Pain

"Pain is pain... Just because one person's problem is less traumatic than another's doesn't mean they're required to hurt less."

"Now he understood. After a while, pain simply stopped. It was as though your mind was able to create a firewall beyond which it would not let you venture. You had to have a break from your anguish, or you'd go crazy. It was the psychological equivalent to fainting when physical pain became overbearing."

"I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think—no, you will realize—that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying."

"...when the pain subsides the grief remains."

"But it turns out Joy is a house built from the same bricks as Sorrow. Pleasure is a poem, and it uses the same words as Pain."

"Not many people understood the inherent pain of a career in heroics. Your body aches from the demands of day-to-day protection. Your mind whirs with the things you did wrong, the ways you could’ve done better, the scores of citizens you didn’t save. And when you lose someone you love, when their blood forms a puddle beneath your cheek while you watch… Your name, Watcher, becomes the cruelest agony of all."

"She was brave from excess of grief"

"She knew nothing of the massacre that went on around her, but when she released the wail of a broken hearted mother, one man heard her. The one who took her son's life."

"Don't mire up in self despair of your losses, learn from them and move on to other good things in life. Don't stop allowing the sunshine in because of the fear that winter will come and engulf the warmth. Hold it close to you to help you through those cold winter days."

"Shine in any season of your life!Head on with confidence in your life’s pilgrim!In deep faith, countless hope and unconditional love blessed by the Almighty. Newness of each rising day, bringing forth colourful sunsets. Enkindle your soul once more with courage, joy and love,flowing in a river of awakening & sharing:with a heart who once knew that hurt, pain, loss…means to SHINE!"

"At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms. But then we never did. Oh, for the countless things one fails to do!"

"What I would give right now, to feel nothing."

"The only way past the pain is through it. Pain, grief, anger, misery...they don't go away--they just increase and compound and get worse. You have to live through them, acknowledge them. You have to give your pain its due."

"You don't have to tell me everything right away, but I have to tell you everything right away? Can't you see how stupid that is?"

"I loved her in spite of myself. I loved her immeasurably. Infinitely. And I feared that love as much as I feared my own fury at theworld."

"At the edge you will always remember me, at the edge you will last be remembered, where sanity and insanity come together, for the time, then separates. Like leaves on October trees, that color the world, but for a moment, then leave. At the edge, where life losses its edginess, and thoughts we will become one, someday. At the edge the sun drops, the ring falls, and senses of raindrops climb upwards to the gray sky."

"This you have to understand. There's only one way to hurt a man who's lost everything. Give him back something broken."

"Like Mom, Zoe thought–like Mom used to. And that’s where they differed, for Zoe wrote quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions. It’s not even good poetry, she thought. I don’t have talent, it’s her. I should be the one ill; she has so much to offer, so much life. “You’re a dark one,” her mother said sometimes with amused wonder. “You’re a mystery."

"Fear manifested itself as a physical presence that seemed to dominate the public sphere. Time almost stopped. Even without confirmation I could sense that something had gone terribly wrong."

"This book is written in a barren period of loss with an attempt to move forward towards substance."