Erasmus Darwin Quotes

I didn't feel physically sick. But mentally. My mind was twisting in so many ways. (...) We once saw a documentary on migraines. One of the men interviewed used to fall on his knees and bang his head against the floor, over and over during attacks. This diverted the pain from deep inside his brain, where he couldn't reach it, to a pain outside that he had control over.

When pain is unbearable it destroys us; when it does not it is bearable.

She felt so much emotionally, she would say, that a physical outlet - physical pain - was the only way to make her internal pain go away. It was the only way she could control it.

Pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It comes from the mind’s mysterious instinct to believe that pain is good, or that it cannot be escaped, or that the person deserves it.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.

When you have so much pain, you think you will lose consciousness. If you say to yourself, ‘So what, lose consciousness,’ the pain goes away.

One fire burns out another's burning, One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.

And when pain bites, men bargain. Boys too. We twist and turn, we plead and beg, we offer our tormentors what he wants so that the hurting will stop. And when there is no torturer to placate, no hooded man with hot irons and tongs, just a burn you can't escape, we bargain with God, or ourselves, depending on the size of our egos.

There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)

I've certainly experienced physical pain in my life.

Pain is an event. It happens to you, and you deal with it in whatever way you can.

Anyone and everyone eventually confesses under torture.

Physical pain is temporary.

There's a lot of people out here faking a smile on their face like they got it together but inside actually suffering from some sort of traumatic experience, a loss, depressed, fearful, envious or whatever the case may be, but I can feel it.

I can manage my own pain. I can drink. I can go to the doctor and get a prescription. I can exercise. I can write a story about it. I've done it a million times! But I don't want to see the people I love tortured and suffering.

The plan was to drink until the pain is over, But what's worse, the pain or the hangover?

For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours if it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static pain often is... is it not yet enough?

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

You believe you could not live with the pain. Such pain is not lived with. It is only endured. I am sorry.

I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.

Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.

We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.

I think emotional and mental pain is probably worse than physical pain. I think we don't realize that I have no arms or legs but we all have disabilities of some sort, some fear, some lost, some wishes that didn't come true, things we wish would be better.

I deal daily with chronic pain and, at times, my pain feels like a lemon that God "squeezes," revealing my sour attitude, peevish spirit, and tendency to complain or grumble. Did not God use my pain to expose my sin, I might - like many of us - not be aware of the sin of which I'm capable.