Quotes About Pain

pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate, and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me ... In the exact now, we are all, always, all right ... Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty.

The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain—the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, "unutterably alone.

In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now.

Debemos permitir que nos golpee el rayo del dolor. No lo olvides: este dolor es útil, el relámpago ilumina.

It may be different for others, but pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right.

Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail. Art may seem to spring from pain, but perhaps that is because pain serves to focus our attention onto details ... the singular image is what haunts us and becomes art. Even in the midst of pain, this singular image brings delight.

We begin to excavate our buried dreams. This is a tricky process ... the mere act of brushing some of them off sends an enormous surge of energy bolting through our denial system ... we make what Robert Bly calls a decent into ashes. We mourn the self we abandoned ... we find a certain amount of grief to be essential ... We must allow the bolt of pain to strike us. Remember, this is useful pain; lightning illuminates.

She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.

Suddenly it was too hard to be in his presence, too painful to know that he would belong to someone else.

Every love story is a potential grief story.

Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.

Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes for both.

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with those one doesn't love.

But if being on the level didn't shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.

Todas as histórias de amor são potenciais histórias de dor. Se não no princípio, depois. Se não para um, para o outro. Às vezes para ambos.

I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera).

One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped - it was his only hope now - that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying , would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely.