Quotes About Suffering

God will break your heart.

God's got a lot of explaining to do. Of course, God never explains. When life breaks your heart, you're just supposed to pick up the pieces and start all over, I guess.

Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine," Vincenzo Giuliani said quietly. " 'Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.' " "But the sparrow still falls," Felipe said.

If pain and injustice and undeserved misery are part of the package, and God knows they are, then surely the life of Christ is God's own answer to Ecclesiasticus! Redeem the suffering. Embrace it. Make it mean something.

There was a real sweetness to that man: a special sort of gentleness that you see sometimes in people who've been hurt bad but don't want revenge. [Bessie about James]

What he experienced was not so much the beginning of love as a cessation of pain.

Who decides which… deaths are tragic and which are not? Who decides what is big and what is little? Is it a matter of numbers or physical mass or intelligence? If you are a little creature or a little person dying alone and in pain, you may not remember or know that you are little. If you are in enough pain, you may not remember who or what you are; you may know only your suffering, which is immense… What decides – common sense? Can common sense dictate such things?

She was starved hurting limbs.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved. p. xx

Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

Later, Mother patted my back as I threw up into the toilet. I remember the smell of Jergen's lotion from her hands, and how the tenderness of her gesture repelled me even as part of me hungered for it. I passed out sending prayers up at machine-gun speed, like a soldier in a foxhole to a god not believed in, Don't let me be her, don't let me be her. For however she'd pulled herself together for this trip, she could blow at any second.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there's suffering involved.

I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while. People can get behind pain that way, if they think it derives from powers larger than themselves.

I only breathe with one lung since you've gone , you say. And I love you with one hemisphere of my brain, the dumb one, the one that forgets.

So I arrive alone alongside Daddy's home hospital bed. There's the bleach from the sheets and the air tinny with iodine. Under the air conditioner grind, his breathing is labored. Honeysuckle vines cling to the window screen, and a chameleon hangs by its claws.

Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

This book is about the problem of evil, but not quite in the traditional sense, since I see it as our problem, not God's. It

We shake with joy, we shake with grief. What a time they have, these two housed as they are in the same body.

Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man's most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering. Who would disagree.

What does barbed wire feel like when you grip it, as though it were a plate and a fork, or a handful of flowers?

We did not know she was sick, but she has come to the fence, walking like a woman who is balancing a sword inside of her body.

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, isn't war the most demented activity ever invented?

Many are the hearts               that are weary tonight,        Wishing for the war to cease Ã¢â'¬Â¦