Howard Barker Quotes

The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?

I'm attracted to pathos, because life is mostly pathos. I've had a lot of it in my life.

The disasters of war can be infinitely eerie and poignant.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

What then is tragedy? In the Elizabethan period it was assumed that a play ending in death was a tragedy, but in recent years we have come to understand that to live on is sometimes far more tragic than death.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

The horror of a death without dignity has so much implications for the people who are left behind.

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

War violates the order of nature and causes parents to bury their children.

I think that no human gets away unscathed in this old life. We've all experienced loss and grief and pain and tragedy.

That's why I'm never happy. Every tragedy, I really feel very painful - especially about a child or old people. This is reality. We try to close eyes and ears, but it's happening every second, and somehow, unfortunately, I feel a connection.

The sad fact is that horrendous human conflict is nothing new.

God does not waste an ounce of our pain or a drop of our tears; suffering doesn't come our way for no reason, and He seems especially efficient at using what we endure to mold our character. If we are malleable, He takes our bumps and bruises and shapes them into something beautiful.

There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth.

I think life is perverse. It can be beautiful, but it won't.

Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court? He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow.

The tragedy of our lives is that, while we suffer from the wounds afflicted on us by those who love us, we cannot avoid wounding those we want to love.

Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.

But the most wretched thing, is it not-is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.

Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep, To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub.

The envious pine at others' success; no greater punishment than envy was devised by Sicilian tyrants.