Quotes about pain
page 12

“Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.”

Source: The Robber Bride

“No one ever found out what was happening inside me. How the pain was eating me away. No one ever came to my rescue, or stood up for me.”

Julie Anne Peters (1952) American writer

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

“Come, hunt with me, the invitation whispers in my heart. Leave the pain behind and let your life be your own again. There is a place where all time is now, and the choices are simple and always your own.
Wolves have no kings.”

Robin Hobb book Royal Assassin

Variant: Leave the pain behind and let your life be your own again. There is a place where all time is now, and the choices are simple and always your own.

Wolves have no kings
Source: Royal Assassin

Life, Time, Heart

“Terry was beside himself. Not literally. This story would be that much more painful if there were two Terrys, able to stand next to each other and simultaneously curse Leven.”

Obert Skye book Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret

Source: Leven Thumps and the Whispered Secret

“Some secrets, she thought, were better told; some were better left the burden of the carrier, that they might not cause pain to others.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Secret

“She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness…”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

Happiness

“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, Heart

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 6
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale
Source: Complete Poems and Selected Letters

Love, Death, Art, Soul

“Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It's just not my thing anymore.”

Dave Eggers book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Source: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”

Bell Hooks book All About Love: New Visions

Source: All About Love: New Visions

“Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

Nature, Change

“No wonder men got impervious to superficial pain, I thought. It came from this habit of hammering each other incessantly.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

Men

“There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.”

Andrew Solomon book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Source: The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

People, Secret, World

“Old pain doesn't completely die. Time may soothe it, stoke over it until it looks like it has healed, but it never dies properly. It stays with you, it lives in the cracks of your soul, waiting for moments when you feel true pain”

Dorothy Koomson (1971) British writer

Source: Goodnight, Beautiful

Feeling, Soul, Time, Waiting

“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

History, Heart

“No pain is too small if it hurts, but any pain is too big if it's cherished.”

Edward St. Aubyn (1960) British writer

Hurt

“As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavored to harden herself to Dexter's indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Indifference

“She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.”

Edna O'Brien (1930) Novelist, memoirist, biographer, playwright, poet and short story writer

Source: Saints and Sinners

Love, People

“I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Men

“Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us - and those around us - more effectively. Look for the learning.”

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) American novelist

Learning

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Source: Letters of John Keats

World, School, Soul, Intelligence

“It’s all relative, I suppose. You think you know love, you think you know real pain, but you don’t. You don’t know anything.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

Love, Thinking

“But adulthood," continued the barely twentysomething, "doesn't give you power over what matters most. It doesn't protect you from pain, loss, fate. That's part of being human.”

Cynthia Leitich Smith (1967) American writer and poet

Source: Tantalize

Fate, Loss, Parting, Adulthood

“The brain controls pain. It controls fear. Sleep. Empathy. Hunger. Everything we associate with the heart or the soul or the nervous system is actually controlled by the brain. Everything. What if you could control it?”

Dennis Lehane book Shutter Island

Source: Shutter Island

Hunger, Fear, Soul, Sleep

“Hell is the special pain that dwells in that loss which you yourself have caused”

Elliot Perlman book Seven Types of Ambiguity

Source: Seven Types of Ambiguity

Hell, Loss

“I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

“Yeah, but I don’t want to be in pain, and I definitely don’t want to suffer.” – Nick
“Well…The only way to avoid them is to die.” – Death
“Okay, let’s change the topic now. Oh, look! A chicken.” – Nick”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Death, Way, Suffering, Change

“The heart may freeze, or it can burn. The pain will ease and I can learn. There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as, my last.”

Jonathan Larson (1960–1996) American composer and playwright

Source: Rent: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical

Learning, Past, Future, Heart

“On the other side of pain, there is still love.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Love

“Pain was their body's way of telling them that they'd pushed themselves to their limits -- which was exactly where they were supposed to be.”

Richard Marcinko book Rogue Warrior

Source: Rogue Warrior

Way

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Source: Reflections on War and Death

Pleasure, Reality

“There we go again, old men and their stupid arguments. What a pain.
~Toshiro Hitsugaya”

Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist

Men, Stupidity

“There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Way

“Relationships always sounded so physically painful: you fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars?”

Jodi Picoult book The Tenth Circle

Source: The Tenth Circle

Love, People, Heart

“No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Love, Mood, Help, Madness

“The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.”

David Foster Wallace book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Source: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Personality

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

Laughter

“My mother says that pain is hidden in everyone you see. She says try to imagine it like big bunches of flowers that everyone is carrying around with them. Think of your pain like a big bunch of red roses, a beautiful thorn necklace. Everyone has one.”

Francesca Lia Block book Witch Baby

Source: Witch Baby

Beauty, Imagination, Flowers, Thinking

“I dont think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Thinking

“Sometimes you must lose everything to gain it again, and the regaining is the sweeter for the pain of loss.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Loss

“Don't make it worse by thinking it's more painful than it actually is.”

John Boyne (1971) Irish novelist, author of children's and youth fiction

Source: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Thinking

“Scars are just a treasure map for pain you've buried too deep to remember.”

Jodi Picoult book Lone Wolf

Source: Lone Wolf

“Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain. And bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain.”

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

Heart

“… hear rumors and go digging for the painful truth beneath the lovely lies. You believe you have a right to these things, but you don't. When someone tells you a piece of their life, they're giving you a gift, not granting you your due.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

Love, Life, Truth

“You meet people who are in pain in life and love and you forgive them for behaving the way they do.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

Love, Life, People, Way

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful graces of God.”

William Kent Krueger book Ordinary Grace

Source: Ordinary Grace

Wisdom, God, Sleep, Suffering

“Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

“There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Behavior, Joy

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) American folklorist, novelist, short story writer

“Imagine jumping into a pit of boiling acid. Now multiply that pain times fifty."
-Percy”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

Imagination, Time

“It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Happiness, Peace, Feeling, Heart

“What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: NOS4A2

Business

“I fear that I am losing my mind. But really, it would not be such a precious thing to lose, as it only causes me pain.”

L.A. Meyer (1942–2014) American writer

Source: The Mark of the Golden Dragon: Being an Account of the Further Adventures of Jacky Faber, Jewel of the East, Vexation of the West, and Pearl of the South China Sea

Fear

“Love is so painful, how could you ever wish it on anybody? And love is so essential, how could you ever stand in its way?”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Two Boys Kissing

Love, Way

“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Source: Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation

“Something about the joy and pain of that moment, something about the excruciating contrast, made me feel that no matter what happens now, my life has been worth it. What a ride.”

Chris Crutcher (1946) American children's writer

Source: Stotan!

Life, Feeling, Joy

“How to seperate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.”

Stephen Fry book Making History

Source: Making History

Love, Loss

“I am a rock.
I am an island.
And a rock feels no pain.
And an island never cries.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

I Am a Rock
Song lyrics, Sounds of Silence (1966)
Source: Lyrics 1964-2008
Context: I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock.
I am an island.
And a rock feels no pain.
And an island never cries.

Feeling

“therefore i live for today-
certain of finding at sunrise
guidance and strength for the way.
power for each moment of weakness,
hope for each moment of pain,
comfort for every sorrow,
sunshine and joy after rain!”

Billy Graham (1918–2018) American Christian evangelist

Source: Hope for Each Day: Words of Wisdom and Faith

Hope, Way, Joy

“Pain and suffering are the soil of strength and courage.”

Lurlene McDaniel (1944) American writer

Source: Someone Dies, Someone Lives

Courage, Suffering

“You can't ever guess at life, at pain. All pain is real, and all pain is personal. It's the most personal thing we have. It eats each of us differently.”

Dave Eggers (1970) memoirist, novelist, short story writer, editor, publisher

Source: You Shall Know Our Velocity!

Life, Personality

“Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.”

Paula Danziger (1945–2004) American children's writer

People, Truth, Forgetting

“If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.”

Diane Wood Middlebrook (1939–2007) biographer

Source: Anne Sexton: A Biography

Way, Communication, Suffering

“There is a place in you that you don't even know exists, where you can simply stand back and watch without feeling any pain.”

Jodi Picoult Salem Falls

Source: Salem Falls

Feeling

“The minute I'm in a little pain… your rough, tough, scary bad boy image totally falls apart.”

Christine Feehan American writer

Source: Dark Hunger

Boy

“The severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection.”

David Foster Wallace book The Broom of the System

Source: The Broom of the System

“Great beauty is often perceived by human senses as pain.”

Susan Kay (1952) British writer

Beauty, Sense

“Above all, he — and his goofball customers — believed that shared pain is lessened, and shared Joy increased.”

Spider Robinson (1948) Canadian author

The Callahan Chronicals (1996) [originally published as Callahan and Company (1988)] "Backword", p. xii
Context: In a culture where pessimism has metastasized like slow carcinoma, that crazy Irishman was backward enough to try to raise hopes, like hothouse flowers. In an era during which even judicious use of alcohol has been increasingly bad-rapped, the man who came to be known as The Mick of Time was backward enough to think that the world can look just that essential tad better when seen through a flask, brightly. (As long as you let someone else drive you home afterward.) Above all, he — and his goofball customers — believed that shared pain is lessened, and shared Joy increased.
Now he is gone. Gone back whence he came, and we are all the poorer for it. But I refuse to say that we will not see his like again. Or his love again.

Joy

“I want to believe that memories, even sad and painful ones, should not be forgotten forever.”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Sadness, Memory

“Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Infamous

Life

“The trick is not how much pain you feel--but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain. Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.”

Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic

Life, Feeling, Joy

“Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Solitude

“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

Bell Hooks book All About Love: New Visions

Source: All About Love: New Visions

Love, Loss, Hurt, Hurtful

“Being a wizard gives you more power than most, but it doesn't change your heart. We're all human. We're all of us equally naked before the jaws of pain.”

Jim Butcher book White Night

Source: White Night

Change, Heart

“Love - true love - is a precious thing. It is painful, uncomfortable, makes fools of us all, but it is what breathes meaning and color and purpose into our lives.”

Kate Mosse book Sepulchre

Source: Sepulchre

Love, Fools, Color

“Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;
What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.”

Theodore Roethke book The Far Field

"The Marrow," ll. 11-12
The Far Field (1964)

“They hurt you. You hurt 'em back. Or maybe it is the other way around. Whatever. Someday you might find a way to forgive each other. But it won't be like it used to 'cause that pain never really goes away.”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

Source: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: No Future for You

Way, Forgiveness, Hurt

“You say you felt a presence, but I only sensed an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like a patient who cannot tell the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Sense, Hurt

“Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’
‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.”

Yasunari Kawabata book Thousand Cranes

Source: Thousand Cranes

Feeling

“So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: All the Sad Young Men

Happiness, Strong

“It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Happiness, People, Truth, Fear

“Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more.”

Michel Houellebecq (1956) writer

Source: H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life

Life, Disappointment, Reality

“Grace changes us and change is painful".”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Change

“Love hurts. There is nothing as painful as heartbreak. But in order to learn to love again you must learn to trust again.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Love, Learning, Hurt

“I had wanted to say that my song was far too painful to sing.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Singing

“I've never been shot, but this probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

Source: This is Where I Leave You

Feeling

“… when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.”

Anne Michaels book Fugitive Pieces

Source: Fugitive Pieces

Pleasure, Decision, Learning, Forgetting

“pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Source: The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

Death, Pleasure, Intelligence

“When you're five and you hurt, you make a big noise in the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain.”

Stephen King book Rage

Source: Rage

World, Tree, Time, Hurt

“Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Vorkosigan Saga, Barrayar (1991)
Source: Cordelia's Honor
Context: Welcome to Barrayar, son. Here you go: have a world of wealth and poverty, wrenching change and rooted history. Have a birth; have two. Have a name. Miles means "soldier," but don't let the power of suggestion overwhelm you. Have a twisted form in a society that loathes and fears the mutations that have been its deepest agony. Have a title, wealth, power, and all the hatred and envy they will draw. Have your body ripped apart and re-arranged. Inherit an array of friends and enemies you never made. Have a grandfather from hell. Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.

Universe, Joy