Quotes About Pain

don't believe I will get better," Daudet wrote, ". . . yet I always behave as if my damned pains were going to disappear by tomorrow morning.")

Alphonse Daudet observes in In the Land of Pain. "Everyone will get used to it except me.

As Virginia Woolf testified in On Being Ill, "English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.

I can say is that it was a bone-deep, a cell-deep conviction: that whatever was wrong was not in my head. The symptoms—roving neurological pain, headaches, flu-like aches, sensitivity to food—were too specific. And my lab work had so many small clues. Low vitamin D. Anemia. The many viruses.

But as more and more "small things" went wrong—endometriosis, hives, the labral tear in my hip, the arthritis in my neck, the thyroid disease, the failure to get pregnant, the fatigue and brain fog—I had started to see my body differently, not as a collection of parts but as an entangled system.

My body felt like a vow that had been irrevocably broken.

Is illness, in any way, a lesson? Illness is a travesty; illness is shit; illness is not redemptive unless it happens to be for a particular ill person, for reasons that are not replicable nor should they be said to be so.

Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.

Comedy is when you accidentally fall off a cliff and die. Tragedy is when I have a hangnail.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.

We laughed hard at real stories of tragedy. It had to be real and it had to be funny. Somebody getting hurt was wonderful. Later, as the 2000 Year Old Man with Carl Reiner I explained the difference between comedy and tragedy: If I cut my finger, that's tragedy. Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.

If I cut my finger, that's tragedy. Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.

Ea poare ca nici nu isi da seama, dar i-a rupt viata in doua. L-a spintecat, asa cum fulgerul despica un copac. Din el n-a mai ramas decat trunchiul, drept si bine infipt in pamant, trunchiul retezat pe care a crescut muschiul, in care si-ai facut pasarile cuib, dar care n-a mai putut sa renasca. Pana cand si radacinile au putrezit si s-au prabusit, inaltand spre cerul care l-a pedepsit o adunatura de lemne rasucite.

When I'm in pain I want everyone I love on the island with me, sitting around the fire, getting drunk on coconut milk, banging out a plan.

It is the broken heart that makes us human in the end.

He mentioned a grim truism in analgesia research known as the "30 rule"—that the existing pain drugs generally reduce pain by 30 percent in 30 percent of people—"and before we start treating them, we have no idea who is going to respond or not.

If there is anything on this earth that I know better than anyone, it is that the ones who give you everything except what matters most are the ones with the deepest wounds. We may never love or be more than this beautiful bond between us but whatever we will ever be it is going to be integral to my life.

But grief makes a monster out of us sometimes . . . and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can't forgive yourself for.

Then he holds her and for a moment I hear total silence; that totally silent part of a cry that announces that the most horrible grief is going to follow. And it does, and he's muffling it, but I can hear and I want someone to come over and jab her with a sedative because its pitch pierces my soul.

Someone asked us later, "Didn't you wonder why no one came across you sooner?" Did I wonder? When you see your parents zipped up in black body bags on the Jellicoe Road like they're some kind of garbage, don't you know? Wonder dies.

Go to hell," he said, but there was a desolate fear in his eyes and I couldn't look away. "Been there. Trust me. It's so overrated.

I remember love. It's what I have to keep on reminding myself. It's funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that's why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. It's not the pain they're getting over, it's the love.

Quintana of Charyn's body was a map of hatred.