Phantom Pain Quotes & Sayings

Martin said, "It feels as though part of my self has detached and gone to Amsterdam, where it - she - is waiting for me. Do you know about phantom-limb syndrome?" Julia nodded. "There's pain where she ought to be. It's feeding the other pain, the thing that makes me wash and count and all that. So her absence is stopping me from going to find her. Do you see? — Audrey Niffenegger

God speaks in the language you know best - not through your ears, but through your circumstances. — Oswald Chambers

Fear tugs at me and I'm falling.
I grab at the mattress, dig in with my fingers, flop onto my stomach, hold tight. Press my face into the pillow so hard it hurts. The quilt twists like it wants to smother me.
I can't scream out loud, but there has to be some release. I kick my feet against the mattress in a muffled frenzy, legs flying fast and hard enough to carry me miles away. And when it's done, nothing's changed. I'm still stuck right here. — Rachel M. Wilson

To suggest that organic vegetables, which cost far more than conventional produce, can feed billions of people in parts of the world without roads or proper irrigation may be a fantasy based on the finest intentions. But it is a cruel fantasy nonetheless. — Michael Specter

The thing is, you can cut off a couple passions and only focus on one, but after a while, you'll start to feel phantom limb pain. — Austin Kleon

A lie believed to be truth will be lived is if it is true — Roger House

Keep my soul safe. Phantom Lagoon is my home; my safe harbor. I no longer belong to a family; I am a loner. I feel no pain here, because it does not exist; nor will I let it exist. My soul is concealed in this stone; it is my life. I must let go, forget, and never look back. The blame shall be none but my own, for I was born of only half, to be reunited later in life. I am an Essence. — Mandi Lynn

With tears and prayers and tender hands, Mother and sisters made her ready for the long sleep that pain would never mar again, seeing with grateful eyes the beautiful serenity that soon replaced the pathetic patience that had wrung their hearts so long, and feeling with reverent joy that to their darling death was a benignant angel, not a phantom full of dread. — Louisa May Alcott

Before, if I thought Christmas, I would have remembered my past on Earth and would have succumbed to the aching sadness for a life I can never have again.
Now, I can think the word and not feel anything but a dull ache, a phantom pain for a part of my life that's been amputated. [p.244] — Beth Revis

I want to reassure fans that I am 100% involved and will continue working on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain; I'm determined to make it the greatest game I've directed to date. Don't miss it! — Hideo Kojima

Her empathy was like a double-edged razor that allowed her to experience the nethermost of human joys and sorrows. The best and worst of emotions cut her to the bone. The pain of her heart was like a tortuous phantom that lived outside her body. She could feel its presence. It clung to her breasts like a nursing infant. Pressure on her chest. Stealing her breath. I don't want to hurt like this, she thought. Then she remembered the alternative. She pictured life without feeling and imagined the sociopath existence. It is better to feel, she said. — C.J. Anderson

There is a phantom that flies with the banshees. It strangles the throat, pierces the heart and consumes the body with pain that only time and tears can expel. — Susan Denning

And even though I'd cried in my bed every night since, feeling his phantom arms around me, it had been worth eight hours Saturday night. The pleasure then was worth the pain now. — Nicole Williams

It was a universal truth among males that anytime you saw a guy get it in the nuts, you experienced a shot of phantom pain in your own croquet set. — J.R. Ward

Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee's hands were running down his ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs. — William S. Burroughs

You don't limp at all. Your recovery is going well."
"Yes." Though whether someone ever fully recovered from losing a limb, he didn't know. He sure as hell hadn't. It had been five years, and still there were days when the pain in his nonexistent leg was enough to drive him out of his mind. — Laura Oliva

The physical suffering of the disease and its aspect of evil mystery were expressed in a strange Welsh lament which saw "death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit! It is seething, terrible ... a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry ... a painful angry knob ... Great is its seething like a burning cinder ... a grievous thing of ashy color." Its eruption is ugly like the "seeds of black peas, broken fragments of brittle sea-coal ... the early ornaments of black death, cinders of the peelings of the cockle weed, a mixed multitude, a black plague like halfpence, like berries. ... — Barbara W. Tuchman

My legs! Lord Jesus stop the pain in my legs!"

"Hush John," Florida said. "That's only phantom pain."

"Is it real?" I asked her.

She shrugged. "All pain is real. — Lucia Berlin

When the nurse leaves, Doctor Rose mouths, "Act like you're in pain." Then she mimics a painful expression in case Summer doesn't understand. On the contrary, Summer's an expert at interpreting body language and reading lips. It's all thanks to her observant nature while enslaved on the Cosmos. Who else could tell that Peter's discomfort is due to him wearing the same pair of underwear for a week straight? Ah, yes, she always knew when day six and seven approached. She watched the crew member with much amusement as he waddled, pulled wedgies, and scratched his bum relentlessly. Not that anyone else cared to know that little nugget of information. — Laura Kreitzer

Of course the edges of the wound struggle to close up
and the clock wants to be set going
(how awkward to be pointing permanently to half past one)
amputated limbs feel phantom pain — Katarina Mazetti

For most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory
no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto
and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom. — Diane Ackerman

Local grandmas came in and out of our clinic bringing homemade cookies and fudge, because nothing soothes phantom limb pain better than a homemade brownie. — Adele Levine

We were quite naturally unhappy; feeling a definite need, unbearably keen at moments, which was never to be satisfied. But that was recognizable pain, and the sharp pang grew to be almost welcome in the midst of the sultry and opaque life which was not felt, had nothing real in it, and yet swam about us, and choked us and blinded us. All these tears and groans, reproaches and protestations of affection, high talk of duty and work and living for others, were doubtless what we should feel if we felt properly, and yet we had but a dull sense of gloom which could not honestly be referred to the dead; unfortunately it did not quicken our feeling for the living; but hideous as it was, obscured both living and dead; and for long did unpardonable mischief by substituting for the shape of a true and most vivid mother, nothing better than an unlovable phantom. — Virginia Woolf

No one in my family is in entertainment. They thought acting was a fun hobby, and when I got a degree, I'd settle down. — Hannah Murray

I am but a stranger ... as we all are. Lonely inside our separate skins, we cannot know each others pain and must bear our own in solitude. For my part, I have found that walking soothes it; and that, given luck, sometimes we find one to walk besides us ... at least for a little way. — Alan Moore

With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion
like the phantom pain of an amputee. — Khaled Hosseini

The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it. — E. M. Forster

Every so often I was overwhelmed by a phantom pain that cut through me like a knife. I was certain that if I looked down I would find blood all over, like the knife I once held in my hands, but it was all in my mind. — Gail Tsukiyama

So perhaps there are no phantom pains after all; perhaps all pain is real; perhaps each long-ago blow lives on into eternity in some different permutation and shape; perhaps the body is this hypersensitive, revengeful entity, a ledger book, a warehouse of remembered slights and cruelties. — Thrity Umrigar

I line my pills up in formation, like they're about to be inspected. It's time for roll call, motherfuckers: Zoloft for depression (Here!), Abilify for depression (Here!), Klonopin for anxiety (Here!), Oleptro and Lunesta for sleep (Here! Here!), Neurontin for phantom limb pain (Here!), ibuprofen for TBI headaches (Here!). If I stare at the pills long enough, they start floating like tiny stars in the sky. — Heather Demetrios

I've sworn off agnosticism, which I now call cowardly atheism. I've come to the position that in the complete absence of any supporting data whatsover for the persistence of the individual in some spiritual form, it is necessary to operate under the provisional conclusion that there is no afterlife and then be ready to amend that if I find out otherwise. — James Cameron

Never underestimate a girl's love for her favorite band. Never think even for a minute, that she won't defend them to her death. Because it's not just the music that makes that band her favorite. It's the guys, the gals. It's the fans. People whom of which she has interacted with thanks to the band. That band might of saved her life, or just made her smile everyday. That band has never broke her heart and has yet to leave her. No wonder she finds such joy in her music. — Alex Gaskarth

This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed.
Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]. Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died
like parents and marriages
kept hurting forever. — Kristin Hannah

After Voltaire: envy is chained to the portico of the temple of glory and can neither enter nor leave. — Mason Cooley

Indeed, Chicago seems to have literally sucked the air out of Springfield: another case of American becoming a network of massive city-states more intimately interconnected with other continents than with their own hinterlands. It is in the merging with the rest of the world and global civilization that the forces of division come to the fore at home. Springfield: another small city that should inspire but doesn't. — Robert D. Kaplan