Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

To have a body is to suffer.

Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old. A good woman knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her.

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

For all mortals, birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering.

Man's own form in space - his body - was a private prison; and that it was because of this imprisoning misery - because he was hungry and overworked and went to a horrid place called home late at night in the rain, and his bones ached and his head was heavy.

How do you feel?” she asked, trying to fluff his pillow. “Other than terrible, I mean.” He moved his head slightly to the side. It seemed to be a sickly interpretation of a shrug. “Of course you’re feeling terrible,” she clarified, “but is there any change? More terrible? Less terrible?” He made no response. “The same amount of terrible?

Pain is the body's way of ridding itself of weakness.

Being a wizard gives you more power than most, but it doesn't change your heart. We're all human. We're all of us equally naked before the jaws of pain.

Bite your tongue. Get a cinder in your eye. When you feel good, you feel nothing.

And in bed, deep inside the building, are all the headaches that won't go away. The failed kidneys, the rashes, the ragged-edged moles, the lumps on the breast, the coughs that have turned nasty. In the Marie Curie Ward on the fourth floor are the kids with cancer. Their bodies secretly and slowly being consumed. And then there's the mortuary, where the dead lie in refrigerated drawers with name tags on their feet.

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.

My spirit is too weak--mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.

He never knew what hit him, and that would have comforted me, except . . . just for one second, he would have had to know, wouldn't he? There must have been a blur, a sense of the world exploding, a flashpoint of receiving more damage than a human body could endure.

Seal my lips on aches and pains. They are increasing, and love of rehearsing them is becoming sweeter as the years go by.

Look at your body— A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings. —The Dhammapada

My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.

The happiest of pillows is not that which love first presses! it is that which death has frowned on and passed over.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

To age truly was to suffer the ultimate treason, that of one's body against oneself.

"I feel like, like pudding," Iggy groaned. "Pudding with nerve endings. Pudding in great pain."

For the world, I count it not an inn, but a hospital; and a place not to live, but to die in.