Pain

"As an undergraduate student in psychology, I was taught that multiple personalities were a very rare and bizarre disorder. That is all that I was taught on ... It soon became apparent that what I had been taught was simply not true. Not only was I meeting people with multiplicity; these individuals entering my life were normal human beings with much to offer. They were simply people who had endured more than their share of pain in this life and were struggling to make sense of it."

"..various people had long had the feeling that gain through pain was nature's way"

"How hard it is to now believe that these strong, merciless chains of fear and hopelessness, rendering the limbs of my mind motionless, were once innocuous mere threads.” -Mehul. M"

"There's nothing like a little physical pain to keep your mind off your emotional problems."

"The moment we refuse to hurt others because of our own pain, is the time we evolve as souls."

"Pain is always a fanged serpent, but to the fearful it has a hundred heads."

"Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better."

"After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it."

"People rarely ventured outside the realm of their own hurts. They believed their own suffering was obvious to all, but might as well have been wearing blinders for all that they noticed anyone else's."

"A society coming apart at top and bottom, or passing over into another form, contains just as many possibilities for revelation as a society running along smoothly in its own rut. The individual is thrust out of the sheltered nest that society has provided. He can no longer hide his nakedness by the old disguises. he learns how much of what he has taken for granted was by its own nature neither eternal nor necessary but thoroughly temporal and contingent. He learns that the solitude of the self is an irreducible dimension of human life no matter how completely that self had seemed to be contained in its social milieu. In the end, he sees each man as solitary and unsheltered before his own death. Admittedly, these are painful truths, but the most basic things are always learned with pain, since our inertia and complacent love of comfort prevent us from learning them until they are forced upon us. It appears that man is willing to learn about himself only after some disaster; after war, economic crisis, and political upheaval have taught him how flimsy is that human world in which he thought himself so securely grounded. What he learns has always been there, lying concealed beneath the surface of even the best-functioning societies; it is no less true for having come out of a period of chaos and disaster. But so long as man does not have to face up to such a truth, he will not do so."

"If she's in pain now she doesn't show it; she just closes her eyes and surrenders, and that is worse than her screaming for help, somehow."

"But I know that for every good thing that comes along, there is always a cost."

"A thief is one who insists on sharing his victimhood."

"But I had to think to myself that this was normal, because that was the attitude. I was 19 when I went to see my doctor and I was told it was all in the mind.[Author Hilary Mantel on being told her endometriosis was imagined pain, From Oct 2009 Daily Mail interview]"

"Souraya thought those days that she knew so many songs about the misery of love because pain kept love within the boundaries of time, and knowable, whereas what she was experiencing passed beyond the horizon of birth and death; it was like the eternal life the prophets spoke of. A gesture, a kiss, a task, a sentence had a golden elemental endlessness, like the scenes in the murals painted in the island houses."

"One moment of true happiness was worth all the moments of pain. (Jessica)"

"Perfect love, like perfect partner does not exist. We create our own perfect love. If you care to know, a a good partner is like a construction engineer. To build the kind of house he want, he must pick the material that best suits his needs and maybe his wallet too."

"Funny how much we all suffer trying to spare others a bit of pain."

"I am told many children block out the memory of trauma. In fact, the healing process can only truly begin when we are willing to remember."

"Sometimes I hesitate to use the term sexual abuse. It conjures up worst-case scenarios in our minds, and we think, "That will never happen to my kids." And we never begin the conversation regarding sexual abuse with our children. But one violation left in secret can cause significant pain."