Quotes About Suffering

Individual liberation was impossible if other people were suffering.

A o?i so vse na Julki. In vse klopi zadržujejo dih, da bi bile vse o?i še bolj tesno pri njem. Kakor da bodo iz njih, iz o?i, vsak hip zaplavale otroške dlani kot golobje peruti in privzdignile njeno telo in mu zamanjšale bole?ine. Njene o?i pa so žametno in vlažno mehke, ker se njena stopala ne dotikajo poda. Rožnat trak, ki povezuje kiti, pa ?epi na kavlju kot metulj z razprtimi krili.

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?

He had to see her face, listen to her voice. She had no reason to hide, and it was his duty to get as close as he could to all suffering. He wanted to say to the woman in black—as he would later to Zakya's children—that the dead of Murambi, too, had dreams, and that their most ardent desire was for the resurrection of the living.

And all the beautiful words of the poets, Cornelius, can say nothing, I swear to you, of the fifty thousand ways to die like a dog, within a few hours.

The poor man finds happiness in economy; the rich man, misery.

Every war involves a greater or less relapse into barbarism. War, indeed, in its details, is the essence of inhumanity. It dehumanizes. It may save the state, but it destroys the citizen.

Most suffering is generated by the tendency of the mind to moralize and judge, and to mistake belief for reality. 4.

The not knowing—the hope—has become more painful than death. And that just makes the tragedy all the more obscene. It is horrible enough that you make a mother suffer like

You are forever held hostage once you care so much. The

I ducked inside, my mind still numb. The stench came first, the acid smells of urine and the never-mistaken stink of fecal matter. Something was burning—I think I knew what—and the damp yellow odor of sweat seemed to be coming from the walls. But there was something else here. The smell, not of death, but of predeath, like gangrene, like something dying and decomposing while still breathing. The

He squinted at the fluorescent light on the white ceiling. The Spanish praying continued. The familiar smell filled the air, that combination of harsh cleaners, bodily functions, wilting fauna and absolutely no natural air circulation. Mike's head dropped to the left. He saw the back of a woman hunched over a bed. Her fingers moved over the prayer beads. Her head seemed to be resting on a man's chest. She alternated between sobs and prayers—and a blend of the two. He

It was the type of bad that made you want to do anything to please— —oh God please— —make it stop. It made you think about picking up a gun and silencing the sounds, if you knew where you were, if you knew that you were so close to your bedside table where you kept a gun in that small safe . . . Maya

The arm was the worst of it; it felt as though it'd been mangled by a tiger and then jammed into a blender set on pulverize. A blacksmith was mercilessly using her skull as an anvil. Her tongue and mouth had the dryness of both the Sahara and the worst hangover imaginable. Megan

It's the cruelest thing in the world. Death is better. When you're dead, the pain stops. But hope keeps raising you way up high, only to drop you to the hard ground. Hope cradles your heart in its hand and then it crushes it with a fist. Over and over. It never stops. That's what hope does.

AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched me in every way I had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind.

I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty it brings about. For without pain, there can be no pleasure.

It's from Lear," she said. "Wait. Yes. 'As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.

AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet … AM has won, simply … he has taken his revenge … I have no mouth. And I must scream. (Page 13).

Who Needs the Taj Mahal when it's a drag to live at all?

Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us. Because at that moment I think I realized completely, so that I was able to verbalize it: AM was intent on keeping us in his belly forever, twisting and torturing us forever. The machine hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before. And we were helpless. It also became hideously clear: If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.

Stomachs that were merely cauldrons of acid, bubbling, foaming, always shooting spears of sliver-thin pain into our chests. It was the pain of the terminal ulcer, terminal cancer, terminal paresis. It was unending pain … And we passed through the cavern of rats. And we passed through the path of boiling steam. And we passed through the country of the blind. And we passed through the slough of despond. And we passed through the vale of tears. And we came, finally, to the ice caverns.

None of us knew why AM had saved five people, or why our specific five, or why he spent all his time tormenting us, nor even why he had made us virtually immortal …