“I don’t care what you do to me, but I don’t want you to hurt me. I’ve had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.”— Haruki Murakami, amazon.com
“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, amazon.com
“It’s easy for someone to joke about scars if they’ve never been cut.”— William Shakespeare, amazon.com
“Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.”— George R. R. Martin, amazon.com
“I don’t think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.”— Arthur Golden, amazon.com
“I still feel that poetry is not medicine — it’s an X-ray. It helps you see the wound and understand it.”— Dunya Mikhail, npr.org
“Sometimes suffering is just suffering. It doesn’t make you stronger. It doesn’t build character. It only hurts.”— Kate Jacobs, amazon.com
“It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then.”— Stephen King, amazon.com
“I didn’t know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I’d cry for a week.”— Sylvia Plath, amazon.com
“The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.”— Charles Dickens, amazon.com
“I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.”— Henry Rollins, great-quotes.com
“Sorrow is how we learn to love. Your heart isn’t breaking. It hurts because it’s getting larger. The larger it gets, the more love it holds.”— Rita Mae Brown, amazon.com
“Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you.”— Donna Tartt, amazon.com
“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”— Audre Lorde, amazon.com