The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.
To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.
Great paines quickly find ease.
The problem is, when I talk about heartbreak or whatever, people want to melt it down to some break-up of a relationship, but it's not about that. If you're a sensitive person, just stepping outside can be heartbreaking.
The waves of pain that had only lapped at me before now reared high up and washed over my head, pulling me under. I did not resurface.
They tore out my heart and stomped that sucker flat.
For most people, spiritual awakening is a gradual process. Rarely does it happen all at once. When it does, though, it is usually brought about by intense suffering.
Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.
How cruel my suffering is,—no one is more talkative than I am!
I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.
I will tear this folly from my heart, though every fibre bleed as I rend it away!
He could feel it immediately when his shoulder snapped - the intense pain of his bones cracking. His skin tightened, as if it could no long hold whatever was lurking inside him. The breath was sucked from his lungs like he was being crushed. His vision began to blur, and he had the sensation he was falling, even though he could feel the rock tearing at his flesh as his body seized on the ground.
It hurts and hurts to have him this close. I feel sick with it.
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.
The moment something happens to one you love, it's twenty times more intense. You experience pain and enlightenment on a much vaster scale.
Pain seared through me again-a hot, burning stab in my gut-and yet my body found strength I didn't know I had, correcting as I fell.
There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him; he changed his mind, and went to the oars.
Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.
Scorching my seared heart with a pain, not hell shall make me fear again.
There is a pain so utter, it swallows being up; The covers the abyss with a trance So memory can step around, across, upon it.
Strictly speaking, there is but one real evil: I mean acute pain. All other complaints are so considerably diminished by time that it is plain the grief is owing to our passion, since the sensation of it vanishes when that is over.
You know, your sarcasm isn’t appreciated right now. I’ve been drugged, beaten, nearly raped, saved, drugged again, hijacked, and now threatened by you. Tell me, what else should I look forward to? Torture, or just a good maiming? (Kiara)
Suffering, violent suffering, seems to be something that corresponds with something that we experience.
Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.
