Quotes About Suffering

There is a cyclone fence between ourselves and the slaughter and behind it we hover in a calm protected world like netted fish, exactly like netted fish. It is either the beginning or the end of the world, and the choice is ourselves or nothing.

it was becoming obvious that the war he had been anticipating, "in three to five years" might have already begun, as many wars do begin, he said, not with a major event reported in the news but with sufferings barely noticed: an unjust law, a murder, a peaceful protest march attacked by police. It begins, according to Leonel, with poverty endured by many and corruption benefiting the few, with crimes unpunished, a hardening of positions, the failure of peaceful means of appeal and redress.

But how am I to live in the meantime?' I wailed. 'Tis for you to decide,' he said. 'You can be her enemy and make yourself miserable by it, or you can endure it. If 'twere me, I'd choose endurance.

So that's all right then, isn't it?" she said. "If you can't go there with them, the best you can do is to be there when they get back." She reached over and touched his cheek. "We all suffer something, don't we?" she said. "Some of us just go down harder than others.

if you have a need to be comfortable all the time—well, among other things, you have the makings of a classic drug addict or alcoholic.

Heaven's no place for one who thrives on hell.

But I think if you have the expectation that you're going to be happy throughout your life—more to the point, if you have a need to be comfortable all the time—well, among other things, you have the makings of a classic drug addict or alcoholic.

I have filled him in to be unobtainable, disinterested, attractive and bored with my company. My ideal mate. Someone to endure, never to enjoy. I am totally at his mercy. I suffer through the silence, imagining that he is suffering my company. That I am merely an alternative for nothing better to do. I'm frightened of the power I have given him over me and of how he will almost certainly abuse it, merely by not being fully aware he has it.

But I think if you have the expectation that you're going to be happy throughout your life -- more to the point, if you have a need to be comfortable all the time -- well, among other things, you have the makings of a classic drug addict or alcoholic.

I was into pain reduction and mind expansion, but what I've ended up with is pain expansion and mind reduction. Everything hurts now, and nothing makes sense. DAY

I heard someone say once that many of us only seem able to find heaven by backing away from hell.

Astley comes to my side. "Are you well?" "No," I tell him, voice hoarse. "I am not well. I am broken inside. I am broken almost all-the-way deep, and I don't know...I don't know if I can ever be unbroken, let alone well again".

It is love which made all this. War which protects it. With love comes responsibility and possibility, fear and hopes, quests and suffering.

Monsters? Why? Because we admit to the pain we cause? Admit we like it?...

With love comes responsibility and possibility, fear and hope, quests and suffering

They all lived so steeped in fear that the losses they had yet to suffer had already consumed them.

In this great fiat of the little girl Mary, the strength and foundation of our life of contemplation is grounded, for it means absolute trust in God, trust which will not set us free from suffering but will set us free from anxiety, hesitation, and above all from the fear of suffering. Trust which makes us willing to be what God wants us to be, however great or however little that may prove. Trust which accepts God as illimitable Love.

It is a great mistake to suppose that those who have inherited the material for their life from suffering generations, and who have poor health and a timid approach or some vice or weakness, have not been designed and planned by God as much as others who seem luckier in the world's eyes.

This is very like Purgatory, and it is a pain which we would not willingly forgo once it has touched us, because it is our necessity and our joy. For Purgatory, after all, is the fire of the love of God, cauterising the wound of sin.

It really needs to be practised to be understood. We need to say to ourselves a thousand times a day: "Christ wants to do this"; "Christ wants to suffer this." And we shall thus come to realise that when we resent our circumstances or try to spare ourselves what we should undergo, we are being like Peter when he tried to dissuade Our Lord from the Passion

The voice from the Cross speaks in the desert, in the hospital, from the open seas, from every place where young men are giving their lives. Mary hears the voice of her son in all these voices, and they echo her fiat.

And I'm suppose to sit by while you date boys and fall in love with someone else, get married...?" His voice tightened. "And meanwhile, I'll die a little bit more every day, watching.

You endure what is unbearable, and you bear it. That is all.

My rapier wit hides my inner pain.