Painful Reality Quotes

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.

If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one.

This was not a fearie tale. This was not the movies. This was life. It hurt more. It was excruciating. It was excruciatingly beautiful.

The truth is what hurts

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

It's better to have the faith to embrace reality with all its pain than to cling to the false comfort of a painless fantasy.

Some things are too terrible to be true.

In this new place we've found, sometimes there aren't words, because the truth can be even more difficult than the lies.

We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.

Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

My life's dream has been a perpetual nightmare.

I don't need drugs. Life is already tragic enough.

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.

To hear my mother say, 'Michael is dead,' to feel and hear the tone in her voice to say her child is dead, is nothing that anyone can ever imagine.

Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

Certainly we're always rooting for our particular contingent moment to be a great one. Pain-free. But the more expansive vision has to include the idea that, even for us, sometimes our particular contingent moment is going to be horrific.

Imagination doesn’t just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful. Head teachers would call this escapism, but they would be entirely wrong. I would call fantasy the most serious, and the most useful, branch of writing there is. And this is why I don’t, and never would, write Real Books.

We do not rest satisfied with the present.... So imprudent we are that we wander in the times which are not ours and do not thinkof the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists. For the present is generally painful to us.

For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private; it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

We are slow to believe that which if believed would hurt our feelings.

When a parent dies, the whole house of cards comes down.

The truth hurts sometimes, particularly when it involves someone at a low point in their life.

So often we have this image of what drug addiction looks like, and it's not fun. Our loved ones who go down that path are in pain.