Quotes About Suffering

the moment in which the mind acknowledge 'This isn't what I wanted, but it's what I got' is the point at which suffering disappears. Sadness might remain present, but the mind ... is free to console, free to support the mind's acceptance of the situation, free to allow space for new possibilities to come into view. [p. 29]

Everything is always changing. There is a cause-and-effect lawfulness that governs all unfolding experience. What I do matters, but I am not in charge. Suffering results from struggling with what is beyond my control. [pp. 27-28]

life is difficult and painful, just by its very nature, not because we're doing it wrong [pp. 17-18].

Life is painful, suffering is optional.

This is torment for me, Eva. I can't focus. I can't sleep. I lose my temper at the slightest irritants. I'm in hell without you.

You show me no mercy by sparing me for a life without you in it.

Nunca conseguiríamos ficar juntos porque era demasiado doloroso... excepto quando era inacreditavelmente perfeito.

The words she wanted to say burned her throat and tongue, explanations and declarations that would only cause more pain because the end would only be the same.

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I have a call.

I hated men because they didn't stay around and love me like a father: I could prick holes in them & show they were no father-material. I made them propose and then showed them they hadn't a chance. I hated men because they didn't have to suffer like a woman did. They could die or go to Spain. They could have fun while a woman had birth pangs. They could gamble while a woman skimped on the butter on the bread. Men, nasty lousy men.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. --from Elm, written 19 April 1962

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor or pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

Ash, ash —- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—— A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. --from Lady Lazarus, written 23-29 October 1962

How many different deaths I can die?

Let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals.

I wait and ache.

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B. Once you were beautiful.

I am accused. I dream of massacres. I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them, Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.

They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. --From the poem Lady Lazarus, written 23-29 October 1962

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.

Your body Hurts me as the world hurts God