Quotes About Suffering

But Lottie staggered on the lowest verandah step like a bird fallen out of the nest. If she stood still for a moment she fell asleep, if she leaned against anything her eyes closed. She could not walk another step.

You maximize the moral anguish of those whose "values" you share and protect their "rights" wherever possible. And you minimize the suffering of those who don't belong to the group and treat their rights as merely selfish demands.

What we found is that when people [are] excluded, you see activity in…the neural regions [of the brain] that are also involved in the distressing component of pain, or what sometimes people call the 'suffering component' of pain.

So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear. Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful. ETTY HILLESUM

When we open our hearts to each other we allow grace to enter. It is as simple as that. And suffering--events that break open the heart--can become the refiner's fire that leaves us fully open to the truth about love and compassion.

The movement of descent and discovery begins at the moment you consciously become dissatisfied with life. . . . Concealed within this basic unhappiness with life and existence is the embryo of a growing intelligence, a special intelligence, usually buried under the immense weight of social shams. A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to "awaken" to deeper realities, truer realities.4

Aeschylus. He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

Everything that happened in life-whether for good or bad, joyous or tragic reasons-held the potential to sanctify and bring one closer to the Lord. Even, Abby realized, the personal pain and horror of loss. In life's catastrophic upheavals, in the self-fragmentation, confusion, and spirit-shattering grief, there was always the hope of rebirth to a new and even better life-a life not of this world but of the Spirit.

The tortured sounds followed Niall as he stumbled back to the hearth. Muted cries, choking sobs, mingled with the snapping, crackling clamor of the hungry fire. Time passed with lumbering slowness as Niall stared into the agitated flames, hearing it all from some place far away, even as the night's horror charred its memory into his soul. Never had he hurt so, not from any wound in battle, not from . . . He paused. The sounds

pain. Let me bear it. His grasp on her tightened, and he willed all the strength of his heart, his body, into hers. God forgive him, but he'd sacrifice the babe if only he could keep his bonny wife. How would he go on without her? She must live. She

It is the community that suffers when it refuses to validate any outside standards, and won't allow even the legitimate exercise of authority by the professionals it has hired.

I suspect that exorcism still has a place in our lives. Who has not felt the sudden lifting of what had seemed an unbearable burden, the removal of what for too long had been an un-surmountable obstacle? Who does not have something deep within that they would not wish to exorcise, so that it no longer casts a shadow on their capacity to receive and give love?

Because I see these mountains they are brought low, because I drink these waters they are bitter, because I tread these black rocks they are barren, because I have found these islands they are lost; Upon seal and seabird dreaming their innocent world my shadow has fallen.

Let my body sweat Let snakes torment my breast My eyes be blind, ears deaf, hands distraught Mouth parched, uterus cut out, Belly slashed, back lashed, Tongue slivered into thongs of leather Rain stones inserted in my breasts, Head severed, If only the lips may speak, If only the god will come.

Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided. It takes everything we have. But it also spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things.

There was a whole vocabulary of suffering, eloquent in its wordlessness, which gave voice to all the things she couldn't do or say.

Was any wound more painful than the one no one else could see?

Heaven isn't a place, Fanning!...Why does everyone assume it's a destination - some cerebral version of Grand Central Station? It's a state of being! The unshakeable certainty of who you are and where you fit in the world! The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune aside, we suffer most when we try to be someone or something we're not." (page 220)

The sick individual cannot simply shrug it off, pull out of it, or slow down mentally. While God certainly can pick up the pieces and put them together in a new way, this can happen only if the depressed brain makes it through an episode to see again life among the living.

Suffering is not eliminated by the resurrection but transformed by it.

It is not like cancer, where there is hope at least of cutting out afflicted parts of the body in hopes of eradicating the disease. In mental illnesses, the symptoms plague the whole body and mind equally. I am not necessarily sad when I am depressed. I am not necessarily "down." Sometimes I just have a gnawing, overwhelming sense of grief, with no identifiable cause. I grieve as though my loved ones were dead. I imagine their funerals. I feel completely alone and isolated.

Depression meant that every breath, every thought, every moment of consciousness hurt.

My days are as long as despair can make them.

Smile at Jesus in your suffering - for to be a real Missionary of Charity you must be a cheerful victim.