c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things
— Ann Brashares, The Last Summer
My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance--this is why people tell me secrets--my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound.
— Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?
— Boris Pasternak
The pain of the flesh is naught to that of the heart
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen
I fell for you and I fell hard. You bruised my knees and my heart to the point where I will do everything in my power never to fall for anyone again. It’s safer to stay on your feet. I would rather walk through life completely without love - empty
—  than crawl through what’s been pumping through my veins one more time.
Dominion does not mean domination. We hold dominion over animals only because of our powerful and ubiquitous intellect. Not because we are morally superior. Not because we have a "right" to exploit those who cannot defend themselves. Let us use our brain to move toward compassion and away from cruelty, to feel empathy rather than cold indifference, to feel animals' pain in our hearts.
— Marc Bekoff, Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect
There's a place beyond words where experience first occurs to which I always want to return. I suspect that whenever I articulate my thoughts or translate my impulses into words, I am betraying the real thoughts and impulses which remain hidden.
— Jerzy Kosiński, The Painted Bird
Pride helps us
—  and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.
I take my hand back, like a leaf letting go. It hurts too much to hang on. So why does it hurt so much to let go?
— Emily Murdoch, If You Find Me
The two of them looked so comfortable together it made Nico glad. But it also it caused an ache in his heart – a ghostly pain, like an old war wound throbbing in bad weather.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.
— Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
Some pain shouldn’t be wished away so easily. It had to be dealt with, even embraced. Without the agony of the last few months, Piper never would have found her best friends, Hazel and Annabeth. She never would’ve discovered her own courage. She certainly wouldn’t have had the guts to sing show tunes to the snake people under Athens.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory
— Christopher Hitchens, Mortality
Leaving would imply suitcases and empty drawers, and late birthday cards with ten-dollar bills stuffed inside.
— Julie Kagawa, The Iron King
It is when suffering finds a voice andsets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.
— H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
There is no shame in what you are feeling, Harry,' said Dumbledore's voice. 'On the contrary... the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now
— Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees
I know why we laugh. We laugh because it hurts, and it's the only thing to make it stop hurting.
— Robert A. Heinlein
If you can't feel anything, it doesn't mean it's not hurting.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
Hunger of choice is a painful luxury
—  hunger of necessity is terrifying torture.
I eventually came to understand that in harboring the anger, the bitterness and resentment towards those that had hurt me, I was giving the reins of control over to them. Forgiving was not about accepting their words and deeds. Forgiving was about letting go and moving on with my life. In doing so, I had finally set myself free.
— Isabel  Lopez, Isabel's Hand-Me-Down Dreams
We tend to forget at times that it is the little ones, the children, who do suffer the greatest hurt. If we cannot comprehend why certain sorrows are visited upon us, how on earth can they?
— Sharon Kay Penman, The Sunne in Splendour
Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
So if you love me, let me go.And run away before I know.My heart is just too dark to care.I can't destroy what isn't there.Deliver me into my fate -If I'm alone I cannot hateI don't deserve to have you...My smile was taken long agoIf I can change I hope I never know
— Slipknot, Slipknot: All Hope Is Gone
...you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help... And then finally, the way through grief is grieving.
— Jane Hamilton
Sometimes you can be touched by God, but not healed. Often when this happens, he is using your pain for a greater purpose.
— Shannon L. Alder
The trouble with a great sadness is that it doesn't fit inside your body.
— Manuel Rivas, Books Burn Badly
Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.
— Isaac Asimov, Robots and Empire
Farewell, my great one, my own, farewell, my pride, farewell, my swift, deep, dear river, how I loved your daylong splashing, how I loved to plunge into your cold waves.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
One day we took the children to see a goldsmith refine gold after the ancient manner of the East. He was sitting beside his little charcoal fire. ("He shall sit as a refiner"; the gold- or silversmith never leaves his crucible once it is on the fire.) In the red glow lay a common curved roof tile; another tile covered it like a lid. This was the crucible. In it was the medicine made of salt, tamarind fruit and burnt brick dust, and imbedded in it was the gold. The medicine does its appointed work on the gold, "then the fire eats it," and the goldsmith lifts the gold out with a pair of tongs, lets it cool, rubs it between his fingers, and if not satisfied puts it back again in fresh medicine. This time he blows the fire hotter than it was before, and each time he puts the gold into the crucible, the heat of the fire is increased; "it could not bear it so hot at first, but it can bear it now; what would have destroyed it then helps it now." "How do you know when the gold is purified?" we asked him, and he answered, "When I can see my face in it [the liquid gold in the crucible] then it is pure.
— Amy Carmichael, Gold Cord
1. You must let the pain visit.2. You must allow it teach you3. You must not allow it overstay.(Three routes to healing)
— Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada
Heart’s blood and bitter pain belong to love,And tales of problems no one can remove;Cupbearer, fill the bowl with blood, not wine -And if you lack the heart’s rich blood take mine.Love thrives on inextinguishable pain,Which tears the soul, then knits the threads again.A mote of love exceeds all bounds; it givesThe vital essence to whatever lives.But where love thrives, there pain is always found;Angels alone escape this weary round -They love without that savage agonyWhich is reserved for vexed humanity.
— فرید الدین عطار, The Conference of the Birds
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
— Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing thing. It had seeped into our marriage, that emptiness, into our laughs, and our love-making. And late at night, in the darkness of our room, I'd feel it rising from Soraya and setting between us. Sleeping between us. Like a newborn child. 
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
So instead of ignoring the pain, I called out to it, reaching for more. Pain is part of who I am. It’s the defining characteristic of a Shifter’s transformation. Pain is what I suffer from my enemies. It is what I deal out to those who break our laws. It is what I protect my charges from. Pain is what I inherited from fate, that fickle bitch who gave me a mouth and fists, then put me in a world that wanted only my womb and my cradled arms.
— Rachel Vincent, Alpha
We live in one of the few epochs of humanity where life isn't just a painful cycle of toil, fatigue, and collapse. Now pleasure gyrates us through those stages.
— Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic
Do you know what pain is, Cammie? It’s thebody’s physical response to imminent harm.It is the mind’s way of telling us to move ourhand off the stove or let go of the brokenglass.
— Ally Carter, Out of Sight, Out of Time
I wonder if anybody else feels this way, if anyone in here is as scared as I am. Are they as sad and angry and confused and ashamed? Is that even possible? Is it even possible for one building to hold all that pain?
— Amy Reed, Clean
The thing about hearts is that they always want to keep beating
— Elizabeth Scott, Living Dead Girl
A light which lives on what the flames devour,a grey landscape surrounding me with scorch,a crucifixion by a single wound,a sky and earth that darken by each hour,a sob of blood whose red ribbon adornsa lyre without a pulse, and oils the torch,a tide which stuns and strands me on the reef,a scorpion scrambling, stinging in my chest--this is the wreath of love, this bed of thornsis where I dream of you stealing my rest,haunting these sunken ribs cargoed with grief.I sought the peak of prudence, but I foundthe hemlock-brimming valley of your heart,and my own thirst for bitter truth an
— Federico García Lorca
But somebody else had spoken Snape’s name, quite softly.“Severus . . .”The sound frightened Harry beyond anything he had experienced all evening. For the first time, Dumbledore was pleading.Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there was revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face.“Severus . . . please . . .”Snape raised his wand and pointed it directly at Dumble
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
There is no ongoing spiritual life without this process of letting go. At the precise point where we refuse, growth stops. If we hold tightly to anything given to us, unwilling to let it go when the time comes to let it go or unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used, we stunt the growth of the soul. It is easy to make a mistake here, “If God gave it to me,” we say, “its mine. I can do what I want with it.” No. The truth is that it is ours to thank Him for and ours to offer back to Him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of – if we want to find our true selves, if we want real life, if our hearts are set on glory.
— Elisabeth Elliot
The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Anticipating pain was like enduring it twice. Why not anticipate pleasure instead?
— Robin Hobb, Renegade's Magic
Before you came,things were as they should be:the sky was the dead-end of sight,the road was just a road, wine merely wine.Now everything is like my heart,a color at the edge of blood:the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,and the black when you cover the earthwith the coal of dead fires.And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?The sky is a shirt wet with tears,the road a vein about to break,and the glass of wine a mirror in whichthe sky, the road, the world keep changing.Don’t leave now that you’re here—Stay. So the world may become like itself again:so the sky may be the sky,the road a road,and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.
— Faiz Ahmad Faiz, 100 Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz: 1911-1984
Exhaustion is temporary. Pain is temporary. But Helene dying because I didn't find a way to get her back on time—that's permanent.
— Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes
How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, oh, Father, What have you done with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here? Said louisa as she touched her heart.
— Charles Dickens, Hard Times
But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
If I had to wish for something, just one thing, it would be that Hannah would never see Tate the way I did. Never see Tate's beautiful, lush hair turn brittle, her skin sallow, her teeth ruined by anything she could get her hands on that would make her forget. That Hannah would never count how many men there were, or how vile humans can be to one another. That she would never see the moments in my life that were full of neglect, and fear, and revulsion, moments I can never go back to because I know they will slow me down for the rest of my life if I let myself remember them for one moment. Tate, who had kept Hannah alive that night, reading her the story of Jem Finch and Mrs. Dubose. And suddenly I know I have to go. But this time without being chased by the Brigadier, without experiencing the kindness of a postman from Yass, and without taking along a Cadet who will change the way I breath for the rest of my life.
— Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road
Learning to have patience and not forcing the relationship is part of the twin soul process. If you are trying to force your will onto the other person, chances are you’re not ready to really connect yourself. There should be no blame here - only deep and unconditional love. 
— Chimnese Davids, My Unrequited Love Letters
Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things.
— Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold
…the love we most cherish will, of necessity, bring us pain. Because that love is like the setting of a body with broken bones. But I want to stage the setting. I want to direct all scenes.
— Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
[T]he astonishing purity of pain, how it will not be mixed with any other sensation.
— Charles Baxter
I was right when I said I’d never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you can’t ever do anything else except look back.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.
— Alain de Botton, The Course of Love
It was the sheer variety of the pain that stopped me from crying out. It came from so many places, spoke so many languages, wore so many dazzling varieties of ethnic costume, that for a full fifteen seconds I could only hang my jaw in amazement.
— Hugh Laurie, The Gun Seller
Everyone understands the pain that accompanies death,but genuine pain doesn't live in the spirit,nor in the air, nor in our lives,nor on these terraces of billowing smoke.The genuine pain that keeps everything awakeis a tiny, infinite burnon the innocent eyes of other systems.
— Federico García Lorca
If you choose to be sad then you will be sad but there times you don't know why you're sad. Tears start flowing from your eyes.
— Ann Marie Aguilar
One fire burns out another's burning,One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.
— William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
It would be nice to think that as I've got older times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed. But there still seems to be an element of that evening in everything that happened to me since; all my other romantic stories seem to be a scrambled version of that first one. Of course, I have never had to take that long walk again, and my ears have not burned with quite the same fury, and I have never had to count the packs of cheap cigarettes in order to avoid mocking eyes and floods of tears... not really, not actually, not as such. It just feels that way, sometimes.
— Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
George!' [Horace] said, the relief evident in his voice. 'Are you all right?''No! I am not!' George replied with considerable spirit. 'I have a whacking great arrow stuck through my arm and it hurts like the very dickens! How could anybody be all right in those circumstances?'...'You saved my life, George,' Horace said gently...George grimaced. 'Well, if I'd known it was going to hurt like this, I wouldn't have! I would have just let them shoot you! Why do you live this way?' he demanded in a high-pitched voice. 'How can you bear it? This sort of thing is very, very painful. I always suspected that warriors are crazy. Now I know.
— John Flanagan, The Emperor of Nihon-Ja
Her essay about the wedding ring was short. Kerr wrote: "Things are just things - they have no power to hurt or to heal. Only people can do that. And we can all choose whether to be hurt or healed by the people who love us."That was all.And that was everything.
— Jack Canfield, Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II
Why can’t I be like that? Why can’t I be the father who just shrugs off the love of his daughter? Why can’t I be the Lead Inquisitor who enjoys watching his pleading victims burn at the stake? Why can’t I be the one who befriends a lonely, lost girl and then casts her out? Why can’t I be the one to strike first, to hit so early and with such fury that my enemies cower before they can ever think of turning on me? What is so great about being good?
— Marie Lu, The Rose Society
Our worst pain is confined within our own skin.
— Charles Frazier
at first I thought you were just using me" she said"I definitely am." I just wasn't sure for what."Asshole!" she said, and punched me in the side. And she laughed as my kidney began to hemorrhage.That's the beauty of honesty. Everyones so unused to hearing it they just assume you're kidding, and you get to feel very good and forthcoming without suffering any consequences except for traces of blood in your urine for the next day or two.
— Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories
Being a wizard gives you more power than most, but it doesn't change your heart. We're all human. We're all of us equally naked before the jaws of pain.
— Jim Butcher, White Night
You can't love your mother or father if you don't also have the capacity to grieve their deaths and, perhaps even more so, grieve parts of their lives.
— Glenn Beck, The 7: Seven Wonders That Will Change Your Life
Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.
— R.D. Laing
Sometimes she wished for someone she could tell about her problems, just to be able to say, ‘I’m in love with a man and I can’t have him.’ But that would only lead to questions she couldn’t answer, so she kept the secret and the pain inside, hoping someday she would no longer feel as if half of her were missing.
— Abigail Reynolds, The Man Who Loved Pride & Prejudice: A Modern Love Story with a Jane Austen Twist
How many memories can come through at once before they are just jumbled words and faces mixed together by years of pain?
— Rebecca Maizel, Infinite Days
I wonder if pain comes from surrendering or resisting?
— Donna Lynn Hope
Nothing stays the same it all gets crushed. It all gets broken. It all passes with time. Only the moment you're in has any meaning.""There are things that stand the test of time, there are things that last. Like love.""Love theres nothing more fragile or ephereal.Love is like fire on a rainy day: you've got tospend all your time protecting it, feeding it, tending it because if you don't it goes out.""There are some loves that last.""No, what lasts is the pain that comes after love.
— Guillaume Musso, Que serais-je sans toi?
Relief is a wonderful emotion, highly underrated. In fact, I prefer it to elation or joy. Relief lets the air out of the Tire of Pain.
— Adriana Trigiani, Rococo
Life is pain. We are all in pain, all the time.""There are other things this universe has to offer," says the creature, "Light, live, touch, sensation. The way you are all made of the same pieces; the same fragments of stardust and yet you are all so different.
— Amie Kaufman, This Shattered World
I wanted a drink. There were a hundred reasons why a man will want a drink, but I wanted one now for the most elementary reason of all. I didn't want to feel what I was feeling, and a voice within was telling me that I needed a drink, that I couldn't bear it without it.But that voice is a liar. You can always bear the pain. It'll hurt, it'll burn like acid in an open wound, but you can stand it. And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.
— Lawrence Block, Out on the Cutting Edge
I heard the silence pouring from them. The audience held themselves quiet, tense, and tight, as if the song had burned them worse than flame.Each person held their wounded selves closely, clutching their pain as if it were a precious thing.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
Our stresses, anxieties, pains, and problems arise because we do not see the world, others, or even ourselves as worthy of love. (9)
— Prem Prakash, The Yoga of Spiritual Devotion A Modern Translation of the Narada Bhakti Sutras
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.
— William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must havethe stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthlessfurnace of this world. To make injustice the onlymeasure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
— Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven
Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes, it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips, The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific faculties (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety, and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? I am no longer a young man; even if I chose to discard my celibacy I would surely have lost my stamina, re-erecting in half-hours where once it was minutes. And yet if youth were restored to me fully, and I engaged again in what was once my greatest delight – to be fellated at stool by nymphet with mouth still blood-heavy from the necessary precautions – what then? What if my supply of anodontic premenstruals were never-ending, what then? Surely, in time, I should sicken of it.“Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads on a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Do you think Messalina, in that competition of hers with a courtesan, knew pleasure as much on the first occasion as the last? Impossible.“Yet consider.“Consider pain.“Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death, we are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always.
— Jesus I. Aldapuerta, The Eyes: Emetic Fables from the Andalusian de Sade
everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death
— Thomas Bernhard
Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God is of a different nature altogether. It does not hate tragedy. It never denies reality. It stands in the very teeth of suffering. The love of God did not protect His own Son. The cross was the proof of His love – that He gave that Son, that He let Him go to Calvary’s cross, though “legions of angels” might have rescued Him. He will not necessarily protect us - not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.
— Elisabeth Elliot
Every pain is a lesson.
— Frank Delaney, The Matchmaker of Kenmare
See, guys freak out. They hit critical mass and blast nuclear, white-hot anger out over the world like walking flamethrowers. But girls freak in. They absorb the pain and bitterness and keep right on sponging it up until they drown.
— Laura Wiess, Leftovers
She seemed dressed in all of me, stretched across my shame.All the torment and the pain leaked through and covered me.I'd do anything to have her to myself.Just to have her for myselfNow I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do when she makes me sane.She is everything to me.The unrequited dreamA song that no one sings.The unattainable, Shes a myth that I have to believe inAll I need to make it real is one more reasonI don't know what to do, I don't know what to do when she makes me sad.
— Slipknot, Slipknot, Vol. 3
Sure it will hurt. But so what? Pain is just a state of mind. You can think your way out of anything, even pain.
— Rodman Philbrick, Freak the Mighty
If there is a single definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay. (48)
— Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
There are people who are destined to taste only the poison in things, for whom any surprise is a painful surprise and any experience a new occasion for torture. if someone were to say to me that such suffering has subjective reasons, related to the individual's particular makeup, i would then ask; is there an objective criterion for evaluating suffering? who can say with precision that my neighbor suffers more than i do or that jesus suffered more than all of us? there is no objective standard because suffering cannot be measured according to the external stimulation or local irritation of the organism, but only as it is felt and reflected in consciousness. alas, from this point of view, any hierarchy is out of the question. each person remains with his own suffering, which he believes absolute and unlimited. how much would we diminish our own personal suffering if we were to compare it to all the world's sufferings until now, to the most horrifying agonies and the most complicated tortures, the mostcruel deaths and the most painful betrayals, all the lepers, all those burned alive or starved to death? nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought that we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others. because in this organically insufficient and fragmentary world, the individual is set to live fully, wishing to make of his own existence an absolute.
— Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
Crying in the rain. No one sees your tears and your pain gets washed away.
— Elizabeth Bourgeret
Falling in love was as much about receiving as it was giving, was it? It seemed selfish. It was not, though. It was the opposite. Keeping oneself from being loved was to refuse the ultimate gift. He had thought himself done with romantic love. He had thought himself an incurable cynic. He was not, though.He was only someone whose heart and mind, and very soul, had been battered and bruised. It was still - and always - safe to give since there was a certain deal of control to be exerted over giving. Taking, or allowing oneself to receive, was an altogether more risky business. For receiving meant opening up the heart again.Perhaps to rejection.Or disillusionment.Or pain.Or even heart break.It was all terribly risky.And all terribly necessary.And of course, there was the whole issue of trust...
— Mary Balogh, At Last Comes Love
Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.
— Jeanette Winterson
Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.
— Joseph Addison
There was no doubt now in Ender's mind. There was no help for him. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no on ewould save him from it. Peter might be scum, but Peter had been right, always right; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters, the power to kill and destroy, because if you can't kill then you are always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will ever save you.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game
To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.
— Herman Melville, Bartleby
I was such a quiet kid, so shy and calm and in my own head. Of course I knew about being sad. Maybe that's the reason I saved all the things I thought were pretty.
— Nina LaCour, Hold Still
Grief, regret, pain, and of course anger. Another loss. And when you compare this one loss to the hundreds and maybe thousands that occur people stop thinking they matter. It does matter though. Every loss matters.
— Natalie Valdes, Pinky Promise?
...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.
— Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Self-discipline is often disguised as short-term pain, which often leads to long-term gains. The mistake many of us make is the need and want for short-term gains (immediate gratification), which often leads to long-term pain.
— Charles F. Glassman, Brain Drain   The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life
There are parts of a woman’s heart that are reserved for certain types of love. Experiencing the love of a father figure in an appropriate way is essential in paving the way for the love of a man to be experienced in the right way.The love of a father is vital in ensuring that a woman’s heart is kept open in this area. If this area is not kept open, it produces problems later on in a woman’s life, for that area is also reserved for the romantic love that comes in the form of a marriage relationship. This is an extremely sensitive area of the heart for a woman, and has plenty of opportunity to be easily bruised. When that does occur, she will put up a protective barrier to try and avoid any such pain occurring again. If this barrier isn’t dismantled fairly soon, a woman’s heart becomes accustomed to its protective barrier, and the heart shielded inside gradually becomes hardened. As women, we may be able to function like this for awhile. But there will come a time in your life where God will begin to peel away those hard layers surrounding your heart, and you probably won’t like that sensation. But you have to fight your natural instinct to run away.This is where many Christian women may get stuck. They view every man through the lens of what their father was to them, or what he was not. Their perception of men is shaded, and often damaged, by the very people who should have been modeling the world of adult relationships to their daughters. As a result, their judgement is often clouded, and women find themselves settling for less than what they truly deserve. Many marriages, even Christian marriages, have been damaged and even terminated because one or both partners refused to sit down and deal with their past issues.
— Corallie Buchanan, Watch Out! Godly Women on the Loose
Sometimes it lasts in love, But sometimes it hurts instead
— Adele Adkins
Nobody would commit suicide if the pain of being inside herself, the agony of the sleepless, tortured hours spent watching the world get smaller and uglier, were bearable or could be relieved by other people telling her how they wanted her to feel. A depressed person is selfish because her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic serial killer can forget about the person who comes in to torture her everyday. Her body is brutalized by her mind. It hurts to breathe, eat, walk, think. The gross maneuverings of her limbs are so overwhelming, so wearying, that the fine muscle movements or quickness of wit necessary to write, to actually say something, are completely out of the question.
— Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl
What if my greatest disappointments, or the aching of this life, is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can't satisfy?
— Laura Story
She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up into the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke silently on the people below- As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us
— Khaled Hosseini
I can't stop shaking. I need you. I want you. I can't let myself have you.
— Kelli Maine, Taken
And then a throb hits you on the left ide of the head so hard that your head bobs to the right...There's no way that came from inside your head, you think. That's no metaphysical crisis. God just punched you in the face.
— Andrew Levy, A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine Diary
And even if Amina didn't yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.
— Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing
Nix still held Benny's hand, and her grip tightened to an almost crushing force, grinding his hand bones together. It hurt, but Benny would rather have cut that hand off than take it back at that moment. If it would help Nix through this, he'd give her a pair of pliers and a vise so she could do a proper job.
— Jonathan Maberry, Dust & Decay
The look he gave her made her turn away for a moment. Sometimes you couldn’t look too closely at another person’s pain.
— Michelle Sagara West, Silence
That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt...
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
...when I look at my arms, I don't think revolutionary. I think sad, and pain, but not revolutionary.
— Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces
you shoulda known the entirety of the trap, a**hole,love means eventual painvictory means eventual defeatgrace means eventual slovenliness,there's no wayout...you see, youunderstand?
— Charles Bukowski, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck
Crying defies scientific explanation. Tears are only meant to lubricate the eyes. There is no real reason for tear glands to overproduce tears at the behest of emotion.
— Veronica Roth, Insurgent
It’s common to reject or punish yourself when you’ve been rejected by others. When you experience disappointment from the way your family or others treat you, that’s the time to take special care of yourself. What are you doing to nurture yourself? What are you doing to protect yourself? Find a healthy way to express your pain.
— Christina Enevoldsen
Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.~Ken Chlouber, Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100 mile race
— Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
She was battered and beaten up, and not smiling this time. Liesel could see it on her face. Blood leaked from her nose and licked at her lips. Her eyes had blackened. Cuts had opened up and a series of wounds were rising to the surface of her skin. All from the words. From Liesel's words.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
When the power of the shift rips the human body apart and transforms it into its new shape, there lives a second, less than a second, a mere shimmer of time when the mind is without a home, no body to call its own. Existence is painless in there, nothing but formlessness beyond understanding. A secret place, it contains nothing but the essence of self, a lost self. In the fire of pain, Colton found a whisper of that place, its ghost, its echo, and from that echo he withdrew a thread of deepest black.
— Finn Marlowe, A Thread of Deepest Black
Silent is the ruined land.Man is brutaland the rain does not wash awaythe painor rid the distant memory.It makes it glisten.
— Cecil Castellucci, Boy Proof
If you never love you never hurtIf you never hurt you've never lived.Love in life and embrace all the pains that come with it. 
— Sophia Nam
It’s hardly ever that I am hurt by something in only one dimension.
— Ashly Lorenzana
I didn't feel physically sick. But mentally. My mind was twisting in so many ways. (...) We once saw a documentary on migraines. One of the men interviewed used to fall on his knees and bang his head against the floor, over and over during attacks. This diverted the pain from deep inside his brain, where he couldn't reach it, to a pain outside that he had control over.
— Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
Then your tail will divide and shrink until it becomes what the people on earth call a pair of shapely legs. But it will hurt; it will feel as if a sharp sword slashed through you. Everyone who sees you will say that you are the most graceful human being they have ever laid eyes on, for you will keep your gliding movement and no dancer will be able to tread as lightly as you. But every step you take will feel as if you were treading upon knife blades so sharp that blood must flow. I am willing to help you, but are you willing to suffer all this?""Yes," the little mermaid said in a trembling voice, as she thought of the Prince and of gaining a human soul.
— Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid
Almost every day I can feel myself suffering mainly in the head, I can explain the pain to myself but knowing it comes from an inflammation of my imagination doesn't prevent it being reality itself. What's more I'd be crazy not to go crazy. We don't know what an illness is. On awful hurts we plaster little old words, as if we could think hell with a paper bandage.
— Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream
The bad part is life continues. The good part is that the pain goes away.
— Mary Balogh, The Devil's Web
It was nostalgic in that painful way nostalgia could be
— Kristen Ashley, For You
Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness.
— Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence
Come t'e' picciol fallo amaro morso! Dante. What grievous pain a little fault doth give thee!
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
Your pain could be God prying open your life and heart to remove a gift of His that you've been holding on to more dearly than Him.
— Tullian Tchividjian, Jesus + Nothing = Everything
Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them...go around them...take evasive action.
— Geraldine McCaughrean
I am no theologian, and do not have the answers to these questions, and one of the reasons I enjoy the animals on the farm so much is that they don't think about their pain, or question it, they accept it and endure it, true stoics. I have never heard a donkey or cow whine (although I guess dogs do). I told my friend this: pain, like joy, is a gift. It challenges us, tests, defines us, causes us to grow, empathize, and also, to appreciate its absence. If nothing else, it sharpens the experience of joy. The minute something happens to me that causes pain, I start wondering how I can respond to it, what I can learn from it, what it has taught me or shown me about myself. This doesn't make it hurt any less, but it puts it, for me, on a more manageable level. I don't know if there is a God, or if he causes me or anybody else to hurt, or if he could stop pain. I try to accept it and live beyond it. I think the animals have taught me that. The Problem of Pain is that it exists, and is ubiquitous. The Challenge of Pain is how we respond to it.
— Jon Katz
Tears sprang from her eyes and she bit her lip to stop herself from howling at the bright pain.
— Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path
I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out ofexistence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.
— H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".
— Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot
You’ve no idea the restraint I’ve created. A word, which in a past life, never held special meaning for me, flows now through the blood of my veins as if to remind me it was always there. Like you, always there. You said I was not strong. So I created strength to fight against these natural feelings which keep me tied to you. I drew a line in the sand so I would not step towards your door again. I have boundaries, strength and pride. What I do not have is you. And that is the only part I wanted. You’ve no idea the restraint I’ve created. You’ve no idea the bold wall I’ve built to keep me out of your compromising arms.
— Coco J. Ginger
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.Much of your pain is self-chosen.It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
He is broken in three ways, sometimes four. I count them.-He believes himself to be human, but is not actually. At least not anymore. This is similar to the way he believes himself to be alive.-He has a grim affinity for drugs. This comes with no caveat and no parentheses. This is just a fact of life.-He is doggedly unhappy and once decided to kill himself. Sadly, he has not really stopped.-On certain occasions when these first three things have ceased to be bad enough, he loves me. The other sins are commonplace, forgivable under a big enough umbrella. This fourth is irrevocable. Unconscionable. In a word, it is utterly damning.
— Brenna Yovanoff
Healing is more about accepting the pain and finding a way to peacefully co-exist with it. In the sea of life, pain is a tide that will ebb and weave, continually.We need to learn how to let it wash over us, without drowning in it. Our life doesn't have to end where the pain begins, but rather, it is where we start to mend.
— Jaeda DeWalt
He left her. She was dissatisfied with him. He had preferred to incur her anger rather than cause her pain. He had kept all the pain for himself.
— Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Hold on to the thought that no emotion lasts forever, no matter how wonderful or how terrible the emotion may be. The tears may last a little longer than you would like, but it will get better. I promise.
— Osayi Emokpae Lasisi, Because You Deserve Love
Tender," she said again. "Tender is kind and gentle. It's also sore, like the skin around an injury.
— Brenna Yovanoff, The Space Between
The brittle bones beneath my chest cracked, piercing my heart. It was you who breathed new life into my lungs and it was you who would later syphon the life you had given so as to feed your selfish desires
— Sonya Watson, The Tide Breaker
Of four infernal rivers that disgorge/ Into the burning Lake their baleful streams;/Abhorred Styx the flood of deadly hate,/Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep;/Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud/ Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon/ Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage./ Far off from these a slow and silent stream,/ Lethe the River of Oblivion rolls/ Her wat'ry Labyrinth whereof who drinks,/ Forthwith his former state and being forgets,/ Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
It is good to be taught humility when we are young. If we do not exeperience pain as children, we will cause pain as adults.
— Darren Shan, Birth of a Killer
Pleasure, I remind myself, is inseparable from its lawfully wedded mate, pain.
— T.C. Boyle, A Friend of the Earth
Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
— Tom Hodgkinson, The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste
But why all these questions?Because I'm in love and I'm afraid of suffering.Don't be afraid, the only way to avoid that suffering would be to refuse to love.
— Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
I tried cutting myself to express my heartbreak over Tommy (Lord Flood) rejecting me, but OMFG it hurts like flaming fuck.
— Christopher Moore, Bite Me
Ever hurt so bad you want to scream ... or scream so much it hurts.
— kav