Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

As a young child, I was never a crier. I never cried to get my way, or even when I was in pain.

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

I can handle pain.

Strength doesn't mean an absence of pain.

Being knee-deep in sadness or suffering and refusing to look down - to me, that represents something more powerful than someone who's never gone through difficulty.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Suffering is not enough. Life is both dreadful and wonderful...How can I smile when I am filled with so much sorrow? It is natural--you need to smile to your sorrow because you are more than your sorrow.

Sometimes my worst day - one filled with pain and suffering - in the eyes of God, is my best day if I've born it cheerfully and I've born it with love.

If you can learn to endure pain, you can survive anything. Some people learn to embrace it- to love it. Some endure it through drowning it in sorrow, or by making themselves forget. Others turn it into anger.

I have been through a lot and have suffered a great deal. But I have had lots of happy moments, as well. Every moment one lives is different from the other. The good, the bad, hardship, the joy, the tragedy, love, and happiness are all interwoven into one single, indescribable whole that is called life. You cannot separate the good from the bad. And perhaps there is no need to do so, either.

Watch waterfalls of pity roar, you feel to moan but unlike before, you discover that you'd just be one more person crying.

It is not so much the greatness of our troubles, as the littleness of our spirit, which makes us complain.

There are those who suffer and grow strong; there are those who suffer and grow weak. This mystery of pain is still for me the saddest of earth's disabilities.

Most people wish they could erase suffering out of the dictionary. Today's culture of comfort and instant gratification has no patience for suffering - most people want to drug it, escape it, divorce it; do anything but live with it.

I'll accept the pain and the suffering, because I know that in that there's a lot of beauty, too.

No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain.

Don’t worry about me handling the pain," I say. "I’ve had a lot of practice.

One can bear anything of which one is able to conceive.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!

Telling my children was the toughest part. But that's when you get strong, because you have to be strong for other people.

I can’t hate people for making judgment on me, or making a decision of liking me or not liking me. All I can do is try to better as a person. And I’m good with knowing everything isn’t always going to be perfect.