Confronting Pain Quotes

How do you talk about the Holocaust? How do you talk about slavery? Probably the best thing to do is just be quiet and hide from it, forget about it. Except, then it jumps up and bites you. Because it's there.

Some pain shouldn’t be wished away so easily. It has to be dealt with, even embraced.

I myself have always found that if I examine something, it's less scary. I grew up in the West, and we always had this theory that if you saw - if you kept the snake in your eye line, the snake wasn't going to bite you. And that's kind of the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.

But just because you bury something, that doesn't mean it stops existing. Those feelings, they'd been there all along. All that time. I had to face it.

If you bury the pain deep down it will stay with you indefinitely, but if you open yourself to it, experience it, and deal with it head-on, you'll find it begins to move on after a while.

Sometimes we have to face the things that hurt us most. Maybe you won’t heal till you do. You haven’t yet.” They both knew that was true. “You can’t move ahead until you bury the past.

The best therapy is actually the more aggressive kind when they break you open; they unleash you.

Look, pain is there in the world, and there's catharsis through that. I feel like there's... a rapture, if we can get through it, if we can confront things.

In order to do anything about the suffering of the world we must have the strength to face it without turning away.

We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.

We shouldn’t come up with a pseudo-spiritual excuse for turning away from the pain of the world.