“The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it.”

— Laurence Sterne , book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Book I, Ch. 25.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-1767)

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Laurence Sterne 50

Irish/English writer 1713–1768

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“Be — fight — feel the pain — and love the wounds!”

Antoni Lange (1862–1929) Polish writer and philosopher

Vox Posthuma

“The sailor tells of winds, the ploughman of bulls,
the soldier counts his wounds, the shepherd his sheep.”
Navita de ventis, de tauris narrat arator, Enumerat miles vulnera, pastor oves.

Propertius (-47–-16 BC) Latin elegiac poet

II, i, 43–4.
Elegies

“At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.”

Stephen Crane book The Red Badge of Courage

Source: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Ch. 9

“He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.”

Nathanael West book Miss Lonelyhearts

Source: Miss Lonelyhearts

“That is the way it is with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.”

Amy Tan The Joy Luck Club

Source: The Joy Luck Club

“No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain.”

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) Russian author

On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: A new form is not intelligible to everyone; many find it difficult. Perhaps. The ordinary, the banal is, of course, simpler, more pleasant, more comfortable. Euclid's world is very simple, and Einstein's world is very difficult — but it is no longer possible to return to Euclid. No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary: most of mankind suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death.
The same disease often afflicts artists and writers: they sink into satiated slumber in forms once invented and twice perfected. And they lack the strength to wound themselves, to cease loving what they once loved, to leave their old, familiar apartments filled with the scent of laurel leaves and walk away into the open field, to start anew.
Of course, to wound oneself is difficult, even dangerous. But for those who are alive, living today as yesterday and yesterday as today is still more difficult.

“History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own.”

Julius Lester (1939–2018) American author

“History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.”

Sue Monk Kidd (1948) Novelist

Source: The Invention of Wings

“Drinking is the soldier’s pleasure;
Rich the treasure;
Sweet the pleasure;
Sweet is pleasure after pain.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Source: Alexander’s Feast http://www.bartleby.com/40/265.html (1697), l. 57–60.

“The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it.”

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Laurence Sterne 50

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