Quotes & Sayings About Illness And Pain

All of us must do our best to live gracefully in the present moment. I now see depression as akin to being tied to a chair with restraints on my wrists. It took me a long time to realize that I only magnify my distress by struggling for freedom. My pain diminished when I gave up trying to escape completely from it. However, don't interpret my current approach to depression as utterly fatalistic. I do whatever I can to dull depression's pain, while premising my life on its continuing presence. The theologian and philosopher Thomas Moore puts it well with his distinction between cure and care. While cure implies the eradication of trouble, care "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. — David A. Karp

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. — William Styron

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word! — Milan Kundera

Writing a novel is like having a terrible illness. Every time you feel as if you are recovering, you have to start a new chapter, get over the setbacks endured by your heroine (you feel her pain) and set her up for more suffering. Conflict is the oil of fiction and in a romance, someone always needs a cuddle. — Chloe Thurlow

I wanted some assurances that my life would never again be torn apart like that, that I would never again suffer the pain of watching my loved one destroyed by his own hand. And with that one telephone message I realized, in a brutal, final way that so long as I was with Flynn I would never be protected from the horror of suicide. That he would always be capable of stopping his medication, always be capable of lying to cover his illness, always be capable of swallowing forty pills and lying down beside his girlfriend to die. — Tabitha Suzuma

I once saw many flowers blooming
Upon my way, in indolence
I scorned to pick them in my going
And passed in proud indifference.
Now, when my grave is dug, they taunt me;
Now, when I'm sick to death in pain,
In mocking torment still they haunt me,
Those fragrant blooms of my disdain. — Heinrich Heine

Many call it the 1000 yard stare and can't realize the pain when PTSD takes us there — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Manipulating or controlling others through the use of one's illness or suffering,for example,was-and remains-extremely effective for people who find they cannot be direct in their interactions,Who argues with someone who is in pain? And if pain is the only power a person has,health is not an attractive replacement. It was apparent to me that becoming healthy represented more than just getting over an illness. Health represented a complex progression into a state of personal empowerment in which one had to move from a condition of vulnerability to one of invincibility,from victim to victor,from silent bystander to aggressive defender of personal boundaries. Completing this race to the finish was a yeoman's task if ever there was one.Indeed,in opening the psyche and soul to the healing process,we had expanded the journey of wellness into one of personal transformation.
- — Caroline Myss

Why do they call it a 'mental' illness? The pain isn't just in my head; it's everywhere, but mainly at my throat and in my heart. Perhaps my heart is broken. — Sally Brampton

I've grown up with an ethic, call it a part, that insists I hide my pain at all costs. As I talk, I feel this pain leaking out - not just the core symptom of BPD, but all the years of being blamed or ignored for my condition, and all the years I've blamed others for how I am. It's the pain of being told I was too needy even as could never get the help I needed. — Kiera Van Gelder

It never occurred to them that God may have provided the world with a vast array of very brainy medical types for the very reason of solving problems such as theirs. However, there is one thing that the medical profession cannot do and that is save people from being idiots. — Craig Ferguson

Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child's wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness, but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded. — Alice Miller

It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life.
[Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview] — Hilary Mantel

The refreshing pleasure from the first view of nature, after the pain of illness, and the confinement of a sick-chamber, is above the conceptions, as well as the descriptions, of those in health. — Ann Radcliffe

I don't blame anyone and I wouldn't change anything, but if you had told me - if you had warned me there would be so many periods of pain and isolation - I'm not sure what I would have done differently. Shut up? Yelled louder? Worried less or, alternately, more, like a person with an illness that may kill her but it's unclear when? — Lena Dunham

An interesting way to practice dying is by opening to illness. Each time you get a cold or the flu use it as an opportunity to soften around the unpleasant and investigate how resistance turns pain into suffering, the unpleasant into the unbearable. Notice how discomfort attracts grief. Watch the shadows gather in the aching body. Hear them mutter in complaint and self-pity. — Stephen Levine

Take any emotion - love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions - if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them - you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. "But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, 'All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment'. — Mitch Albom

You need to challenge your fear of life becoming unreasonable - because it is already unreasonable. In truth, your life has never been reasonable, it's just that you keep hoping tomorrow will be different and that you will find a way to bring more control into your world. Recognize that life will always be full of challenges and crisis. The wise way is not to attempt to find one path that promises you will never have to endure the pain of loss and illness, but instead to learn how to endure and transcend when unreasonable events come your way. Learning to defy gravity in your world - to think, perceive, and act at the mystical level of consciousness - is the greatest gift you can give yourself, because it is the gift of truth. And as we are bound to learn again and again in this life, the truth does indeed set us free. — Caroline Myss

It didn't occur to me that I never named my own mystery illness the spring before (except to misdiagnose it to friends as mono), because I'd been afraid to admit, even to my mother, how much I'd wanted to lie down somewhere and hide. Black women, tall and strong as cypress trees, didn't pull that. Pain and shame and cowardice and fear had to be kept secret. — Lorene Cary

It isn't discomfort, or dis-ease as he put it. It's this aching, throbbing, god-awful incurable pain - and it's known as life. When will the doctors learn: It isn't death that's the disease. — Wendy Law-Yone

You cannot make yourself have a flashback, nor will you have one unless you are emotionally ready to remember something. Once remembered, the memory can help you to face more of the truth. You can then express your pent-up feelings about the memory and continue on your path to recovery. Think of the flashback as a clue to the next piece of work. No matter how painful, try to view it as a positive indication that you are now ready and willing to remember. — Beverly Engel

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. — Deborah Bray Haddock

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness — Lene Andersen

Just Imagine. No illness. Ever. No pain. No aging or frailty of any kind. No loss or grief or tears. And obviously no more dying, not even if the stars shattered into motes and the moon disintegrated like a corpse beneath the sea. — Toni Morrison

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey. — Marcel Proust

Because whatever has happened to humanity, whatever is currently happening to humanity, it is happening to all of us. No matter how hidden the cruelty, no matter how far off the screams of pain and terror, we live in one world. We are one people. My illness proved that. As well as my understanding that Generose's lost daughter belongs to all of us. It is up to all of us to find her; it is up to us to do our best to make her whole again. There is only one daughter, one father, one mother, one son, one aunt or uncle, one dog, one cat, donkey, monkey, or goat in the universe, after all: the one right in front of you. — Alice Walker

It has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience. — William Styron

Our dogs relieve chronic pain, lift our spirits, sniff out cancer, detect impending heart attacks, seizures and migraines, lower our blood pressure and cholesterol levels, help us recover from devastating illness, and even improve our children's IQ, as well as lowering their risk for adult allergies and asthma. Just think - the unconditional love, limitless affection and to-die-for loyalty of a well-chosen, well-trained, well-cared-for dog could be just what the doctor ordered! — Jack Canfield

Crisis is what suppressed pain looks like; it always comes to the surface. It shakes you into reflection and healing. — Bryant McGill

The tattoo artist inflicts pain and I take it. With each breath I count to one again. Each inhale, each exhale, time passes in the smallest of pieces, and pieces still smaller than those.
This is how you count a life. This is how you go through it. Each second of hurt is a second that's already passed, one you never have to go through again. I have counted in pieces that small, when walking from the bed to the fridge seemed an insurmountable goal. I have counted my breaths, my steps, my eye-blinks, my hiccups, the tiny pulse in my thumb. And when I started getting tattooed, two of the things I used to need were gone: to write on myself, and to find irrelevant things to count. A second of intense pain is the most profound thing you can live through. And another, and another, and another, and then you know what it is to feel, and to struggle through that feeling one small agonizing increment at a time, and if you know that, you know what it is to live with mental illness. — Stacy Pershall

Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didn't like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing. The one thing we don't want to do is to ignore or rupture the essential connections that can complete relevant feedback loops and restore self-regulation and balance. Our real challenge when we have symptoms is to see if we can listen to their message and really hear them and take them to heart, that is, make the connection fully. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

I convinced myself it was all going to be better than okay once I left him. I had at one time loved him with my whole heart. I'd spent the last year overcoming pain, regret, illness, and tried to rediscover myself as I dated men who weren't good for me just to prove to him that I could. In retrospect, I hadn't wanted, nor needed, any men - I simply hadn't realized it. I mindlessly thought I wasn't alright if I didn't have someone. It had hurt my pride that he'd moved on so quickly. — Alesa Teague

Age, mental illness, and failure are all in the mind.

They put the pain there to let you know it hurts. — David Holmes

According to Islam, whenever we are struck by illness or misfortune or someone hurts us, there is a higher purpose behind it, which we may not understand at the time,' one of them said to me. 'That's where trust comes in. Through suffering, God helps us to better ourselves and make good our mistakes. It is a form of purification and also God's way of testing the strength of our faith and the goodness of our character.' Another lady suggested I look on the bright side.

'Suffering draws us closer to God and that is our aim in life,' she said. Then she quoted Rumi who had said, 'It is pain that draws man to his Lord, because when he is well, he doesn't remember the Lord.' I tried to look at the positive and believe that there was a higher, spiritual perspective on what I had just been through, and all the advice I was given helped me a lot. But it took quite a while for my heart to catch up with my mind. — Kristiane Backer

Pain and illness, the deaths of those one loves, and discomforts and disappointments mar the happy norm, but they do not alter the fact that happiness is the norm, nor affect the tendency of the continuum to restore it, to heal it, after any disturbance. — Jean Liedloff

What I failed to see was that, by ending my life, I would cause interminable pain to my family and friends. I could not understand the heartbreak it would cause those around me. Nor did I consider that my brother, Joseph, might live the rest of his life in continual rage, or that my sister, Libby, might shut herself off from the world and fall into perpetual depression, silence, and sadness mistakenly blaming themselves for my death as many family members do when they lose someone they love to suicide. I certainly held no understanding of the enormous pain my mother and father would suffer because they lost their oldest son in such a terrifying and devastating way. They would not have a chance to watch me mature, marry, and perhaps have children. Instead, all of their hopes, aspirations, and dreams for me would be destroyed with my decision to end my life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. — Kevin Hines

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain. — Christopher Hitchens

Mental illness

People assume you aren't sick
unless they see the sickness on your skin
like scars forming a map of all the ways you're hurting.

My heart is a prison of Have you tried?s
Have you tried exercising? Have you tried eating better?
Have you tried not being sad, not being sick?
Have you tried being more like me?
Have you tried shutting up?

Yes, I have tried. Yes, I am still trying,
and yes, I am still sick.

Sometimes monsters are invisible, and
sometimes demons attack you from the inside.
Just because you cannot see the claws and the teeth
does not mean they aren't ripping through me.
Pain does not need to be seen to be felt.

Telling me there is no problem
won't solve the problem.

This is not how miracles are born.
This is not how sickness works. — Emm Roy

Those that have lost their lives to suicide were good people, who were in deep, deep pain. Keep speaking about mental illness and keep it out of the darkness. — Mariel Hemingway

Recently God asked me the same question in a new way, "And if I don't allow you to heal, if I never remove the pain, will you still trust Me? — Cindee Snider Re

The very fact that they were naturally caring and loving would be the milestone that weighed them down. The formula is perfect. The nurse becomes willing to sacrifice herself in the patient. But the patient isn't suffering from an external illness, he's suffering from self-inflicted wounds. The nurse wants to prevent him from this pain. The patient wants her to feel the pain, too. — Anonymous

So whenever any kind of disaster strikes, or something goes seriously "wrong" - illness, disability, loss of home or fortune or of a socially defined identity, breakup of a close relationship, death or suffering of a loved one, or your own impending death - know that there is another side to it, that you are just one step away from something incredible: a complete alchemical transmutation of the base metal of pain and suffering into gold. That one step is called surrender. — Eckhart Tolle

But I am beginning to understand about the dignity and the art of wigs and the makeup. This small, everyday attentiveness of eyebrow pencils is perhaps a picture of the very sort of bodily care our embodied God would have us cultivate, weather in illness or wellness, whether our bodies are in the throes of ecstasy or the throes of pain. — Lauren F. Winner

At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it. — Diane Setterfield

Green consumerism generally, and 'healthy' products and lifestyles in particular, contain quite precise notions about how an individual should consider his or her well-being. Not only is the market-place celebrated but an understanding of the 'natural body' itself becomes fetishised and idolised. Normality seems to have wholly dispensed with bodily illness and pain. Perfection is the norm, and one that can be gained through acquiring the correct products and perfecting the body. — Peter Dickens

It seemed that the pain of their physical illness at times was less than the misery of their poverty ridden existence, the unending wait in the queues and the feeling of hopelessness and abandonment by your own system was enough to rob them of their will power to fight any disease. — Madhu Vajpayee

The 2ams have held my hopes all these years as I calm my nerves down for there would only be three more hours for the world to wake up to my screams and wails of excruciating pain.
Probably the drug store would open if I wait for three more hours then.
8am and the doc would prescribe me a few medicines over whatsapp.
I would make three cups of tea by then. I would quiet my mouth as it would bite on my arm.
By twelve I would finally be relieved as the meds would work.
But it's only midnight now... wish you another goodnight's sleep.... — Sanhita Baruah

I couldn't trust my own emotions. Which emotional reactions were justified, if any? And which ones were tainted by the mental illness of BPD? I found myself fiercely guarding and limiting my emotional reactions, chastising myself for possible distortions and motivations. People who had known me years ago would barely recognize me now. I had become quiet and withdrawn in social settings, no longer the life of the party. After all, how could I know if my boisterous humor were spontaneous or just a borderline desire to be the center of attention? I could no longer trust any of my heart felt beliefs and opinions on politics, religion, or life. The debate queen had withered. I found myself looking at every single side of an issue unable to come to any conclusions for fear they might be tainted. My lifelong ability to be assertive had turned into a constant state of passivity. — Rachel Reiland

It is painful for the plant which is myself to live in the atmosphere and light of this world. Somewhere an element is lacking which would permit me to continue. — Osamu Dazai

Chronic illness is hard. Pain is hard. Isolation is hard. The financial cost is hard. Grieving is hard and necessary and sometimes takes far longer than we every imagined. — Cindee Snider Re

" ... The large majority of those infectious microbes that cause us so much illness and pain are ANAEROBIC ... a big word that means they live and proliferate best in environments where there is LITTLE OR NO OXYGEN." — Ed McCabe

True health begins with your thoughts. Thinking about comfort, strength, flexibility and youthfulness attracts those qualities into your life and body. Dwelling on illness, fear, disease and pain does just the opposite. Your work is to notice and change your thoughts and move them in the direction of health and happiness. — Christiane Northrup

We need this help from the outside because we don't know how to to do this for ourselves. We start with a deep deficit - a chasm really - when it comes to understanding and being tolerant of ourselves, and that's even before we go forth to do battle with the rest of the world. As soon as someone judges, criticizes, dismisses, or ignores, the cycle of pain and reactivity ramps up, compounded by shame, remorse, and rejection. The act of validation, simply saying, 'I can see things from your perspective,' can short-circuit that emotional detour. — Kiera Van Gelder

When you have mental illness you don't have a plaster or a cast or a crutch, that let everyone know that you have the illness, so people expect the same of you as from anyone else and when you are different they give you a hard time and they think you're being difficult or they think you're being a pain in the ass and they're horrible to you. You spend your life in Ireland trying to hide that you have a mental illness. — Sinead O'Connor

Sometimes ... we find that even when we do our best to serve the Lord, we still suffer. You may know someone who faces these most challenging of circumstances: consider the parent whose child becomes ill, for whom everyone prays and fasts with all their heart and soul, but who ultimately dies. Or the missionary who sacrifices to go on a mission, then develops a terrible illness that leaves him or her severely disabled or in chronic pain. — David E. Sorensen

Illness was admirable training in the creative art of grateful acceptance. Pain accepted was just pain, and heavy, but Harriet believed that pain gladly accepted took wings, went somewhere and did something. — Elizabeth Goudge

Let us thank God for having made us this gift of death, so that life is to have meaning; of night, that day is to have meaning; silence, that speech is to have meaning; illness, that health is to have meaning; war, that peace is to have meaning. Let us give thanks to Him for having given us weariness and pain, so that rest and joy are to have meaning. Let us give thanks to him, whose wisdom is infinite. — Amin Maalouf

Our bodies love us so much that they will do anything necessary to bring us to a place in which we recognize and release our unlovingness toward ourselves that's causing us deep heartache. The message of illness and pain may be "It's time to bring healing love into your energy field. You've been in emotional pain long enough. Let me turn up the volume by creating physical pain so you'll pay attention and take care of your heart. — Christiane Northrup

When you are not in your body, however, an emotion can survive inside you for days or weeks, or join with other emotions of a similar frequency that have merged and become the pain-body, a parasite that can live inside you for years, feed on your energy, lead to physical illness, and make your life miserable — Eckhart Tolle

It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and seeking out life. The chance to escape from the reminders of illness and death, from a hectic life, and from clinical and teaching responsibilities was not unlike my earlier year as an undergraduate in St. Andrews: it gave me a semblance of peace that had eluded me, and a place of my own to heal and mull, but most important to heal. England did not have the Celtic, magical quality of St. Andrews - nothing, I suppose, ever could for me - but it gave me back myself again, gave me back my high hopes of life. And it gave me back, my belief in love. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them ... and as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the liberator of the spirit. — Oliver Sacks

The more severe the pain or illness, the more severe will be the necessary changes. These may involve breaking bad habits, or acquiring some new and better ones. — Peter McWilliams

Illness is always an interaction between [mind and body]. It can begin in the mind and affect the body, or it can begin in the body and affect the mind, both of which are served by the same bloodstream. Attempts to treat most mental diseases as though they were completely free of physical causes and attempts to treat most bodily diseases as though the mind were in no way involved must be considered archaic in the light of new evidence about the way the human body functions. — Norman Cousins

My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was pain no words can render. — Charlotte Bronte

Except then I wonder what it's like to feel normal because if you take away the things I've felt all my life
the insecurity, the pain, the loneliness, the absolute dissolution of any sane or rational thought during one of my more manic moods and the helplessness when I realize one of said manic moods is creeping up on me (like right now)
what's left after the fact? Emptiness? — Kelley York

A positive attitude enables a person to endure suffering and disappointment as well as enhance enjoyment and satisfaction. A negative attitude intensifies pain and deepens disappointments; it undermines and diminishes pleasure, happiness, and satisfaction; it may even lead to depression or physical illness. — Viktor E. Frankl

We are becoming a nation of sissies and hypochondriacs, a self medicating society easily intimidated by pain and prone to panic. We understand almost nothing about the essential robustness of the human body or its ability to meet the challenge of illness. — Norman Cousins

The doctor's words made me understand what happened to me was a dark, evil, and shameful secret, and by association I too was dark, evil, and shameful. While it may not have been their intention, this was the message my clouded mind received. To escape the confines of the hospital, I once again disassociated myself from my emotions and numbed myself to the pain ravaging my body and mind. I acted as if nothing was wrong and went back to performing the necessary motions to get me from one day to the next. I existed but I did not live. — Alyssa Reyans

Three, 300, or 3,000 - these are the number of unknown days, a week, a year, or a decade, each far too precious little and yet, poignantly too much at the same time, to see an irrevocably declined loved one languish and suffer. That fear-ridden, irreversible release lingers in the doorway, but hesitates for reasons we don't understand, leaving us to weep with a mixture of angst and gratitude all at the same time. It is finally ushered all the way in, to comfort and carry our loved one to that Better Place. When the time finally comes, we can be enveloped in a warm cloak of long-awaited acceptance and peace that eases our own pain. It quiets the grief which has moaned inside of us, at least some, every single one of those bittersweet days, weeks... or years. — Connie Kerbs

For some reason the word "chronic" often has to be explained. It does not mean severe, though many chronic conditions can be exceptionally serious and indeed life-threatening. No, "chronic" means persistent over time, enduring, constant. Diabetes is a chronic condition, but measles is not. With measles, you contract it and then it is gone. It can sometimes be fatal, but is never chronic. Manic depression, in other words, is something you have to learn to live with. There are therapies which may help some people to function and function for the most part happily and well. Sometimes a talking therapy, sometimes pharmaceutical intervention helps. — Stephen Fry

Approach illness as an experiment in staying present, in opening your heart in hell. Discuss how we fear our hidden pain even more than death, and how noting and mindfulness brings that pain to the surface where it can be healed. — Stephen Levine

Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable. — Virginia Woolf

I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea. — Patti Smith

To believe you're being psychically attacked gives you an understanding of your illness that no Western doctor can provide; this can be reassuring when you've exhausted the Western doctor tool kit, and the doctors are sending you to acupuncturists for pain relief. — Heidi Julavits

I owe it all to words and art, the peace that came with a flicker of a pen silenced the suffering; eased the pain and life that was once filled with burden became sane again. It Became meaningful.
Art does matter, it made me, when the world changed me. — Nikki Rowe

But then there were other times, like this, when he looked at Jem and saw no mark of illness on him, and wondered what it would be like in a world where Jem was not dying. And that did not bear thinking about either. It was a terrible black place in himself that the fear came from, a dark voice he could only silence with anger, risk, and pain. — Cassandra Clare

As we begin to transform, illness and pain can also be seen as a "messenger" for spiritual growth. What does this illness mean? What can I learn from this? Why is the occurring in my life — Teresa DeCicco

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre. — Andy Behrman

On the ward there was hurt and pain so big and so deep that speech could not express it. I had been interested in philosophy, and suddenly philosophy came alive for me, for here the basic questions of human existence were not abstractions: they were embodied in human suffering — Frank X. Barron

What seems to happen is that pain tries to let us know it needs listening to in different ways. And one way it tries is through illness. In — John C. Parkin

But what if you simply don't have a solid self to return to - if the way you are is seen as basically broken? And what if you can't conceive of "normal" or "healthy" because pain and loneliness are all you remember? — Kiera Van Gelder

Q: How do you take off your suit of armor? How do you open yourself? A: It is not a question of how you do it. There is no ritual or ceremony or formula for opening. The first obstacle is the question itself: "How?" If you don't question yourself, don't watch yourself, then you just do it. We do not consider how we are going to vomit; we just vomit. There is no time to think about it; it just happens. If we are very tense, then we will have tremendous pain and will not really be able to vomit properly. We will try to swallow it back, try to struggle with our illness. We have to learn to relax when we are sick. — Chogyam Trungpa

Emily woke to shadows and their voices. They looked different today, because the entire world hurt. The numbness had worn off sometime between sleep and awake, and she was seeing red. The shadows on the walls were not shadows at all, but red blobs consisting of teeth and claws. Her house reeked of pain.
The whole world was fucking bleeding. — Allie Burke

Jesus doesn't give an explanation for the pain and sorrow of the world. He comes where the pain is most acute and takes it upon himself. Jesus doesn't explain why there is suffering, illness, and death in the world. He brings healing and hope. He doesn't allow the problem of evil to be the subject of a seminar. He allows evil to do its worst to him. He exhausts it, drains its power, and emerges with new life. — N. T. Wright

Let us, just for a moment, look at the implications of that 'distress'. Severe depression affects more than 120 million people worldwide and more than 5 million in the UK. By 2020, according to the World Health Organisation, it will be one of the world's most debilitating conditions, second only to heart disease. Is that distress? Or is it a major illness? The danger in polite euphemisms is that they drive the condition underground. I constantly see people struggling with severe depression, clamping down on the pain so as not to bother anyone. I know how they minimise both themselves and the severity of their struggle. Mute, pale shadows, they are gagged by polite euphemisms and by misunderstanding. — Sally Brampton

Although your decision to die is firm, your decision to become a god has caused you to suffer. You suffered, wondering why you couldn't cure Magdalia's illness, wondering why you weren't capable of saving her. All you wanted to do was protect your only sister, wasn't that it? Not in heaven, but here on Earth. You wanted to make Lady Maldaria happy more than anything else, didn't you? And so now, to avoid the guilt of your loved one dying at your expense, you're willing to die yourself. You've already come to this realization. You know you aren't god. You're just a fragile human being who's capable of feeling pain and having doubts. Go back to being an ordinary man and start all over again for the sake of those who look up to you.
-Kenshin — Nobuhiro Watsuki

Sometimes pain and illness are not meant to be removed. You can't second-guess God. Rather than praying for it to go away, it's often wiser to pray that you learn as much from it as you possibly can. — Stephen Levine

Missing Alina was worse than a terminal illness. At least when you were terminal you knew the pain was going to end eventually. But there was no light at the end of my tunnel. Grief was going to devour me, day into night, night into day, and although I might feel like I was dying from it, might even wish I was, I never would. I was going to have to walk around with a hole in my heart forever. I was going to hurt for my sister until the day I died. If you don't know what I mean or you think I'm being melodramatic, then you've never really loved anyone. — Karen Marie Moning

Kate was about to protest when something caused her to look in her mother's direction. She was standing statue-like in front of the television with that brave, painted-on smile. Then Kate realized what had caught her attention: her mother's tear-filled eyes were reflecting the on-off motion of the blinkers like a watery mirror. Kate stared transfixed at the flashing points of light that betrayed her mother's pain. The urge to tell her father how much she wanted him to be proud of her and how much he had hurt her, faded in the dark depths of her mother's eyes. — Sabrynne McLain

So much in a relationship changes when a partner is seriously ill, helpless yet blameless, and indefatigably needy. I felt old. [p. 99]
The animal part of him in pain accepted my caring. But the part of himself watching himself in that pain didn't believe I could ever respect him again. None of this crossed my mind. I couldn't risk knowing it. No one could and continue caregiving. They'd feel so unappreciated and wronged that it would drive them away. [p. 100] — Diane Ackerman

Yet in the awful majesty of her pain he went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in her arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her. The orange light through the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching in the vacuity of her illness and finding only remote abstractions.
As he arose the tears fled lava-like into her bandages. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The less control people had over their work, the higher their blood pressure during work hours. Moreover, blood pressure at home was unrelated to the level of job control, indicating that the spike during work hours was specifically caused by lack of choice on the job. People with little control over their work also experienced more back pain, missed more days of work due to illness in general, and had higher rates of mental illness-the human equivalent of stereotypies, resulting in the decreased quality of life common to animals reared in captivity. — Sheena Iyengar

It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness — Kay Redfield Jamison

To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain. — Jean Vanier

I think those who have a terminal illness and are in great pain should have the right to choose to end their own life, and those that help them should be free from prosecution. — Stephen Hawking

A man who under the influence of mental pain or unbearably oppressive suffering sends a bullet through his own head is called a suicide; but for those who give freedom to their pitiful, soul-debasing passions in the holy days of spring and youth there is no name in man's vocabulary. After the bullet follows the peace of the grave: ruined youth is followed by years of grief and painful recollections. He who has profaned his spring will understand the present condition of my soul. I am not yet old, or grey, but I no longer live. Psychiaters tell us that a solider, who was wounded at Waterloo, went mad, and afterwards assured everybody - and believed it himself - that he had died at Waterloo, and that what was now considered to be him was only his shadow, a reflection of the past. I am now experiencing something resembling this semi-death.. — Anton Chekhov

How I understand that love of living, of being in this wonderful, astounding world even if one can look at it only through theprison bars of illness and suffering! Plus je vois, the more I am thrilled by the spectacle. — Edith Wharton

We live in bodies that are fearfully and wonderfully made, yet they are not immune to illness and pain. We have hearts that are capable of experiencing great love, but sometimes they get broken. — Adam Hamilton

Another of the difficulties of having DID is the denial. DID is a disorder of denial. It has to be because if the original person knew about the alters and felt their pain, they would either go crazy and be hospitalized permanently, or would die. — Eve N. Adams

I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live. — Yayoi Kusama