John Berryman Quotes

When you're in a fight, and you get hit, it hurts. And as you get older, you begin to take on the aches and the bruises of doing that.

Born down in a dead man's town, The first kick I took was when I hit the ground, You end up like a dog that's been beat too much, Till you spend half your life just covering up...

The bathroom door swings open. Emma sees the blood painting my skin and the red rivers carved on my body. Emma sees the wet knife, silver and bone. The screams of my little sister shatter mirrors.

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

When you have known the kiss of a flaying knife, a laugh loses all its power to hurt you.

I don't know if it matters what country you're from, size of the city you're from, urban or rural, there are people that are hurting each other everywhere.

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

Before the old wound can be healed, there is fresh blood flowing.

The one who throws the stone forgets; the one who is hit remembers forever.

Every fight is like a different landscape of what you go through. But sometimes it's small injuries. Sometimes it's lessons you walk away with. Every fight is different but they all hurt, for sure.

There is too much hate in the world; too much hurt.

I got my teeth kicked in for a good 25 years.

You don't brag about putting someone in hospital. It's absolutely horrible.

When people repeatedly hit me, I would feel a sense of unfairness.

You know, I had gone to war.

It still hurts," she whispered. "Even when you're doing it for someone else, that doesn't stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist swelling, or your cuts from bleeding.

Abandonment doesn't have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It's like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body.

I ain't got time to bleed.

It occured to her that pleasure, no matter how deep, was a ghostly, ephemeral thing. Love might make the world go round, but she was convinced it ws the cries of the badly wounded andf deeply afflicted which spun the universe on the great glass pole of it's axis.

I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other.

Life was brutal and it made victims of everyone.’ (Nykyrian)

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

I was beaten down long ago in some alley in another world.

Who hasn't sharpened the edge of his soul? When, just as our eyes are opened, we see hate, and just after learning to walk, we are tripped, and just for wanting to love, we are hated, and for no more than touching, we are hurt, which of us hasn't started to arm himself, to make himself sharp, somehow, like a knife, to pay back the hurt?

You must hurt, or be hurt.