D’you know what happens when you hurt people? When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.
—Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
—E.M. Forster
Sometimes pain and hurt are good things because it means you strived for something in your life.
—Kathryn Vance-Perez in Love and Truth
You can’t live your life for other people. You’ve got to do what’s right for you, even if it hurts some people you love.
—Nicholas Sparks in The Notebook
Without your wounds where would your power be? The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken in the wheels of living. In love's service, only the wounded soldiers can serve.
—Thornton Wilder
I hate hiding how much the stupid things he did hurt me, but I hated the idea of him finding out even more.
—Leigh Bardugo in Shadow and Bone
You don't stop loving someone just because they've hurt you. Yes, what you did hurt me, but I gain nothing if I stay angry with you. But I might gain everything by forgiving you.
—Cassia Leo in Pieces of You
My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn't that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends?
—Elizabeth Gilbert in Love
You don't gain much in life if you never allow yourself to be vulnerable. Sometimes the best things in life happen when we open our hearts and give someone the opportunity to hurt us, and trust them not to, and they don't.
—Terry Bolryder in Bearlebrity
Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well-ordered and protected and guarded. Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt.
—Edna Ferber
Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
—Gwendolyn Brooks
People hurt other people the most when they're trying to kill their own pain, real or imagined.
—Frank J. Page
They wouldn't call it falling in love if you didn't get hurt sometimes, but you just pick yourself up and move on.
—Hugh Elliott
The stupid thing about anger is how people hurt you and then you let them keep hurting you by being angry about how they originally hurt you. It's a vicious cycle.
—Susane Colasanti in So Much Closer
This was the kind of hurt that could only be inflicted by someone you loved, who you thought loved you. It was sort of like being stabbed from the inside out.
—Kami Garcia in Beautiful Darkness