quotations about pain
Pain, no matter how prolonged it seems to be, is just a short-lived thing that one day, in one way or another, we will overcome.
ROSEMARY ALTEA
The Eagle and the Rose
See the wretch that long has tost
On the thorny bed of pain,
At length repair his vigour lost,
And breathe and walk again:
The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening paradise.
THOMAS GRAY
"Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude"
As foolish as it may appear, you are, in a sense, a prisoner of the pain, which was intolerable. You're thinking, what could I do to relieve myself of it. If it becomes intense enough, you're perfectly willing to accept cardiac arrest as a possible way of getting rid of the pain.
MICHAEL DEBAKEY
"Pioneering surgeon becomes patient", Yahoo! News, December 25, 2006
To hurt is as human as to breathe.
J. K. ROWLING
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved.
NEIL GAIMAIN
Anansi Boys
Pain was exhausting in its inane imperviousness to everything. There was nothing, no persuasion or bribe you could bring to it. It was a monolithic idiot, the dumbest thing in the universe given complete control over the smartest, a heartbreaking inversion.
GLEN DUNCAN
Talulla Rising
Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.
LANCE ARMSTRONG
Every Second Counts
There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living
Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Bound
I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
1Q84
There is no thornless path in the world.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
Wherefore groan and lament over pain? Be, rather, thankful for this one sign of life; for the dead suffer no pain, and lay figures are never chilled by frost.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow; but the misfortune is that in this particular case, the substance belongs to the shadow, the emptiness to its cause.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing.
GLEN DUNCAN
A Day and a Night and a Day
Unless our souls had root in soil divine
We could not bear earth's overwhelming strife.
The fiercest pain that racks this heart of mine,
Convinces me of everlasting life.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Pain's Proof"
But pain ... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD
Barrayer
You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
The pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
IRVIN D. YALOM
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death