's soul after the hell she'd been through. In such cases psychologists and doctors were like engineers in Chernobyl or Fukushima. They could never get rid of the problem altogether, merely mitigate the consequences of the catastrophe

Now he couldn't hear a thing. No breathing. No scraps of sentences. Not even crackling any more. Nothing. And for the first time, he realised that silence can inflict pain in a way that even the loudest of noises cannot

En apariencia es una actitud muy heroica: rechazar cualquier tipo de consuelo pasando por alto que es precisamente en esta postura donde reside el consuelo más envenenado, temible y vicioso.

La segunda tentación consistía en la amargura, en el propio abandono masoquista al odio, al sufrimiento y a un pesimismo sin barreras.

Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.

Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.

For all the types of pain that can lead to suffering there is a solution. Through opening our hearts with compassion to the pain that life brings, we can truly cure our pain and avoid our suffering. Then we can walk in the valley of love and experience the vast space within our heart.

Through knowing death we can hold a beacon of love for every moment that has just passed, for every friend who has lost a friend, for every child who has lost a parent, for every parent who has lost a child; for any suffering anywhere.

Here's what I think: there are neither major nor minor tragedies. Tragedies exist. Some can be described. There are others for which every heart is too small. Those kind cannot fit in the heart.

In war, {freedom's} meaning is bound to the collective, making peace and freedom the same . . . The collective is a mob that suffers in silence, and waits.