Quotes about pain
page 7

“A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Source: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“Because we managed to keep our heart open, despite the pain.
Because we realized that the person who left us did not take the sun with them or leave darkness in their place.”

Paulo Coelho book Manuscript Found in Accra

Source: Manuscript Found in Accra

Sun, Heart, Personality

“She didn't give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference.”

Thomas Harris The Silence of the Lambs

Source: The Silence of the Lambs

Learning, Indifference

“I feel like, like pudding," Iggy groaned. "Pudding with nerve endings. Pudding in great pain.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

Feeling

“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight
Variant: For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
Source: Identity

Feeling, Imagination

“The absence of pain means death, so when something no longer bothers you, you've died to that thing.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Death

“Love should bring joy, it should grant a person peace, but here and not, it was bringing only pain.”

Nicholas Sparks book Dear John

Source: Dear John

Love, Peace, Joy, Personality

“There are boys so enraptured by love that they can't get their hearts to slow down enough to get some rest, and other boys so damaged by love that they can't stop picking at their pain.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Two Boys Kissing

Love, Boy, Heart

“Before this trip and all that she'd learned about the three of them, she would have gotten angry or changed the subject. Anything to obscure the pain she felt. Now she knew better. You carried your pain with you in life. There was no outrunning it.”

Kristin Hannah (1960) American writer

Source: Winter Garden

Life, Learning, Change

“It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Pleasure, Imagination

“History, despite its wrenching pain cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage need not be lived again.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

History, Courage

“But our wounds are part of who we are… and there is nothing left to chance…. And pain's the pen that writes the songs…. That call us forth to dance”

Michael Card (1957) singer, songwriter, author, composer, Radio Host

Chance, Dance, Parting

“There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion

“Without a word or hesitation, Pain took the mop from Nick. Suffering moved to pick up glass.
"Wow. Where have you two been all my life?"
Pain quirked and eyebrow as he mopped the floor.
"Walking hand in hand with you. Haven't you noticed?”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Life, Suffering

“Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Reviewing Warren Farrell's The Myth of Male Power, p. 392
Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality"

Women, Men, Children, Housing

“I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Happiness, People, Pleasure

“It is an extraordinary act of courage,' said Tulas Shorn, 'to come to know a stranger's pain.”

Steven Erikson (1959) Canadian fantasy author

Courage

“You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things”

Ann Brashares book The Last Summer

Source: The Last Summer

“She had opened a door… and now she was walking with demons. And at the end of her travels, she would have her revenge… Pain had made a sadist of her.”

Clive Barker book The Hellbound Heart

Source: The Hellbound Heart

Travel, Revenge

“She was in pain and I loved her, sort of loved her, I guess, so I kind of had to love her pain, too.”

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

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

Love

“Child of Hades, what more could I do to you? You are perfect! So much sorrow and pain!’ Nico gasped. His eyes flew open.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Perfection

“The end of life is not to be happy, nor to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what may.”

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

Life, God, Happiness, Pleasure

“The good face pain. But the great — they embrace it.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)
Source: Shards of Honour

“In most cases learning something essential in life requires physical pain.”

Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Life, Learning

“I wake up thinking of yesterday. The joy is in remembering; the pain is in knowing it was yesterday.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

Thinking, Joy

“The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Time

“There's a certain class of people who will do you in and then remain completely mystified by the depth of your pain.”

Sue Grafton (1940–2017) American writer

Source: E is for Evidence

People

“I have known the joy and pain of friendship. I have served and been served. I have made some good enemies for which I am not a bit sorry. I have loved unselfishly, and I have fondled hatred with the red-hot tongs of Hell. That's living.”

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

Love, Friendship, Hell, Joy

“It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses

“Love is messy. If you really love someone, you can't avoid the pain. People die, people leave, things change, but sometimes it all works”

Danielle Steel book Friends Forever

Source: Friends Forever

Love, People, Change

“The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley.
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

To a Mouse, st. 7 (1785)
Source: Collected Poems of Robert Burns

Men, Joy

“I wanted him to hold me, to take care of me. To make the pain dissolve away. I know that this was part of what had ruined everything but I wanted it once more anyway.”

Francesca Lia Block book Echo

Source: Echo

Parting

“Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache: do be my enemy for friendship's sake.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Friendship, Heart

“Why are you so sad, akri? (Simi)
I’m not sad, Simi. (Acheron)
Yes you are. I know you, akri, you gots that pain in your heart like the Simi gets whenever she cries. (Simi)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Dance with the Devil

Source: Dance with the Devil

Sadness, Heart

“Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)
Variant: Waiting Hurts. Forgetting Hurts. But not knowing which decision to take is the worst of suffering.
Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Suffering, Waiting, Forgetting

“Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

Happiness, World, Universe

“what is the worst pain? To me, it's always the pain that is present.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

“We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted

Love, Hate, War, World

“Our worst pain is confined within our own skin.”

Charles Frazier (1950) American writer

“Living was a dangerous past-time, and often quite painful—but there was also such joy in living, such beauty, things that one would otherwise never see, never experience, never know. The risk of pain and loss was a part of living.”

Jim Butcher Captain's Fury

Source: Captain's Fury

Beauty, Loss, Time, Past

“Even pain is impossibly exquisite.”

Vicki Pettersson (1972) American author

The Taken

“I wished that love could be simple, that it was always given and returned in the same measure, equally and at the same time, that all the planets aligned in a perfect way to dispel all doubts, that it was easy to understand and never painful.”

Mary E. Pearson (1955) young-adult fiction writer

Source: The Heart of Betrayal

Love, Way, Understanding, Time

“the pain we suffer is a way to make us appreciate what comes next.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The First Phone Call from Heaven

Way, Suffering

“You're a pretty cool customer, huh?" says Agent Hunt.

"I hide my inner pain under my stoic visage."

Agent Hunt looks like he would like to put his fist through my stoic visage.”

Holly Black book Red Glove

Source: Red Glove

“Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels — the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

Problem, Heart

“You have a great heart, but will only find it to be so through great pain. This is the wisdom of love, and its doubtful gift…. I have endured much suffering and still remain unbitter and unclosed.”

Alison Croggon (1962) contemporary Australian poet, playwright and fantasy novelist

Source: The Naming

Love, Wisdom, Suffering, Heart

“So often the pain of our life is no more than a reminder to take our hand off the stove.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Carousel

Life

“Pain, thou art not an evil”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Art, Evil

“He makes a pained sound. "Bloody hell, woman, I think a part of me wants to keep you this way.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Dreamfever

Way, Hell, Thinking, Parting

“She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness, yet they could let each other see it without the need of protection.”

Ayn Rand book The Fountainhead

Source: The Fountainhead

Happiness

“Until I understood why you didn't cry, even though it hurt: there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Hurt, Cry

“My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.”

Madeleine L'Engle An Acceptable Time

Source: An Acceptable Time

Life, Business, Universe

“June smiled. "So what will it be? Safety, or a future of pain and possibility?”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Smile, Future

“By the time Alec came back into the training room, Jace was lying on the floor, envisioning lines of dancing girls in an effort to ignore the pain in his wrists. It wasn’t working.
~pg. 317~”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Girl, Lying, Effort, Time

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch (1871)

Hope, Despair, Hope

“Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. Some things are so sad that only your soul can do the crying for them.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Truth, Sadness, Feeling, Soul

“When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror at being forced to accept that they exist.”

Noah Cicero (1980) American writer

Source: The Condemned

Personality

“The most intimate feeling people can share is neither love nor hate, but pain.”

Tess Gerritsen book The Surgeon

Source: The Surgeon

Love, Hate, People, Feeling

“D'ye ken that the only time I am without pain is in your bed, Sassenach? When I take ye, when I lie in your arms-my wounds are healed, then, my scars forgotten.”

Diana Gabaldon book The Fiery Cross

Source: The Fiery Cross

Lie, Time

“There are no mistakes in life,
only lessons. There is no such thing as a negative experience, only
opportunities to grow, learn and advance along the road of selfmastery.
From struggle comes strength. Even pain can be a wonderful teacher”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

Life, Learning, Teachers

“The thing was, if I had found a way to escape- even for just a little while- I knew the pain would be there waiting for me when I got back.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: Bruiser

Way, Waiting

“Why do we have such a finite capacity for pleasure but an infinite one for pain?”

Marian Keyes (1963) Irish writer

Source: The Other Side of the Story

Pleasure

“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book A Study in Scarlet

Source: A Study in Scarlet

Smile

“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

Way, Hurt

“Percy’d heard stories about amputees who had phantom pains where their missing legs
and arms used to be. That’s how his mind
felt—like his missing memories were aching.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

Memory

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

Thinking

“Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

Truth, Literature, Reading

“We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours.”

Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin

“Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it.”

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

Life, Laughter

“And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Beauty, Feeling

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. The sun might shine, or the clouds might lour: but nothing could appear to me as it had done the day before.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

Appearance, Change, Sun

“If it is so painful to love and to be charged with this electric current, how much more painful must it be to a woman and to be the current, and to inspire love.”

Borís Pasternak book Doctor Zhivago

Source: Doctor Zhivago (1957)

Love

“Suddenly, I viddied what I had to do, and what I had wanted to do, and that was to do myself in; to snuff it, to blast off for ever out of this wicked, cruel world. One moment of pain perhaps and, then, sleep forever, and ever and ever.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

World, Sleep

“That was another lesson I had learned perhaps too well: people meant pain.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

People, Learning

“I wondered if it was possible to take someone's pain away with a kiss. Because that was what i wanted to do, take all of his sadness and pour it out of him, comfort him, make the boy i knew come back.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

Sadness, Boy, Kiss

“I just want to protect them no matter how much pain befalls me.”

Masashi Kishimoto book Naruto

Source: Naruto, Vol. 47: The Seal Destroyed

“The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.”

John Steinbeck book The Pearl

Source: The Pearl

People

“Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.”

Julian Barnes (1946) English writer

Source: Levels of Life

Way, Nature, Thinking, Hurt

“He loved her, and he would love her until the day he was too old for loving--but he could not have her. 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 book Winter Dreams

Source: Winter Dreams

Love, Happiness, Strong

“Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

We Bereaved (1929)

Life, World

“A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?”

Dallas Willard (1935–2013) American philosopher

Source: Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ

God, Children, Heart

“When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Life, Suffering

“If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.”

Emily Dickinson Life, and Death, and Giants —

Life, p. 6
Collected Poems (1993)

Life, Help, Heart

“Don't punish yourself,' she heard her say again, but there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Variant: ... there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.
Source: The Book Thief

Happiness

“Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you?”

Jeff Lindsay (1952) American playwright and crime novelist Jeffry P. Freundlich

Source: Dexter By Design

Life

“From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Life, Way, Birth

“Weave the circle, tightly sewn,
Let nothing evil or unknown
Enter within. Stay without
On pain of death, we cast you out.”

Yasmine Galenorn (1961) American writer

Source: Blood Wyne

Death, Evil

“The community of the Giver had achieved at such great price. A community without danger or pain. But also, a community without music, color or art. And books.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

Books, Art, Music, Color

“Happiness is something you lay siege to, it is a battle like a game of go. I will take hold of all the pain and snuff it out.”

Shan Sa book The Girl Who Played Go

Source: The Girl Who Played Go

Happiness, Game

“That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”

Ernest Cline book Ready Player One

Source: Ready Player One

Happiness, Reality

“Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

...in der ganzen Natur, mit dem Grad der Intelligenz die Fähigkeit zum Schmerze sich steigert, also ebenfalls erst hier ihre höchste Stufe erreicht.
The Wisdom of Life. Chapter II. Personality, or What a Man Is: Footnote 19
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Not yet placed by volume, chapter or section

Intelligence, Nature, Suffering

“Still, being able to feel pain was good, he thought. It's when you can't even feel pain anymore that you're in real trouble.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Feeling

“The biggest black eye that you can give the devil is to give God your pain and let Him turn it into gain.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

God