Karen Armstrong Quotes

We're all damaged somehow."-A Great and Terrible Beauty

What hurts us is what heals us.

I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt but I was wrong.

I spent half my life being hurt. The leftovers of hurt are an automatic gesture, like a dog that salivates.

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

I got stuff that's going to hurt for the rest of my life.

I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.

I feel hurt and pain times a million, all the time.

When I'm in pain and grief and despair, my throat is clenched and my heart hurts.

Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths

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

You must hurt, or be hurt.

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

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.

And the pain is too much it's too much it's too much and my hands are on my head and I'm rearing back and my mouth is open in a never-ending wordless wail of all the blackness that's inside me. And i fall back into it.

Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.

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

The silence was killing me. And that's all there ever was. Silence. It was all I knew. Keep quiet. Pretend nothing had happened, that nothing was wrong. And look how well that was turning out.

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.

Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.

At least it was instant. At least there wasn't any pain." I knew he was only trying to help, but he didn't get it. There was pain. A dul endless pain in my gut that wouldn't go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving.

Explanations don't comfort. You won't feel better if you know why. It won't hurt any less.

The first cut is the deepest.