“My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it. Sometimes more than I can handle. And it’s not just mine. Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they’re too busy with their own. The beautiful ones. The popular ones. The guys that pick on you. Everyone. If you co…”— Joss Whedon, tvtropes.org
“It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.”— Anne Carson, amazon.com
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”— James Baldwin, amazon.com
“I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?”— Laurie Halse Anderson, amazon.com
“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? …Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”— John Steinbeck, amazon.com
“Memories are bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces.”— Richard Kadrey, amazon.com
“And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain.”— Vladimir Nabokov, amazon.com
“I’m numb and I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.”— Ray Bradbury, amazon.com
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”— John Keats, amazon.com
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.”— Louise Erdrich, amazon.com
“2 November. This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com
“I hate them for not being in pain like me, hate them for being able to enjoy themselves. Hate myself for feeling that way.”— Chevy Stevens, amazon.com
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”— Zora Neale Hurston, amazon.com
“It’s hard to trust, when your hearts been broken times before. You pull the curtains and you lock the doors, swear you’ll never go out anymore.”— Matthew Perryman Jones, play.spotify.com
“I experience not only my own suffering, but even more that which I inflict upon you.”— Franz Kafka, amazon.com