Quotes About Pain

KIDS IN DISTRESSED FAMILIES ARE GREAT repositories of silence and carry in their bodies whole arctic wastelands of words not to be uttered, stories not to be told.

If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it. Zora Neale Hurston

When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place.

Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there's suffering involved.

It's the disparities in your childhood, your life between ass-whippings, that throws past pain into stark relief for a reader. Without those places of hope, the beatings become too repetitive—maybe they'd make a dramatic read for a while, but single-note tales seldom bear rereading.

Yet through alcohol's alchemy, I'd swear some nights his shadowy form stands in the yard behind an old push-type lawn mower. Why'd you keep drinking? And Daddy, who was a shrugger, a starer into distances, shrugs and stares. You know…Then he dissolves into the falling snow. I upend the smooth bourbon, trying to achieve the same blunt, anesthetized state that once snuffed him out.

I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while. People can get behind pain that way, if they think it derives from powers larger than themselves.

I only breathe with one lung since you've gone , you say. And I love you with one hemisphere of my brain, the dumb one, the one that forgets.

Lo que más duele de la juventud no son las hostias que da el mundo, sino las estúpidas esperanzas que se hacen pasar por certezas.

Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.)

clawing at my heart all these years.

She was horribly sorry for Libby, to the point where she could hardly bear seeing her; Libby's red open mouth, continually gabbling, was like a running wound in the middle of her open face.

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it? Of course, it isn't. Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only the light that can shine out of a life.

It's true, isn't it, in our world, that the petals pooled with nectar, and the polished thorns are a single thing- that the petals pooled with nectar, and the polished thorns are a single thing- that even the purest light, lacking the robe of darkness, would be without expression- that love itself, without pain, would be no more than a shrug gable comfort.

Listen, the heart-shackles are not, as you think, death, illness, pain, unrequited hope, not loneliness, but lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety, selfishness

Let the world have its way with you, luminous as it is with mystery and pain— graced as it is with the ordinary.

One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning --- some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain. 6 But to lift the hoof! For that you need an idea. 7 For years and years I struggled just to love my life. And then the butterfly rose, weightless, in the wind. Don't love your life too much, it said, and vanished into the world.

life is real, and pain is real, but death is an imposter

What does barbed wire feel like when you grip it, as though it were a plate and a fork, or a handful of flowers?

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.