Painful Quotes - Page 38

• Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.

  Milan Kundera

  Sacrifice, Broken, Today

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• If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.

  Karen Armstrong

  Art, Our World, Self

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• What seems nasty, painful, evil can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.

  Henry Miller

  Acceptance, Evil, Joy

  Henry Miller (1959). “The Henry Miller Reader”, p.356, New Directions Publishing

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• Living was a dangerous past-time, and often quite painful—but there was also such joy in living, such beauty, things that one would otherwise never see, never experience, never know. The risk of pain and loss was a part of living.

  Jim Butcher

  Pain, Loss, Past

  Jim Butcher (2008). “Captain's Fury”, p.313, Penguin

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• She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.

  Edna O'Brien

  Love Is, Two, People

  Edna O'Brien (2011). “Saints and Sinners”, p.137, Faber & Faber

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• Love hurts. There is nothing as painful as heartbreak. But in order to learn to love again you must learn to trust again.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Hurt, Order, Trusting Again

  Nicholas Sparks (2013). “Safe Haven”, Hachette UK

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• Dying makes everyone weaker, subject to painful insight, and not always insight into any kind of special truth - it's just the approaching end that makes people want to believe they are seeing something in the line of a great revelation.

  Jeff Lindsay

  Believe, People, Special

  Jeff Lindsay (2009). “Dexter by Design”, p.109, Hachette UK

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• Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, may be the thing that keeps you going, but that it's dangerous, that it's painful and risky, that it's making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?

  Patrick Ness

  Winning, World, May

  Patrick Ness (2008). “The Knife of Never Letting Go”, Candlewick Press (MA)

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• To wait. In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions all together occupy a bare one percent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine percent is just living in waiting. I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness. Empty. Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.

  Osamu Dazai

  Reality, Ninety Nine, Expectations

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• What if she stepped on a needle and it went right into her foot and Roberta would not feel it and the needle would rise and rise and rise through the veins leading up to the heart and then the needle would STAB HER IN THE HEART and Roberta would DIE and it would be VERY PAINFUL this according to nurse mother a medical expert on Freaky Ways to Croak... The mother shouted that she knew several people who died from the Rising Stab of the Unfelt Needle or RSUN she has seen cases of it many times and not ONE PERSON HAS SURVIVED IT.

  Lynda Barry

  Mother, Heart, Feet

  Lynda Barry (2001). “Cruddy: A Novel”, p.9, Simon and Schuster

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• the thing about pessimism is that in most cases it's nothing more than a front behind which a body can hide its most sweetful yet painful hopes. please forgive mine.

  Eric Clapton

  Forgiving, Body, Pessimism

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• We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function , day in, day out. Immune to others’ pain and loss.

  Neil Gaiman

  Pain, Loss, Order

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• This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  Translation of the Zeit Online interview, www.thehowlingfantods.com. January 26, 2007.

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• I had always turned to books, to knowledge, to help me get through everything in my life—and, sometimes, to escape it. But grief was a journey through a forest of razor blades. I walked through every painful inch of it—no shortcuts and no anesthesia.

  Michele Bardsley

  Grief, Book, Journey

  Michele Bardsley (2007). “Don't Talk Back To Your Vampire”, p.99, Penguin

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• When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity.

  Graham Greene

  Love, Loyalty, Understanding

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• she glanced down and saw that a glove of blood covered her lower arm from the elbow to the wrist. The arm was throbbing, stiff, and painful. "Is this when you start tearing strips off your T-shirt to bind up my wound?" she joked. She hated the sight of blood, especially her own. "If you wanted me to rip my clothes off, you should have just asked." He dug into his pocket and brought out his stele. "It would have been a lot less painful.

  Cassandra Clare

  Rip, Clothes, Sight

  Cassandra Clare (2011). “Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instrument Series (4 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass; City of Fallen Angels”, p.173, Simon and Schuster

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• Happy moments, PRAISE GOD Difficult moments, SEEK GOD Quiet moments, WORSHIP GOD Painful moments, TRUST GOD Every moment, THANK GOD

  Rick Warren

  Inspirational, Quiet Moments, Thank God

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• Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Soul, Feelings, Mind

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1988). “Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus: With Supplementary Essays and Poems from the Twentieth Century”, p.76, Orchises Press

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• Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

  Adrienne Rich

  Two, Giving, Energy

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• I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.

  Haruki Murakami

  Running, Book, Reading

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• She nodded, but Tiny was still holding her arm, and he asked uncertainly, "Are you sure you want to do this, Beau? It sounds painful." "Not as painful as the turn," she said solemnly. "And I'd go through this and a lot more to keep you as my life mate.

  Lynsay Sands

  Sound, Want, Arms

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• Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.

  Stendhal

  Careers, Divine, Vulgar

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• The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Hope, Hurt, Regret

  Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (1996). “Book of Disquietude”, Carcanet Press Limited

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• I slept peacefully that night, feeling exultant and determined. Little did I know that I was making the most common and the most painful mistake women have made all throughout the ages: to naively think that with their love they can change the man they love.

  Elif Safak

  Mistake, Night, Men

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• Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.

  Isaac Asimov

  Life, Nursing, Moved On

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