Physical Agony Quotes

The problem with my shoulders was something I inherited from my dad. The left one would pop out and then pop back in - absolute agony - during almost every game last season, so I had surgery to put it right last summer.

Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself.

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

Hunger is the worst of diseases, the body the greatest of pains; if one knows this truly, that is Nirv?na, the highest happiness.

Consider, children ... the pain of touching the tip of your finger to your mother's stove, even for a fraction of a second. That is an experience which most of you have suffered. Now try to imagine that pain, not simply on a fingertip but spread over the whole surface of your body, and not for a mere second, but everlastingly. That, children, is hellfire.

I was feeling miserable physically, in a lot of pain to the point where it was almost crippling me, especially creatively. I decided to take that and use it as an inspiration for getting out of bed and making something again.

Gripping my arm, Mother held it in the orange-blue flame. My skin seemed to explode from the heat.

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor or pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

It hurts and hurts to have him this close. I feel sick with it.

Could anything less than the fire of a civil war with all its violence and vicissitudes - a war that nearly rent the great American Republic - have welded the states, not only into a Union of independent units, but into a Nation, in spite of all the ethnic differences that characterized its component parts? That so fundamental a revolution, involving such far-reaching changes in the structure of society, can be achieved through the ordinary processes of diplomacy and education seems highly improbable. We have but to turn our gaze to humanity's blood-stained history to realize that nothing short of intense mental as well as physical agony has been able to precipitate those epoch-making changes that constitute the greatest landmarks in the history of human civilization.

I got Osgood-Schlatter disease in my knees because my bones were growing quicker than my muscles, and it's hard to get out on the training pitch; then, afterwards, you're in agony every single time you play football.

It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.

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.

The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence. Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we are still alive.

We're all of us equally naked before the jaws of pain.

For every moment of triumph, there is an unequal and opposite feeling of despair. Take that iconic photograph of Muhammad Ali standing triumphantly over the prostrate, semiconscious wreckage of Sonny Liston. Great photo. Now think of Liston. Do the pleasure/pain calculus.

When a man is on the verge of passing out from pain, it seemed wrong to notice how beautiful he was.

A comic should suffer as much over a single line as a man with a hernia would in picking up a heavy barbell.

Suffering, violent suffering, seems to be something that corresponds with something that we experience.