Quotes about pain
page 11

“We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Feeling, Thinking, Personality

“We are not strong enough to stand up against endless grief, And yet pain is the constant drone of life. So if we are to have any happiness at all, it is only in the passing instant.”

Charles Frazier (1950) American writer

Life, Happiness, Strong

“She was the most painful, most glorious dance of his life”

Anne Bishop (1955) American fiction writer

Source: Heir to the Shadows

Life, Dance

“Ah how shameless – the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone they say come all their miseries yes but they themselves with their own reckless ways compound their pains beyond their proper share.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

Source: The Odyssey

God, Way

“The only way to remove pain from death is to remove love from life.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Walk

Love, Life, Death, Way

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Quoted in "Anecdotes of the Revd. Percival Stockdale" (1809) in Johnsonian Miscellanies (1897), vol. II, p. 333, edited by George Birkbeck Hill; also quoted in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, in the Avenged Sevenfold song "Bat Country", and in Kingdom S02E04.

“Laughter is higher than all pain.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Laughter

“And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?”

Emily Brontë book Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

Source: Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

World, Drink, Memory

“When someone stabs you it's not your fault that you feel pain.”

Louise Penny book A Fatal Grace

Source: A Fatal Grace

Feeling, Hurtful

“Pain is to be endured. It ends or it does not.”

Jim Butcher book Fool Moon

Source: Fool Moon

“I don't want to care. If I care about things, it'll just be worse, it'll just be another thing to worry about. It's less painful if I don't care.”

Bret Easton Ellis book Less Than Zero

Source: Less Than Zero

Sad

“Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.”

Octavia E. Butler book Kindred

Source: Kindred

People, Sleep, Chance

“It was the heaviest thing I'd ever felt, as if I were being crushed under a thousand trucks. I wanted to black out from the pain, but I breathed deeply.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

“There is, though, nothing that prepares us for the worst things in our life. There is nothing you can do to stop the shock, or buffer the pain.”

James Frey book The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Source: The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Life

“Everyone cries sometimes, Tory. There are some pains that run too deep for even the strongest to take without breaking. I don’t think any less of you for it. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

Thinking

“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”

Lance Armstrong book It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

"Back in the Saddle - An Essay by Lance Armstrong", as quoted in The Book of Action (2006) by Jeramy L. Patrick and Justin L. Helms, p. 68
Source: Armstrong, Lance. It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. New York: Berkley Books, 2001

Motivational

“He closed his eyes. “I’m so tired, Tess,” he said. “I only wanted pleasant dreams for once.”
“That is not the way to get them, Will,” she said softly. “You cannot buy or drug or dream your way out of pain.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Dreams, Way

“There was pain, and then there was PAIN. This was-Vishous”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Unleashed

“Education… is a painful, continual and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by warning,… by praise, but above all -- by example.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Education

“Forget the noose. Forget the Iron Maiden. Forget the electric chair or the guillotine. The mind was mankind's most painful torture chamber, the blessed liberty to cogitate offering either doom or salvation, depending on one's disposition.”

Tiffanie DeBartolo (1970) American writer

Source: How to Kill a Rock Star

Dependency, Forgetting

“It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

Soul, Suffering, Parting

“Pain is the body's way of ridding itself of weakness.”

Dean Karnazes (1962) American distance runner

Source: Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner

Way

“Weirdly, an image of Adrian’s Love painting came back to me. I thought of the jagged red streak, slashing through the blackness, ripping it
apart. Staring at Jill and her inconsolable pain, I suddenly understood his art a little bit better.”

Richelle Mead Bloodlines

Source: Bloodlines

Love, Art, Painting

“In a way fighting was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

Life, People, Way, Feeling

“I was not wounded in any part of my body, but I had never experienced such intense pain, such a ripping of the nerves, such an ache of the heart.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Heart, Parting

“Change is a funny thing. We never are quite sure what we are becoming or even why. Then one day we look at ourselves and wonder who we are and how we got that way. Only one thing about change remains constant… it is always painful”

Jodi Picoult book The Tenth Circle

Source: The Tenth Circle

Way, Change

“Waiting for your
answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At
least let me know whether or not I hurt you.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Waiting, Hurt

“The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you.”

Anthony Robbins (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

Life, Pleasure, Secret, Learning

“Those who have hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

Past, Hurt

“Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

“Pain fades,” I said slowly. “But being a nutcase seems to stick around. Guess who got the better deal here?” The last thing I remember is Mr. Chu’s face blazing with fury.”

James Patterson book Maximum Ride

Source: Max

“Lydia: Strange how you always remember the pain someone gave you, but seldom the hurt you caused them.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: The Guardian

Hurt

“In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Love, Fear, Madness

“Take pride in your pain," her mother had always told her. "You are stronger than those who have none.”

Lois Lowry Gathering Blue

Variant: Be proud of your pain, for you are stronger than those with none.
Source: Gathering Blue

“If I had a shiny gun
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folks that cause me pains :)”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

World, Speed

“Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other's hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn't feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet.”

Michelle Tea (1971) American writer

Source: Rose of No Man's Land

Beauty, Feeling, Personality

“I hear my silence talked of in every lane;
The suppression of a cry is itself a cry of pain.”

Darshan Singh (1932)

Silence, Cry

“I don't know. I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Mirror Dance

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Mirror Dance (1994)

People, Thinking, Madness

“Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

Life, Birth, Effort

“He must love me, i thought, amazed. A faint whiff of nausea hit me at seeing pain as proof of love, but it seemed true. Unavoidable.”

Katherine Dunn book Geek Love

Source: Geek Love

Love

“Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care… -Wintergirls”

Laurie Halse Anderson (1961) American children's writer

Life, Family, Thinking, Hurt

“Can't escape pain, kiddo. Battle through it and you get stronger.”

Laurie Halse Anderson (1961) American children's writer

Source: The Impossible Knife of Memory

“I've always protected myself when it comes to love. And maybe that's the problem. By not letting myself get hurt now, it ripples into much bigger pain later.”

Carolyn Mackler book The Future of Us

Source: The Future of Us

Love, Problem, Hurt

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

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: The Viscount Who Loved Me

“Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".”

Stephen Fry book Moab Is My Washpot

Source: Moab Is My Washpot

Music, Angels, Lovers, Hell

“I just want the pain to end.”

Julie Anne Peters (1952) American writer

Source: By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

“I'm jus' pain covered with skin.”

John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath

Source: The Grapes of Wrath

“Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.”

Lance Armstrong book Every Second Counts

Source: Every Second Counts

Motivational, Success, Hurtful, Graduation

“Just as there are Laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed.
But one can be converted into the other.”

Spider Robinson book Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

Source: Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (1977) "Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy"

Law, Joy

“I don't like lies," said Bran, and I knew I'd failed to keep the pain of his revelation from my face. "Not even lies of omission. Hard truths can be dealt with, triumphed over, but lies will destroy your soul.”

Patricia Briggs book Moon Called

Source: Moon Called

Truth, Soul

“There was no warning, not even a knock. The door flew open, and he forgot his present aches and pains in anticipation of what lay in store. The figure that stood in the door was not that of an enemy. It was worse. It was his mother.”

Elizabeth Peters The Ape Who Guards the Balance

Source: The Ape Who Guards the Balance

“Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 7 : 'Violence', p. 254

People, Madness

“Joy, once lost, is pain”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Joy

“We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Feeling, Time

“And even though people try to pretend that pain doesn't do anything to them, none of us can really handle it. Everything bad we do in our life is because of pain of some kind.”

James Frey book The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Source: The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

Life, People

“My painting carries with it the message of pain.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Painting

“She felt so much emotionally, she would say, that a physical outlet - physical pain - was the only way to make her internal pain go away. It was the only way she could control it.”

Richelle Mead Vampire Academy

Source: Vampire Academy

Way

“winners see the gain; losers see the pain.”

Shiv Khera (1961) Indian politician

Source: You Can Win: A Step by Step Tool for Top Achievers

“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

“A joy as intense as pain”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Joy

“All pain is the same.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

“There in that pool stained with green blood, he had learned two things: one was that all the pain stopped when you stopped fighting death; and the other was that as long as you could still hear your heart beating, you had to keep fighting back.”

Ryū Murakami book Coin Locker Babies

Source: Coin Locker Babies

Death, Learning, Heart, Fight

“It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory”

Christopher Hitchens Mortality

Source: Mortality

Memory

“Do you know what happened to the last person who took that tone with me? (Xypher)
Let me guess…Disembowelment. Probably painful. Definitely slow. (Simone)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dream Chaser

Personality

“You have someone in your life whom you honor and revere so much that every hurt on them is inflicted on you as well. And the closer they are to you, the greater the pain.”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

Life, Hurt

“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.”

Julian Barnes book The Sense of an Ending

Source: The Sense of an Ending

Help

“I have found a way to beat myself
I win by losing, something like that
I'm told that I'm stupid
So ok, I'll be stupid
If I can't register the pain
Then it's not there
I'm not so stupid after all
I'll show them”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Stupidity, Way

“If I let myself care, all I'll feel is pain.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Feeling

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

As quoted in "Doom and glory of knowing who you are" by Jane Howard, in LIFE magazine, Vol. 54, No. 21 (24 May 1963), p. 89 https://books.google.com/books?id=mEkEAAAAMBAJ; a part of this statement has often been quoted as it was paraphrased in The New York Times (1 June 1964): <br class="br">Context: You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.

People, World, History, Thinking

“It's painful and it's messy. But sometimes you just have to make the break and start again.”

Tony Parsons (1953) British writer

Source: Man and Wife

“Sometimes, pain is all that lets you know you're alive.”

Robert Jordan book Crossroads of Twilight

Lews Therin Telamon
(7 January 2003)
Source: Crossroads of Twilight

“… to be injured on this tundra would lead to a quick and painful death—or at the very least abject humiliation before the popping flashes of the tourist season's tail end, which was slightly less painful than a painful death, but lasted longer.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Atlantis Complex

Death, Season

“If it is very painful for you to criticize your friends, you are safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that is the time to hold your tongue”

Alice Miller (1923–2010) Swiss psychologist

Pleasure, Time, Friendship, For Friend

“the pain of that first lost was still raw. You could deal with it, endure it, but never escape it.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book The Lunatic Cafe

Source: The Lunatic Cafe

“Pain and beauty, our constant bedfellows”

Nick Bantock book Griffin and Sabine

Source: Griffin and Sabine

Beauty

“I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.”

Robin McKinley book Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast

Source: Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast

Way, Thinking, Loss

“Not knowing is half the fun," Aphrodite said, "Exquisitely painful isn't it? Not being sure who you love and who loves you? Oh, you kids! It's so cute I'm going to cry!”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Love, Cry

“Work. Like pain, I sensed that this was an experience I would want to avoid as often as possible.”

Joanne Harris book The Gospel of Loki

Source: The Gospel of Loki

Sense

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

Stephen Levine (1937–2016) American poet and author

Love, Fear

“But he won’t let the pain blot out the humor no more’n he’ll let the humor blot out the pain.”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

“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.”

Julia Cameron book The Artist's Way

Source: The Artist's Way

Learning, Time, Past, Future

“Then when I saw Pain attack Hinata, I was so mad, so full of rage, I let the Nine-Tails take over without even thinking about it.”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

Thinking, Rage, Madness

“She had changed him. The ice was in his eyes and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling.”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Source: The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold

World, Feeling, Change, Heart

“life itself is not the miracle.
that pain should be so constant,
that's the miracle”

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Life

“The lives of all people flow through time, and, regardless of how brutal one moment may be, how filled with grief or pain or fear, time flows through all lives equally.”

Orson Scott Card book Children of the Mind

Source: Children of the Mind

People, Fear, Time

“But we all must be true to our own nature. Acting as anyone other than yourself merely brings you pain and makes you appear ashamed of who and what you are. Others will feed off that shame, and soon it will be all that you are.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Kiss

Nature, Appearance

“The eyes mirror the heart of a person. An entire life can be seen through them. Love, sorrow, deceit, pain. If you look closely, it’s all there.”

Gail Tsukiyama (1957) American writer

Source: The Language of Threads

Love, Life, Heart, Personality

“With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Source: Books of Blood: Volume Two

Fear

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Source: Letter from the Birmingham Jail
Context: We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

Freedom