“As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.”

“When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.”

“For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.”

“It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.”

“He has chosen not to heal me, but to hold me. The more intense the pain, the closer His embrace.”

“I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible.”

“There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”

“Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable.”

“To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.”

“Self-knowledge can be painful, but not half so damaging as self-ignorance.”