“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”

— Elena Ferrante , book The Days of Abandonment

Source: The Days of Abandonment

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Elena Ferrante 25

Italian writer 1943

Alice Borchardt book The Silver Wolf

have you ever seen anyone who could take anything from me against my will, ever, anywhere, anytime?
The Silver Wolf

“A joy as intense as pain”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

“I should think that for one who has tasted the joys of creation, no other pleasure could exist.”

Anton Chekhov The Seagull

Anna to Trigorin, Act I
The Seagull (1896)
Original: (ru) Но, я думаю, кто испытал наслаждение творчества, для того уже все другие наслаждения не существуют.

“When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 12

“As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth — whatever the truth may be — that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”

June Jordan (1936–2002) Poet, essayist, playwright, feminist and bisexual activist

"Life After Lebanon" (1984), later published in On Call : Political Essays (1985), and Some of Us Did Not Die : New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002)

“This dance is the joy of existence. I am filled with you.
Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul.
There's no room for lack of trust, or trust.
Nothing in this existence but that existence.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

"We Three" Ch. 11 : Union
The Essential Rumi (1995)

“We are the body of heaven
and the soul of etermity,
the desolation and pains of hell are within us,
the joy and pleasures of paradise also.
We finish at the start and with ending we begins
in the infinity of space-time the celestial ash wander.”

alexis karpouzos

mystic poetry and spirituality

“Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

A Defence of Poetry http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html (1821)

“In the course of some experiments I conducted from 1954 through 1956 I was suspended in water for several hours at a time, and I noticed that my skin gradually became more and more sensitive to tactile stimuli and an intense sense of pleasure resulted. However, if the stimulation was carried too far it became intensely irritating, I reasoned that the dolphin is suspended in water all of his life, twenty four hours a day, and possibly had developed an intensely sensitive skin.”

John Lilly (1915–2001) American physician

Man and Dolphin (1961), p.172; as quoted in The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (2012), by D. Graham Burnett, p.580

“Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure—
Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.
Such pleasures seek if private be thy end:
If it be public, wide let them extend.
Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:
If pains must come, let them extend to few.”

Jeremy Bentham book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

Source: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; 1823), Ch. 4: Value of a Lot of Pleasure or Pain, How to be Measured

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”

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Elena Ferrante 25

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