Jay Asher Quotes

Hence when a person is in great pain, the cause of which he cannot remove, he sets his teeth firmly together, or bites some substance between them with great vehemence, as another mode of violent exertion to produce a temporary relief. Thus we have the proverb where no help can be has in pain, 'to grin and abide;' and the tortures of hell are said to be attended with 'gnashing of teeth.'Describing a suggestion of the origin of the grin in the present form of a proverb, 'to grin and bear it.'

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.

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?

I'm not going to stop torturing myself till I figure out the cause of my pain.

Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care... -Wintergirls

I realize now I didn't really want to die. I just wanted to stop the hurt and pain.

When we have emotional pain in our lives, we are going to seek to relieve that pain in some way.

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 (any pain--emotional, physical, mental) has a message. The information it has about our life can be remarkably specific, but it usually falls into one of two categories: We would be more alive if we did more of this and Life would be more lovely if we did less of that. Once we get the pain's message, and follow its advice, the pain goes away.

Isn't the fear of pain next brother to pain itself?

Pain - physical, emotional and spiritual pain - is more than just a condition that needs to be silenced, numbed or "fixed." Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it. When we don't listen, our understanding of the world gets more and more distorted, and we become capable of doing things we very often regret.

How many young hearts have revealed the fact that what they had been trained to imagine, the highest earthly felicity, was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.

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.

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.

Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.

There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain.

Maybe that's what Hell is. You go mad. And all your demons come and get you just as fast as you can think them up.

I thought that jealousy was an idea. It isn't. It's a pain. But I didn't feel as they do in a Broadway melodrama. I didn't want to kill anybody. I just wanted to die.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)

Pain of mind is worse than pain of body.

There is no doubt that sorrow brings one down in the world. The aristocratic privilege of silence belongs, you soon find out, to only the happy state- or, at least, to the state when pain keeps within bounds.

Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.

There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow endless drizzle.