Quotes About Suffering

For a while everything became too terrible, one could scarcely bear to be conscious.

It had all been quite uncannily painless. I was left with a sense of not having suffered enough. Only sometimes in dreams did I experience certain horrors, glimpses of punishment which would perhaps yet find its hour.

But there can be intuitions even here of a more sublime agony.

He felt as if he were being used, as if Willy were using him as a hard neutral surface against which to crush, like insects, the thoughts which haunted him.

The wound with which she travelled vibrated within her. She thought, I shall never have what I desire. I shall become bitter and defeated and dim, and I shall never really paint, I am a freak, a crippled animal, something to be put down, put to sleep, put out of its misery.

We cannot really love the dead. We love a fantasm that secretly consoles. What love sometimes mistakes for death is a kind of intense suffering, a pain that can be endured and absorbed. But the idea of a real ending, that cannot be envisaged . . . Indeed, in the language of love the concept of an ending is devoid of sense. (So we must go beyond love or utterly change it.)

Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.

Yet it was not that a rapture or a glory which had once shone around her had passed away from the world. The rapture and the glory whose hauntings she suffered had never manifested themselves in her life at all.

Perhaps the reality is in the suffering. But it can't be. Love promises happiness. Art promises happiness. Yet it isn't exactly a promise . . .

Happiness must exist. It can't all be made of pain. But what is happiness made of?

I don't know what love can do for the terrible things of life.

We did not exist all that much. We could suffer like mad all the same. Something was there, a wounded complex of resentment and anxiety and pain, something half crushed, something swallowed, not yet digested, and still screaming.

He had always thought of himself as a muddler, a sufferer, a victim.

I do wish you could be happy. If I thought you could be happy I could simply cease to exist with a sigh of joy.

I tried to think these thoughts but they remained intolerably abstract, while a pain in my body told me what was real.

You don't understand what it's like when things are terrible in your mind.

We've all got things to cry about. Don't you think I could drown the world with tears if I started on my own woes?

Theo wanted to call him back. But then he thought, oh let him go, there's no mending a fruitless love, it just has to be endured.

He thought, I haven't got much longer before some sort of collapse. He could not think if this would be a collapse of mind or of body. Mind and body seemed utterly fused now in cold aching pain, and darkness.

What do you want for Christmas?' 'A loaded revolver.

Oh if only I could take my mother away and never know of these things again. But it was impossible, the machine would go on and on and nothing would stop it. And no one from now on for ever would know how much he suffered and what it was really like to be him. How can I bear it, he thought, how can I go on bearing it without becoming something savage and awful?

One knows what being in love is like and it is a very terrible thing.

She thought, I shall die of misery and pain.

the huge machine of her misery.