Quotes about Pain

I wish I didn't have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I'm not impressed, I'm disgusted...You wanted to make damn good and sure I'd never be able to turn over in bed again without feeling that body beside me, not there but tangible, like a leg that's been cut off. Gone but the place still hurts.

But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep.

Me, it's the heart: that's the part lacking. I used to want one: a dainty cushion of red silk dangling from a blood ribbon, fit for sticking pins in. But I've changed my mind. Hearts hurt. — Margaret Atwood, from "The Tin Woodwoman Gets a Massage ," Dearly: New Poems (Ecco, 2020)

But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.

Messy love is better than none, I guess. I'm no authority on sane living. Which is all true and no hep at all, because this form of love is like the pain of childbirth: so intense it's hard to remember afterwards, or what kind of screams and grimaces it pushed you into.

But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.

Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droolings of the flesh, these are signs, these are the things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil. It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

If it hurts and you feel sick and it's making you ugly, take this, from HelthWyzer; if you're ugly and it hurts and you feel sick about it, take that, from AnooYoo.

The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold onto.

I've cut myself off. I can feel the place where I used o be attached. It's raw, as when you grate your finger. It's a shredded mess of images. It hurts. But where exactly on me is this torn-off stem? Now here, now there. Meanwhile the other girl, the one with the memory, is coming nearer and nearer. She's catching up to me, trailing behind her, like red smoke, the rope we share.

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes; when you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That's relativity.