#suffer

When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are," replied the girl steadily, "give away your hearts, love will carry you all lengths--even such as you, who have home, friends, other admireres, everything to fill them. When such as I, who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us? Pity us, lady--pity us for having only one feeling of the woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgment, from a comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#love #suffering #beauty

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased. ↗

— Pema Chödrön

#choice #life #relaxing #suffering #beauty

They knew, though, she would not suffer as they had suffered. She was perfect. They were scarred. ↗

— Francesca Lia Block

#hope #suffering #beauty

[The sound of the wind] was just more proof that the workings of the world were random, that beauty, like suffering, was meaningless, that human life was as pointless as waves on sand. ↗

— Anita Diamant

#beauty #day-after-night #meaninglessness-of-life #random-chance #randomness

A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years. ↗

— Byron Katie

#suffering #thinking #thought #truth #change

It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible. ↗

— Samuel Beckett

#desire #longing #pain #suffering #time

I want to suffer so that I may love. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#suffering #dreams

She said, 'It's not life or death, the labyrinth.' 'Um, okay. So what is it?' 'Suffering,' she said. 'Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?...Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It'st the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about. ↗

— John Green

#labyrinth #philosophy #pudge #suffering #death

Loss is like a shrapnel wound, I said, where the piece of metal's got stuck in a place where the surgeons daren't go, so they decide to leave it. It is painful at first, horribly painful, so that you wonder you can live with it. But then the body grows around it, until it doesn't hurt anymore. Not like it used to be. But every now and again there are these twinges when you are not ready for them, and you realize it is still there, and it's always going to be there. It is a part of you. A still, hard point inside. ↗

— Robert Wilson

#death

Toda vida, le dijo esa noche Epifanio a Lalo Cura, por más feliz que sea, acaba siempre en dolor y sufrimiento. Depende, dijo Lalo Cura. ¿Depende de qué, buey? De muchas cosas, dijo Lalo Cura. Si te pegan un balazo en la nuca, por ejemplo, y el pinche asesino se acerca sin que lo escuches, te vas al otro mundo sin dolor y sin sufrimiento. Pinche escuincle, dijo Epifanio. ¿A ti han pegado muchos tiros en la nuca? ↗

— Roberto Bolaño

#pain #suffering #death