Pain

"Can I possibly be a good writer if I'm not healed form the story I'm telling? Will I be able to go deep enough if people find out the truth?"

"The thing about pain, whether physical or emotional, is there's no running away. You can't escape it and you can't hide from it. Not by ignoring it, not by drugging it, not by doing a swan dive into a bottle. Sooner or later you'll have to take a breath, let the pain rush in and get to the other side like your life depends on it. Because it does."

"When someone is force to realize that the road he'd been working hard to make progress on was no different from the place he'd started, and when he realized that he had in fact gone backward, all that person can do is face the pale sky and lament."

"It was amazing how many colors there were, all running into the gutter in a stream: a dozen shades of blue, twenty different reds, and all that black soot, like a nightmare given form, the insides of a heart, destroyed so easily, done away with before anyone could stop the damage, or salvage what was lost, or even try to save him."

"Pain, or pleasure. I could not tell where one ended and the other began."

"the gravity of wound to fist"

"In the absence of any therapy, the mentally ill of the 20th century were chained, shackled, straitjacketed, kept nude, electrocuted, half-frozen, parboiled, violently hosed, wrapped in wet canvas, confined to “mummy bags”, subjected to insulin-induced hypoglycemic comas, forced into seizures with massive doses of the stimulant Metrazol, injected with camphor, drugged into three-week comas with barbiturates and tranquilizers, involuntarily sterilized, and surgically mutilated. Rape by hospital staff was common, as was humiliation and verbal abuse. One reporter noted that a state hospital patient had been restrained for so long that his skin was beginning to grow around the leather straps."

"Hiding my pain and acting strong, afraid to cry and show my tears, I struggle with all this years later."

"Children who are victimized through sexual abuse often begin to develop deeply held tenets that shape their sense of self: 'My worth is my sexuality. I'm dirty and shameful. I have no right to my own physical boundaries.' That shapes their ideas about the world around them: 'No one will believe me. Telling the truth results in bad consequences. People can't be trusted.' It doesn't take long for children to being to act in accordance with these belief systems. For girls who have experienced incest, sexual abuse, or rape, the boundaries between love, sex, and pain become blurred. Secrets are normal, and shame is a constant."

"I went closer this time and touched him. He let out a deafening shriek, as if something had pierced into his heart. I held his hand and sat there, admiring the intricate network of life on them. The creases and folds in his body were testament to the cruelty that he had been subjected to in this world. The watery eyes screamed of the pain, the agonising wait to leave this godforsaken place forever, that had given him nothing but pleadings for mercy."

"Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain."

"Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless."

"I tried desperately to put my thoughts into the forms of prayers, but I didn't know how. If God was real, I figured He was powerful enough to know what I wanted without me actually saying the right words."

"The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors."

"Strongest pain often gives the deepest pleasure."

"No one wants to get hurt but without pain how can we win?"

"Would you agree," he said, "that man's sole duty is to produce as much pleasure as possible"Only if the pleasure produced is equivalent to the diminution of pain." My father crossed his arms. "And only if one man's pleasure is as important as any other's."

"The double consequence of artifice--to project sentience out onto the made world and in turn to make sentience itself into a complex living artifact--is thus fractured, neatly fractured, into two separable consequences, one of which (projection) belongs to one group of people, and the other of which (reciprocation) belongs to another group of people, and this shattering of the original integrity of projection-reciprocation into a double location has its most sustained registration in the texture of analysis that alternates between an almost sensuous rendering of the inner desire and movements of capital (the large Artifact) on the one hand and an almost arithmetic recording of amplified human embodinedness on the other. Though the interior value of capital is projected there through the collective labor of the workers, it now (by becoming internally self-referential, and when once more externally referential, referring to a much smaller group of people whom it now disembodies and exempts from the process of production) standas apart from and against its own inventors."

"No baby, you didn't hurt me. You wrecked me. Know the difference."

"He walked out the door and with each step my heart breaks. He'd be gone for days with long silences between each breath. I know I'm his one of many and he knows he's my one of one. The only one who holds him down. Yet, he still leaves. He walks through the door and with each step my heart leaps. He crumbles to the ground in tears telling me he's sorry. He says he needs me and he's nothing without me. How can he be so attached and detached at the same time?I swear, this man loves to see me in pain."