Quotes About Pain

I have scars. No one alive today doesn't. But Alex's scars have to be much deeper than mine.

Heartbreak doesn't flow through the heart but along that frail shallow canal of the sternum.

In this way she perpetuated the pain she had experienced as a child. Not unexpectedly, her enormous accumulated rage had to find a way out, but since she was afraid to express it directly, her body and her moods expressed it for her: in the form of headaches, a knotted-up stomach, and depression.

Realizing that your mother couldn't love you is one of the most painful discoveries you'll ever make. You deserved to be cherished, but your mother was a disturbed, unhappy woman who took out her frustrations on you. And it wasn't your fault.

Like a chemical toxin, the emotional damage inflicted by these parents spreads throughout a child's being, and as the child grows, so does the pain.

She was battered incessantly, regularly, all the time. I'm not saying 24 hours a day, but the incidents of battering were extraordinarily high.

The physical and emotional distress that result from incurring the misogynist's displeasure can be so painful that women will do virtually anything to avoid it, including tolerate their partner's irrational behavior.

When a child is not permitted to express her pain, one of the important, destructive messages she gets is that if she is feeling bad it is due to her own deficiencies. Coupled with this is likely the message that if she needs comfort, then she is ugly and repulsive to others.

Incest is almost always a devastating experience for the victim.

Most adult children of toxic parents grow up feeling tremendous confusion about what love means and how it's supposed to feel. Their parents did extremely unloving things to them in the name of love. They came to understand love as something chaotic, dramatic, confusing, and often painful—something they had to give up their own dreams and desires for. Obviously, that's not what love is all about.

My classmates all thought I had such a great family. I thought, "If they only knew." I wish I could tell my parents how they ruined my high school years. I want to scream at them that they hurt me so much I can't love anyone. I can't have a loving relationship with a man. They've paralyzed me emotionally. They still do. But I'm too scared to say anything to them.

When a woman is attacked for showing pain or sadness over her partner's treatment of her, she must repress her normal feelings. But feelings need to be ventilated and expressed. When a direct outlet for expression is cut off, these feelings find other ways to manifest themselves—often unpleasant and harmful ways, such as physical illness, low energy, lack of motivation, and depression.

This is emotional surgery, and as with any surgery, the wounds must be cleaned out before they heal, and it takes time for the pain to go away. But the pain is a sign that the healing process has started.

Did it ever occur to you to rescue me? Do you have any idea what it felt like being a little kid in that house? Do you have any idea what kind of terror I lived with every day? Why didn't you do anything about it? Why don't you do something about it now?

The experience generated powerful, lifelong fears of being hurt and betrayed. Two marriages ended in divorce because he couldn't learn to trust.

The shock of a sudden death, Joan Didion attests, is "obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.

The hardly noticeable symptoms of cancer pale in comparison to those produced by the surgeons determined to excise it.

I am dying without death; living without life.

the pedagogy of pain. I am pathetically grateful to the doctors for righting the wrong they had done.

For in the sequel to Gilead (which is really a prequel), later-life lovers must contend with the aftershocks of trauma. Love that arrives late can come after great pain, as Shakespeare knew. Yet that pain may not arrest or numb but burn or blister a later-life lover, making her wince at the touch of the hand she wants to hold. Our

Deep under the earth, inside its cardboard coffin, shrouded in the layers of white paper, the china doll with the jagged open crevasse in its skull was crying.

I was forced to live through it all, every minute and then every day thereafter...

If one really stopped to think about the insane way the universe is arranged one would go mad in no time, so now and then it's good to laugh, it's therapeutic, it dilutes the pain

Marrying for love might be romantic but I considered it the hallmark of an undisciplined private life. Romance is the opiate of the dissatisfied; it anesthetizes them from the pain of their disordered second-rate lives.