Quotes About Suffering

Work went on monotonously, and our constant hunger was wrenching. Rice powder and bran, which I sometimes roasted in an attempt to give it some flavor, had torn my insides to shreds. One morning I didn't have the strength to get up, and no one came to see what had happened to me. Everyone was so used to having people just disappear.

These stories depressed me. Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.

Sinking, sinking, drinking water. When everyone in the village was fasting a long month,when not a grain, not a drop of water passed between the parched lips of any able-bodied man, woman or child over the age of ten, when the sun was hotter than the cooking pot and dusk was just a febrile wish, the hypocrite went down to the pond to duck his head, to dive and sink, to drink and sink a little lower. p. 105

When you have fallen low, she told herself, what hurts is pretending you are high.

What could not be changed must be borne. And since nothing could be changed, everything had to be borne.

A busload of pilgrims today on journeys they never chose, having once believed themselves born for more than this.

Religion, Pat had said to me and then I had repeated it to Charlotte, was for people who needed to believe that death was better than life.

Qui craint de souffrir souffre déjà de ce qu'il craint.

El desear y el gozar nos llevan al mismo dolor

But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness they were beaten down and met with disappointment again and again—their lives were not available for use as an illustration. Theirs were not stories that could be read as an affirmation of another system.

Only twenty - nine years in the entire human history had been without warfare, and now here he was too, travelling between the episodes of a rapacious civil war.

On the bottom shelf M. kept the books from his childhood days: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the Iliad - they are described in The Noise of Time and happened to have been saved by M.'s father. Most of them later perished in Kalinin when I was fleeing from the Germans. The way we have scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin!

The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.

Nanak dukhiya sab sansar.

The fact is, we will all be broken—sooner or later. We can choose to be broken or we can wait for God to crush our pride. If we resist the means God provides to lead us to brokenness, we do not avoid brokenness—we simply make it necessary for God to intensify and prolong the process.

We want God to fix all our problems. God says instead, "I have a purpose for your problems. I want to use your problems to change you and to reveal My grace and power to the world." That is the Truth—and the Truth will set you free.

The world is not a bad place, it is a pity to have to die. But, of course, it is only a good place for a very few people. Think of Dachau, think of China, and Czechoslovakia and Spain. Think of the distressed areas. We must die now, and there must be a new world.

Childbirth, said Sally, is an unpleasing process. It must be quite awful for the father who, according to Walter, suffers even more than the mother. I don't quite understand about that, but of course I take his word for it.

Mirar Adentro Del siglo dieciseis data mi pena y apenas lo sabía porque aquel ruiseñor siempre canta en mi pena. Looking Within From the sixteenth century dates my suffering though I barely felt it for that nightingale always sings in my suffering.

Keep saying Dear God, dear God. There may still be suffering - but keep touching those people, Lucia, and He won't let you suffer alone.

Dimly, with her burning heart more than her mind, she began to understand why she had always liked gay men. They suffered, were persecuted, they were outsiders in a world where studbuck male heteros held all the power, they did not count, they were Other – the way women were.

I will see you bereft of all that you have, of home and happiness and beautiful things. I will see your nation cast down and your allies drawn away. I will see you as alone and friendless and wretched as am I; and then you may live as long as you like, in some dark and lonely corner of the earth, and I shall call myself content. -Lien, Albino Celestial (Dragon)

I didn't need this much more to lose.

She was thinner than she had been. The thing ate only sparingly. Enough to keep Kasia alive, not enough to keep me from watching her wear away, her body growing gaunt and her face hollow-cheeked.