Quotes About Pain

Life is an incurable disease.

A mighty pain to love it is, and 'tis a pain that pain to miss but of all the pains, the greatest pain is to love, but love in vain.

I feel just like the boy who stubbed his toe–too damned badly hurt to laugh and too damned proud to cry!

[I feel] somewhat like the boy in Kentucky who stubbed his toe while running to see his sweetheart. The boy said he was too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to laugh.

Not allowing people to go through their pain, and protecting them from it, may turn out to be a kind of over-protection, which in turn implies a certain lack of respect for the integrity and the intrinsic nature and the future development of the individual.

I could see that the almost mystical aura of this legendary surgeon -- the single-mindedness, the dedication, the skill -- was mere surface. The surgical persona was something he had crafter to protect himself. But what he had created was a prison. Anytime he strayed from the professional to the personal, he knew what to expect: pain.

The whisky burns. How strange to try to drown pain with fire.

Secrecy lives in the same rooms as loneliness. His secret and his failing is that after his mother's betrayal he cannot risk love.

Thomas Christian ladies attend his clinic as faithfully as they attend church, presenting him their aches and pains that are often surrogates for chronic marital woes—he offers placebos and sympathetic homilies, such as "Mullu elayil vinallum, ela mullel vinallum, elakka nashttam." Whether the thorn falls on the leaf, or the leaf falls on the thorn, the leaf suffers. "Aah, aah, you're so right, doctor. My husband is a thorn only, what to do?

Leprosy deadens the nerves and is therefore painless; the real wound of leprosy, and the only pain they feel, is that of exile.

If we could light up the room with pain, we'd be such a glorious fire.

What if, instead of carrying a child, I am supposed to carry grief?

Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn't know then that it wasn't even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

Isn't it funny? How the cold numbs everything but grief. If we could light up the room with pain, we'd be such a glorious fire.

I picture a heart lying down on the floor of the torso, pulling up the blankets over its head, thinking this pain will go on forever (even though it won't). The heart is watching Lifetime movies and wishing, and missing all the good parts of her that she has forgotten. The heart is so tired of beating herself up, she wants to stop it still, but also she wants the blood to return, wants to bring in the thrill and wind of the ride, the fast pull of life driving underneath her.

Humans are so strange in the ways that we are either recovering too quickly from something or holding on to pain forever. There seems to be no middle ground. We bounce back or we wallow. But remembering the hardest moments of grief or loss and letting them be present for you in the good moments is something I've found useful and grounding as I age. It feels like a way of remembering that balance does exist. This too. This grief. This joy. Together always intertwined.

He can hit a man in the liver so the blood flow stops. It takes a full second before the pain registers and the man falls. I've seen Billy hook men's livers and punch at their hearts. I've seen him break a man's nose in the ring, shatter an eardrum, close an eye. I've seen him hit a man so hard, fist to jaw, the man seemed to fall asleep before he fell, his body so relaxed his face looked calm even when his head slammed against canvas.

Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face.

The pain you are feeling is merely the strike of every hammer blow on the anvil as you are being forged.

He experienced a familiar comfort being in the presence of another person's unknowable pain. More than any landscape, this place felt like home.

I don't know what most people mean when they use the word love. If they haven't contorted their lives around a hope sharp enough to bleed them empty, then I think they're just kidding. A

And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.

Cancer is the worst way for a fictional wife to die.

And what was wrong with my memory? How come I didn't recollect how I spent these painful days, and why was I okay with the fact that I couldn't recall them? I preferred it this way, didn't I? Compared to forgetting, did living really stand a chance?