Unavoidable Suffering Quotes

During these times there was a pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated …. For it did not come in a part of the world nor upon certain men, nor did it confine itself to any season of the year, so that from such circumstances it might be possible to find subtle explanations of a cause, but it embraced the entire world, and blighted the lives of all men, though differing from one another in the most marked degree, respecting neither sex nor age.

Suffering is a corrective to point out a lesson which by other means we have failed to grasp, and never can it be eradicated until that lesson is learnt.

No campaign of the First World War better justifies the poets' view of the conflict as futile and pitiless than Gallipoli.

The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants.

... the inexorable lesson of centuries: suffering must be borne; there is no way out.

Coming to terms with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee is like being told you have Stage 1 or Stage 2 cancer. You know you'll probably survive, but one way or the other, there's going to be a lot of throwing up.

We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life.

It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.

Sometimes my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run from this. It waits for you. Even when you think you have escaped it, it is there.

When you have kids, you never think of burying your own child.

Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches

There are going to be situations where people are going to go without assistance. That's just the facts of life.

I think every soft child in the world gets damaged. All of of us come into the world and get damaged. It's just a matter of how much.

Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering... since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.

I tend to foster drama via bleakness. If I want the reader to feel sympathy for a character, I cleave the character in half, on his birthday. And then it starts raining. And he's made of sugar.

The first cut is the deepest.

It's not natural to outlive your child. This has always been my greatest fear.

A great hope gets crushed every time someone reminds us that happiness can be neither assumed nor earned; that we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains; that the ultimate aloneness in each of us is, finally, inviolable.

life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness.

Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.

Cancer doesn't care if you have suffered before.

I wasn't prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn't just sadness, and it wasn't linear. Somehow I'd thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better - like getting over the flu. That's not how it was.

Long for me as I for you, forgetting, what will be inevitable, the long black aftermath of pain.