Anne Bishop Quotes

What right had they to make me suffer like that?

This howling mouth, this head which rolls back and tries to escape.

It hurts, it hurts... Im dying, I'm dying.

They promptly tore his fingernails out and he started telling things.

Nobody knows the pain I've been through.

This is painful and it will be for a long time.

Pain was a fascinating horror

Into the silence rips a sound that makes me let go of Max's hand and cover my ears. It is like the strafe of a bullet, nails on a chalkboard, promises being broken. It's a note I have never heard - this chord of pure pain - and it takes a moment to realize it is coming from me.

For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.

Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.

Whatever had happened to him [Newt] out there — maybe even related to his lingering ankle injury — had been truly awful.

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

I was seeing everything through pain.

I've seen the slip a few times. I don't have to watch something like that to go through the pain again and again and again.

He sobbed in desperation at the burden of fear he carried with him every day of his life.

What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.

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.

Now it is nothing but torture.

And when pain bites, men bargain. Boys too. We twist and turn, we plead and beg, we offer our tormentors what he wants so that the hurting will stop. And when there is no torturer to placate, no hooded man with hot irons and tongs, just a burn you can't escape, we bargain with God, or ourselves, depending on the size of our egos.

It was the closest to purgatory that I've ever experienced while I've been living.

So great was the extremity of his pain and anguish, that he did not only sigh but roar.

But I'm very thankful that no one is slamming my head against the wall anymore.

I've seen the hell these people go through.

The crimes in my books are committed by people who can't keep it together any more. They do something to express their own pain, and that has a terrible effect on somebody else.