Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
—John Keats
I've never been very good at feasting on the daily newspaper. It turns bitter in my mouth. And yet, this is my world. This face of suffering I must embrace as a part of my responsibility. Part of the feast is becoming aware of the world that is mine. Part of the feast is owning this broken world as my own brokenness.
—Macrina Wiederkehr
Life is pain, anyone who says differently is selling something.
—William Goldman
All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.
—Marshall Rosenberg
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
—E.M. Forster
Whoever said it got easier with time was wrong, death never got easier. The pain dulls around your heart, numbing the spot the deceased inhabited in your chest—but it was never easier. Loss was still loss—a physical pain, a hurt that reaches deep inside you and smothers your soul, forever indenting their memory.
—Kelsie Leverich in The Valentine’s Arrangement
Sometimes pain and hurt are good things because it means you strived for something in your life.
—Kathryn Vance-Perez in Love and Truth
Never a lip is curved with pain that can't be kissed into smiles again.
—Bret Harte
It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.
—Rose Kennedy
I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.
—Mother Teresa
Acceptance is hard. To accept my pain means holding it in my arms, like a package handed to me, my proper burden to be carried. The package may be heavy as lead, or burning hot, or stuck through with razors, but I must concede that it is my package, simply because it has arrived in my life. It is not a mistake. It has not been sent by accident to the wrong person. I may not welcome it, but accepting it means I carry it without protest for as long as necessary—and then I lay it down.
—Jeanne Duprau
Sometimes you weren’t supposed to share pain. Sometimes it was best just to deal with it alone.
—Sarah Addison Allen in The Sugar Queen
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
"Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
—Cesare Pavese
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
—James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time