Quotes About Suffering

I'm beginning to think," she said, "that growing just means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet—you drink a little of it every day. Once you've seen it, you can't stop seeing it—that's the trouble. And it can, it can"—she passed her hand wearily over her brow again—"drive you mad.

your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.

I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing!

Yet, hope—the hope that we, human beings, can be better than we are—dies hard; perhaps one can no longer live if one allows that hope to die. But it is also hard to see what one sees. One sees that most human beings are wretched, and, in one way or another, become wicked: because they are so wretched.

Now—now, of course, I see something very beautiful in those days, which were such torture then. I felt, then, that Giovanni was dragging me with him to the bottom of the sea.

I dropped my brick and went to him. In a moment I heard his fall. And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder.

I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it made me suffer.

Somebody,' said Jacques, 'your father or mind, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour —and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it

It is still not possible to overstate the price a negro pays to climb out of obscurity, for it is a particular price involved with being a negro, and the great wounds, gouges, amputations, losses, scars endured in such a journey cannot be calculated. But even this is not the worst of it.

this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.

The poor boy sounded as though he would have put his head in the gas oven. If he had had a gas oven.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one's head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain. You ought to have some apprehension that the man you see before you was once even younger than you are now and arrived at his present wretchedness by imperceptible degrees.

but the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.

It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody

Quelqu'un, dit Jacques, mon père ou le tien, aurait dû nous dire que peu de gens sont jamais morts d'amour. Mais combien ont péri, et continuent à périr à toute heure, et dans les endroits les plus étranges ! par manque d'amour.

You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people's pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.

his eyes, behind his glasses, were like the eyes of a dying man who looks everywhere for healing.

And the brief corner of the sky seems to be shrieking, though he does not hear a sound.

Fonny is working on the wood, on the stone, whistling, smiling. And, from far away, but coming nearer, the baby cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries and cries, cries like it means to wake the dead.

Somebody,' [...] should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour [...] for the lack of it.

If the world wasn't so full of dead folks maybe those of us that's trying to live wouldn't have to suffer so bad.

Lord, when you send the rain think about it, please, a little? Do not get carried away by the sound of falling water, the marvelous light on the falling water. I am beneath that water. It falls with great force and the light Blinds me to the light.

But I know about suffering; if that helps. I know that it ends. I ain't going to tell you no lies, like it always ends for the better. Sometimes it ends for the worse. You can suffer so bad that you can be driven to a place where you can't ever suffer again: and that's worse.