Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

My spirits rose as I went deeper; into the forest; but I could not regain my former elasticity of mind. I found cheerfulness to be like life itself - not to be created by any argument. Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of pain fill thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill. So, better and worse, I went on, till I came to a little clearing in the forest.

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

Pain is a byproduct of life. That’s the truth. Life sometimes sucks. That’s true for everyone. But if you don’t face the pain and the suck, you don’t ever get the other things either. Laughter. Joy. Love. Pain passes, but those things are worth fighting for. Worth dying for.

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

You're never given more pain than you can handle. You never, ever get more than you can take.

it is not tears but determination that makes pain bearable.

Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that's how I work.

Pain is no evil, unless it conquers us.

The punches that don't knock you out are the ones you feel the most.

The fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength

We can endure much more than we think we can; all human experience testifies to that. All we need to do is learn not to be afraid of pain. Grit your teeth and let it hurt. Don't deny it, don't be overwhelmed by it. It will not last forever. One day, the pain will be gone and you will still be there.

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.

I think I was as mentally tough as I've ever been. I felt like I handled the situation both on and off the court extremely well. I felt like I needed to.

we do not die of anguish, we live on. We continue to suffer. We drink the cup drop by drop.

You feel your strength in the experience of pain.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain but for the heart to conquer it.

Some people give their problems swimming lessons instead of drowning them.

Dark clouds may hang on me sometimes, but I'll work it out.

More than most, I know the pain of surviving.

People can live through hardship, but from hard feelings they perish.

I understand there are inevitable things that we have to go through: heartbreak, family problems. I don't feel like some Quixotic idiot who says, 'We don't have to feel pain.' No! Let's feel it, let's make it work for ourselves. But I want us all to be able to get past it.

One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

He puts the killing thing in his mouth but doesn't give it the power to kill him.

Use pain as a stepping stone, not a camp ground.

Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly.