Pain

"Love happens only once, what happens after that is just compromise; with your heart and with your life..."

"Once fallen in true love, a person can't really fall out of it, no matter what. How much ever you try to hate your better half, you'll end up falling more instead. Some part of him will always reside in your heart."

"He loves me so he hurts me To try and make me good. It doesn't work. I'm just too bad And don't do what I should. My memory has so many different sections and, like all survivors, there are so many compartments with so many triggers. I'll remember a smell which reminds me of a man which reminds me of a place which reminds me of another man who I think was with a woman who had a certain smell — and I'm back to square one. This is the case for most survivors, I believe. When we try to put together our pasts, the triggers are many and varied, the memories are disjointed — and why wouldn't they be? We were children. Even someone with an idyllic childhood who is only trying to remember the lovely things which happened to them will scratch their head and wonder who gave them that doll and was it for Christmas or their third birthday? Did they have a party when they were four or five? When did they go on a plane for the first time? You see, even happy memories are hard to piece together — so imagine how hard it is to collate all of the trauma, to pull together all of the things I've been trying to push away for so many years."

"Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity."

"the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings"

"You grieve at first. And then slowly, with the yawning of the years, the disappeared gets scraped from your memory, the way your flesh can be peeled from your limbs. It's very harsh and extremely painful. But it gets done, square inch-by-square inch. Until, the skin that is your memory gets completely scarred and numbed. You live. The disappeared is detached from the dermis of remembering. And that is what is known as moving on."

"The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock."

"God always provides a pleasant memory to help ease the pain of a bad experience."

"Wounds may heal, but the scars remain."

"Dance your pain, sing your sorrows, because there is nothing else tomorrow."

"Change comes with pain... But this pain later becomes a gain. To explain it well, "no pain, no gain"! Endure the pain and make a difference!"

"When you complain, you explain pain for no gain. Endure and balance yourself through the pain, be hopeful and persist to the end."

"Keeping the door that leads to your heart ajar is destructive as univited guests would move in and trample on your feelings, leaving you in great pains, but closing it always is a sure way to spot out the destructive and innovative guests."

"Love your neighbor... and in doing so, do it as you love yourself! Take up the loads that will cause your neighbor a neck pain; don't put a heavy cross over his/her neck!"

"What their scorned, over-fucked mothers never teach them is this: men can be hurt, too."

"...men are much softer than women, more sentimental. They cry at the movies and pretend not to. The male of the species is weak. He doesn’t tolerate pain well."

"He's such a drag He's not insane It's just that everybody Has to feel his pain."

"He had made his decision. Later in life Ann would learn that when certain men made decisions no matter how much it might torture them afterwards they would stick with their decision. Men, she learned, would rather suffer than change their minds or their habits. They could develop elaborate systems for containing pain, sometimes so successful they would remain completely unaware of the vastness of the pain they possessed."

"I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences."

"...the older I get, the more I believe that if love is to be judged by most of its visible effects, it looks more like hatred than friendship."