Quotes About Suffering

Since moving to New York, she had been gradually abandoning her old ideas about the nobility of suffering.

Surely there would be humidity and plenty of it in Hell. Hard to imagine a condemned sinner saying cheerfully, Well, yes, it's two hundred and sixty degrees down here, but it's a *dry* heat.

his wife, it seems, would very soon be excorting his sister to a certain clinic near New Delhi, where she might die with the grace and ease that every being deserves, and for which purpose God-or Mother Nature if you prefer-surely put the opium poppy on earth.

It took Maestra a day and a half to coax Sailor down from the fir tree in which he'd taken refuge, and as for Hattie, her reaction was that of the typical contemporary American: I'm suffering. Therefore, somebody must owe me money. I'm hiring a lawyer.

Was she simply too shallow to suffer indefinitely, or was she too wise to become attached to her suffering, too feisty to permit it to rule her life? She voted for wise and feisty, and walked on, kicking leaves.

Pan is right," he thought. "Death can ruin a man's life even though he go on breathing.

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

Gimme hate, Lord," he whimpered. "I'll take hate any day. But don't give me love. I can't take no more love, Lord. I can't carry it...It's too heavy. Jesus, you know, you know all about it. Ain't it heavy? Jesus? Ain't love heavy?

Anything dead coming back to life hurts.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.

The real hell of Hell is that it is forever.' Sula said that. She said doing anything forever and ever was hell.

Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence.

There is no protection. To be female in this place is to be an open wound that cannot heal. Even if scars form, the festering is ever below.

Pain was greedy; it demanded all of her attention.

Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed, she said, and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.

No more running-from nothing. I will never run from another thing on this Earth. I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D. Garner: it cost too much!

I welcomed the circling sharks but they avoided me as if knowing I preferred their teeth to the chains around my neck my waist my ankles

She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.

Difficult to "move on" from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed.

It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too.

The freezing in hell that comes before the everlasting fire where sinners bubble and singe forever.

When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.