Pain Quotes - Page 221

When we speak of being vulnerable, it suggests being especially vulnerable to pain. People for whom personal dignity and self-sufficiency are everything, do all they can to shut it out. Noli mi tangere. They are well aware that any intimate relationship has pain in it, forces a special kind of awareness, is costly, and so they try to keep themselves unencumbered by shutting pain out as far as it is possible to do so.

The more our bodies fail us, the more naked and more demanding is the spirit, the more open and loving we can become if we are not afraid of what we are and of what we feel. I am not a phoenix yet, but here among the ashes, it may be that the pain is chiefly that of new wings trying to push through.

I see that a lot in my own life and in the lives of others.Does the presence of pain mean the absence of God?

If we think that this life is all there is to life, then there is no interpretation of our problems, our pain, not even of our privileges. But everything changes when we open up to the possibility that God's story is really our story too.

Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!

Pain destroys the illusions of false, that is, elitist pleasures. It burns from the inside out. It, therefore, sensitizes us to what is truly beautiful in life.

Facing the darkness, admitting the pain, allowing the pain to be pain, is never easy. This is why courage - big-heartedness - is the most essential virtue on the spiritual journey. But if we fail to let pain be pain - and our entire patriarchal culture refuses to let this happen - then pain will haunt us in nightmarish ways. We will become pain's victims instead of the healers we might become.

The most painful thing for me is to be misunderstood.

When I'm painting outdoors, I only have time to think about what I'm saying, not how I'm saying it.

Talking high philosophy often confuses people, but a look from an egoless person can lift the clouds of pain and despair.

Many pains are imaginary, but all joys are real.

For some Chicago expats, food is the medicine that blunts the pain of separation.

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.

A society person who is enthusiastic about modern painting or Truman Capote is already half a traitor to his class. It is middle-class people who, quite mistakenly, imagine that a lively pursuit of the latest in reading and painting will advance their status in the world.

"Take my own father! You know what he said in his last moments? On his deathbed, he defied me to name a man who had enjoyed a better life. In spite of the dreadful pain, his face radiated happiness," said Mother, nodding her head comfortably. "Happiness drives out pain, as fire burns out fire."

For any addict, when you get sober, life becomes more challenging, in some ways, because all of your problems become very clear and you have to deal with your pain. You can't just drink and forget about it and pretend it doesn't exist. You have to actually face it, head on.

The bad part is life continues. The good part is that the pain goes away.

The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.

Once when we were fifteen, River (Phoenix) and I went out for this fancy dinner in Manhattan and I ordered soft-shell crabs. He left the restaurant and walked around on Park Avenue, crying. I went out and said, "I love you so much. Why?" He had such a pain that I was eating an animal, that he hadn't impressed on me what was right. I loved him for that. For his dramatic desire that we share every belief, that I be with him all the way

Fix-it jackals can't wait to fix it, because they don't know how to enjoy pain. And until you learn how to enjoy pain, you can't enjoy intimacy.

I have had an inordinate and painful concern for the audience in my writing career.

Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet's wailing, a wind's warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.

Can it be possible that the painters make John the Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an Irishman in Dublin?

Therein lies the defect of revenge: it's all in the anticipation; the thing itself is a pain, not a pleasure; at least the pain is the biggest end of it.

I liked painting, very early on, even more than drawing. I used poster paint on posterboard. I would copy images that I liked from magazines and books and combine them to make a "collage" kind of painting. In some ways, this is similar to how I work today.