Quotes about pain
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Source: City of Heavenly Fire
“Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”
Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 44 (p. 449)
Source: Hyperion
Context: “Humanity has evolved—as far as it has evolved,” continued the old priest, “with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”
“Empathy,” Aenea said softly.
Source: The Akhmatova Journals, Volume I: 1938-1941
Source: The Book Thief
Source: Darkness Visible (1990), III
Context: This general unawareness of what depression is really like was apparent most recently in the matter of Primo Levi, the remarkable Italian writer and survivor of Auschwitz who, at the age of sixty-seven, hurled himself down a stairwell in Turin in 1987. Since my own involvement with the illness, I had been more than ordinarily interested in Levi’s death, and so, late in 1988, when I read an account in The New York Times about a symposium on the writer and his work held at New York University, I was fascinated but, finally, appalled. For, according to the article, many of the participants, worldly writers and scholars, seemed mystified by Levi’s suicide, mystified and disappointed. It was as if this man whom they had all so greatly admired, and who had endured so much at the hands of the Nazis — a man of exemplary resilience and courage — had by his suicide demonstrated a frailty, a crumbling of character they were loath to accept. In the face of a terrible absolute — self-destruction — their reaction was helplessness and (the reader could not avoid it) a touch of shame.
My annoyance over all this was so intense that I was prompted to write a short piece for the op-ed page of the Times. The argument I put forth was fairly straightforward: the pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. Through the healing process of time — and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases — most people survive depression, which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.
“I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one.”
Variant: I've learned that I still have a lot to learn.
Source: The Golden Compass
A Long Way from The Stuffed Cabbage (short story)
Source: 终於悲哀的外國語
Context: Painful is the stress when one cannot reproduce or convey vividly to others, however hard he tries, what he's experienced so intensely. In my case, the stronger is the intention to "write about a particular subject in a particular way," the harder it becomes to start writing and to express myself. This stress somewhat resembles the irritation one feels when he cannot describe to another person what he experienced so vividly and realistically in his dreams. All words I use to narrate my feeling of the moment fail incessantly to describe what I wish to, and then they begin to betray me.
“He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.”
Source: Miss Lonelyhearts
Source: The Secret Scripture
“every pleasure's got an edge of pain, pay your ticket and don't complain”
Source: Last Sacrifice
“But I saw the pain and sadness in everything, and swirled it round my mouth like a fine wine.”
Source: Your Voice in My Head
“To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it.”
“The great object of life is sensation- to feel that we exist, even though in pain.”
Source: Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika
“She knew with painful certainty that the opposite of love was not hate, but indifference.”
Source: Summer by the Sea
“Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?”
Source: Renegade's Magic
Variant: I wished I was on the same bus as her. A pain stabbed my heart as it did everytime I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours.
Source: On the Road
“It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.”
Source: Darkness Visible (1990), VI
Source: Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Context: There is a region in the experience of pain where the certainty of alleviation often permits superhuman endurance. We learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it. When we endure severe discomfort of a physical nature our conditioning has taught us since childhood to make accommodations to the pain’s demands — o accept it, whether pluckily or whimpering and complaining, according to our personal degree of stoicism, but in any case to accept it. Except in intractable terminal pain, there is almost always some form of relief; we look forward to that alleviation, whether it be through sleep or Tylenol or self-hypnosis or a change of posture or, most often, through the body’s capacity for healing itself, and we embrace this eventual respite as the natural reward we receive for having been, temporarily, such good sports and doughty sufferers, such optimistic cheerleaders for life at heart.
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying — or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity — but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
“We must accept our pain
Change what we can
and laugh at the rest”
“At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.”
Source: 1960s, Strength to Love (1963), Ch. 1 : A tough mind and a tender heart
Context: The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. The tough-minded individual is astute and discerning. He has a strong austere quality that makes for firmness of purpose and solidness of commitment.
Who doubts that this toughness is one of man's greatest needs? Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.
Source: Why Men Marry Bitches: A Woman's Guide to Winning Her Man's Heart
“Don't make light of any man's pain.”
Source: When Demons Walk
Source: Clockwork Princess
“Don't be concerned about being disloyal to your pain by being joyous.”
Source: Unknown Book 7074565
“Life is pain. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.”
Variant: Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
Source: The Princess Bride
Source: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?
“Pain is the world. I don't have anywhere to run.”
Source: Blood and Guts in High School
“… The pain didn't bother me. In fact, I welcome it: It meant I was alive.”
Source: The Vampire's Assistant
“most days go
nowhere
but the avoidance
of pain and
dissolution are
lovely.”
Source: Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories
Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes
“There is no relationship in life that comes with the promise of zero pain.”
Source: Leven Thumps and the Eyes of the Want
From Peter Engel, "An Interview With Stanislaw Lem": The Missouri Review, Volume VII, Number 2 (1984) http://www.missourireview.org/index.php?genre=Interviews&title=An+Interview+with+Stanislaw+Lem
Context: For moral reasons I am an atheist — for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally.
Variant: Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out of everything, even pain.
Source: Freak the Mighty