Lois Lowry Quotes

I speak to people who have been through so much more.

The pain of powerlessness is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the earth school, and everyone shares it.

I have much to say about the pain I've felt and seen inside of prison. It has been an eye-opening and harrowing experience.

I've been through worst, seen worst.

You know, I had gone to war.

Pain obliterates everything else. In pain, there is only the eternal present.

Those things that hurt, instruct.

Experience is valuable only when it has brought suffering and when the suffering has left its mark upon both body and mind.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.

He who suffers, remembers.

The burned hand teaches best.

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.

The reward of pain is experience.

We learn from the things we suffer.

All my brothers, my brothers-in-law, they're always telling me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain.

To be alive at all is to have scars.

We are never ripe till we have been made so by suffering.

Now you see how you are, the wisdom mixed in with all the scars.

Some hours weigh against a whole lifetime.

Been to hell and back, I can show you vouchers.

You've lived through a lot of wars, I said. "Yes." Do they ever make more sense? "No.

If we shake hands with icy fingers, it is because we have burnt them so horribly before.

Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I’m feeling now. Its so bad, its useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.