All Quotes By Tag: Pain

“She was the kind of star who sold happy dreams. She didn’t want to sell darkness. Pain was best left in the real world where it belonged, where it burrowed so deep you needed a multimillion-dollar industry to escape from it.”

“We have come to see pain as the antithesis of happiness. Yet without the experience of pain we would not appreciate the experience of happiness.”

“Poem (Internal Scene) To make beauty out of pain, it damns the eyes—No, dams the eyes. See how they overflow?No damns them, damns them, and so they cry.What shape can I swallow to make me whole?Baby’s bird-shaped block, blue-painted woodThat fits in the bird-hole of the painted wood box?The skeleton leaf? The skeleton key? LoudKnock when the shape won’t unlock any locks.I hear it through the static in the baby’s roomWhen the monitor clicks on and off, soundOf sea-ice cracking against the jagged sea-rocks,Laughing gull in the gale. What is it dives downPast sight, down there dark with the other blocks?It can’t be seen, only heard. A kind of curse,This kind curse. Forgive me. Blessing that hurts.”

“He (Proust) tells us, for instance, that there are two methods by which a person can acquire wisdom, painlessly via a teacher or painfully via life, and he proposes that the painful variety is far superior…”We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.”

“I prefer happiness to unhappiness, pleasure to pain. I’m old-fashioned that way.”

“The only way to heal from the pain of the past is to walk through that pain in the present. It’s terrifying, I know. It feels safer to just let the pain continue to smolder in the darkest parts of yourself. But the dark parts need tending, too, my friend. Don’t be afraid to breathe life back into those embers of old pain, to rekindle the fires of unhealed hurts. The flames aren’t there to burn you. They are there to light your way through pain to healing. You can walk through courageous and confident or shaking in your boots. It doesn’t matter. Just walk through it. Hurt will transform into hope, wounds into wisdom, suffering into scars that tell of battles won and lost and of a human who survived it all.”

“Forgiveness isn’t telling someone it was okay to hurt you. It’s telling yourself it’s okay to stop hurting. It doesn’t mean you have to trust them again. It means you can learn to trust yourself again. It doesn’t mean you have to give them a free pass back into your life. It means you are free to take your life back again. Forgiveness is simply emptying your past of its power to empty your present of its peace.”

“Pain and sorrow make up a person’s character, not just the happiness and laughter.”

“While the surcease of pain might produce the sharpest moment of rapture, the cessation of pain by itself does not create long-term happiness.”

“Words allow us to unravel the knot inside and to make sense of our loss, not bury it within. For in our sadness and pain, we can be remade. We can learn how to understand our trauma and give it a container — a story — to hold it.”

“Here where North, the night, the berg of deathCrowd me out of the ignorant darkness,I see at last that all the knowledgeI wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness And we call it wisdom. It is pain.”

“If you numb pain you might ignore one of our greatest teachers. As a result, another message can be lost in translation.”

“Often it is not the act that hurts you but the story you tell yourself afterwards.”

“The truth to reconcile these truths he found in the experience of men, which the men of his generation must have realized far beyond others, that pain and error have their purpose and their use: they are steps of the ladder of knowledge: God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. (Aeschylus, Agamemnon)”

“The truth to reconcile these truths he found in the experience of men, which the men of his generation must have realized far beyond others, that pain and error have their purpose and their use: they are steps of the ladder of knowledge: ‘God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’ (Aeschylus, Agamemnon)”