John Steinbeck Quotes

Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.

Now it is nothing but torture.

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

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

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.

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

...This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed. Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died--like parents and marriages--kept hurting forever.

Phychical pain is more easily borne than physical; and if I had my choice between a bad conscience and a bad tooth, I should choose the former.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

To touch a sore is to renew one's grief.

There's some things I can't write about, just terrible personal tragedies.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure

It’s all torture.

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

Nobody knows the pain I've been through.

It's never easy to watch. It's never great to see your friend or teammate put himself through hell.

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.

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

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

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

After each dream, Frankie woke with a start, soaked in tears. But she found no relief in the peaceful silence of her room, because there everything was real. And the guilt was too immense to bear. Each time she opened her eyes, she'd quickly shut them. And wish that she had woken up for the very last time.

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

You believe you could not live with the pain. Such pain is not lived with. It is only endured. I am sorry.

The pain was so deep and so raw. There were days I would have died just to forget. The problem was, I couldn't figure out how to get her out of my mind. How do you kill that kind of pain?