Private Pain Quotes & Sayings

America must deal once and for all with an utterly irrational health care financing system that allows private interests to make billions in profits from the pain and suffering of their fellow citizens. America is the only country in the industrialized world that does not provide tax-supported universal health care coverage in some form. — Suzanne Gordon

Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone. — Bell Hooks

Does the open wound in another's breast soften the pain of the gaping wound in our own? Or does the blood which is welling from another man's side staunch that which is pouring from our own? Does the general anguish of our fellow creatures lessen our own private and particular anguish? No, no, each suffers on his own account, each struggles with his own grief, each sheds his own tears. — Alexandre Dumas

For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word "Book's" with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker. — Lynne Truss

It was as though Cutflower was so glad to be alive that he never lived. Every moment was vivid, a coloured thing, a trill or a crackle of words in the air. Who could imagine, while Cutflower was around, that there were such vulgar monsters as death, birth, love, art and pain around the corner? It was too embarrassing to contemplate. If Cutflower knew of them he kept it secret. Over their gaping and sepulchral deeps he skimmed now here, now there, in his private canoe, changing his course with a flick of his paddle when death's black whale, or the red squid of passion, lifted for a moment its body from the brine. — Mervyn Peake

There is a famous painting, Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. I am in love with that painting. Sometimes, I think everyone is like the people in that painting, everyone lost in their own private universes of pain or sorrow or guilt, everyone remote and unknowable. The painting reminds me of you. It breaks my heart. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

While it is hard to fathom who we are and how we are to live when public chaos shatters our routine, the slow-motion pain of each private death and cataclysm we endure is harder. Each slams us off our feet, yet we have agreed to pretend to be fine again at some point, ideally as soon as possible, so as not to seem self-indulgent or embarrass anybody. Then people can get on with their lives. — Anne Lamott

Runners exalt the marathon as a public test of private will, when months or years of solitary training, early mornings, lost weekends, rain and pain mature into triumph or surrender. That's one reason the race-day crowds matter, the friends who come to cheer and stomp and flap their signs and push the runners on. — Nancy Gibbs

She had very much looked forward to a word in private with him. But she forgot, as she usually did, the silence that always came between them in these latter years, whenever they found themselves alone.

The queer sensation in her chest, however, was all too familiar, that mix of pleasure and pain, never one without the other.

She could have done without those feelings. She would have happily gone her entire life never experiencing the pangs of longing and the futility of regret. He made her human - or as human as she was capable of being. And being human was possibly her least favorite aspect of life. — Sherry Thomas

I think I probably would have enjoyed to keep my own private pain out of my work. But I was changed by my audience who said your private pain which you have unwittingly shown us in your early songs is also ours. — Pete Townshend

Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow sufferers, to raise public awareness, to give a voice to their pain. None of them would ever admit that it was all about ratings and voyeurism and lurid, grotesque curiosity. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

The beauty of this idea is that my decision to keep Peeta alive at the expense of my own life is itself an act of defiance. A refusal to play the Hunger Games by the Capitol's rules. My private agenda dovetails completely with my public one. And if I really could save Peeta ... in terms of a revolution, this would be ideal. Because I will be more valuable dead. They can turn me into some kind of martyr for the cause and paint my face on banners, and it will do more to rally people than anything I could do if I was living. But Peeta would be more valuable alive, and tragic, because he will be able to turn his pain into words that will transform people. — Suzanne Collins

The interior of the arms dealer's private jet was so ugly it hurt my feelings as well as my eyeballs. — Terry Hayes

And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any. — Thomas Paine

Who do I belong to? How come I mortgaged my being till I don't belong to myself? How come I sold my blood? And who now owns my indecisions, my hands, my private pain, my pride? — Pablo Neruda

Huh? Oh you have a hidden agenda, do you?" She laughed. His straight-faced humor always surprised her. "You promised me you didn't."
"There is nothing hidden about it," he replied. My objective is obvious. I've decided I'd rather have you describe me as 'sweet' than a 'slagging pain in the tailset.'"
"Really?"
"Well ... " he looked up from the bag. "Maybe not in public."
"I might be able to confine myself to saying it in private, if you gave me a reason." Taya met his eyes, and he blushed. — Dru Pagliassotti

A SIZEABLE LEGACY HE LEFT her. It was a legacy of beautiful memories, of love and passion, of desire and ecstasy, of nearness and the myriad means of communication two lovers could find. It was a legacy of experience, both private and public, personal and professional, encompassing all she'd learned from their brief liaison. It was a legacy of pain, of hurt and heartache, of humiliation and distrust, of frustration and disillusionment, of the sheer hell of a loneliness made worse by comparison with what might have been. And, finally, there was the small gold heart she wore constantly, ruby-eyed and shining, a poignant reminder of that part of her own heart which was, now and forever, lost. — Barbara Delinsky

What I secretly longed for was to disentangle myself of all those lives which had woven themselves into the pattern of my own life and were making my destiny a part of theirs. To shake myself free of these accumulating experiences which were mine only by force of inertia required a violent effort. Now and then I lunged and tore at the net, but only to become more enmeshed. My liberation seemed to involve pain and suffering to those near and dear to me. Every move I made for my own private good brought about reproach and condemnation. I was a traitor a thousand times over. — Henry Miller

I discovered that private things were mostly sour. They sat spoiling in the corners of your heart for so long that by the time you acknowledged them you were dealing with something rancid. — Tarryn Fisher

Pain narrows vision. The most private of sensations, it forces us to think of ourselves and little else. — Philip Yancey

We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict. — Jim Morrison

Grief is a private, internal thing. No one can say their pain is worse than yours because they don't know. So maybe it's not good to compare. Maybe it's better to talk to people who know you. — Anna Maxted

All of this caused Kiyoaki constant pain. In comparison with Satoko's public humiliation, however, he did not even have a slighting remark to contend with. And however acute his private agony, it was, after all, the torment of a coward. — Yukio Mishima

Pain is the most private experience, but its causes, whether natural or man-made, demand public accounting. — Nancy Gibbs

A long-term substance abuser, a few months before his death, penned this poem: Went downtown, Hastings and Main, looking for relief from the pain. All I did was find a ticket on a one-way train. ... Give me peace before I die. The track is laid out so well; we all live our private hell; just more tickets on the hell-bound train. — Gabor Mate

Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense and unpalliated. There is no morphine equivalent to ease the acute pain, and death, not uncommonly, is violent and grisly. The suffering of a suicidal is private and inexpressible, leaving family members, friends and colleagues to deal with an almost unfathomable kind of loss, as well as guilt. Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description. — Kay Redfield Jamison

His mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking. — George Orwell

Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell-bound realm - which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world. — Eknath Easwaran

Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself. — Alain De Botton

Cycling is an excruciating sport - a rider's power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain - and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose. — Philip Gourevitch

We would all like to see a perfect moral state with no government being necessary at all. That is not reality. To the extent government is necessary, it is desirable, to keep us from each other's throats, to keep the powerful from winning every dispute by virtue of their wealth. 'Might makes right' is not only no way to run a country, it is the opposite of a perfectly moral state. It is, in fact, what you claim to oppose: the decision-maker answerable to no one, who suffers no consequence for his errors. You say it is wrong for government not to feel the pain of loss when it makes mistakes. You say it is wrong for the private citizen to suffer the consequences. And yet you place that same power in the hands of the wealthy without complaint. Why? — Robert Peate

When a cricketer gets hit in the private parts, he hopes the pain will go away very soon but the swelling doesn't! — Richie Benaud

Does your head pain you?" she asked in concern, reaching up to touch the small plaster at his temple. In all the commotion of bringing Bennett to their home, there had been no opportunity for private conversation.
He bent to brush a soft kiss on her lips. "No. With a head as hard as mine, bullets merely bounce off. — Lisa Kleypas

Our generation, like the one before us, must choose. Without the threat of the Cold War, without the pain of economic ruin, without the fresh memory of World War II's slaughter, it is tempting to pursue our private agendas
to simply sit back and let history unfold. We must resist the temptation. — William J. Clinton

The feeling of understanding is as private as the feeling of pain. The act of understanding is at the heart of all scientific activity; without it any ostensibly scientific activity is as sterile as that of a high school student substituting numbers into a formula. For this reason, science, when I push the analysis back as far as I can, must be private. — Percy Williams Bridgman

I will miss myself in relation to others. The rareness. The exceptional differences. I will miss the gift that comes with hardship and paying the price. I will miss the tragedy of my own life. As I once spoke...emphatically, but I now repeat here, quietly - the pain, the pain is what made it so God damn beautiful. I endured. You can wait a lifetime for thirty seconds, five minutes, or for an hour to come into your life - a brief interval that makes all the suffering purposeful. In such moments of splendor and rapture - even if the rapture be stilled, the private hours and years of reckoning are unloaded, a burden lifted and the spirit feels as it did on the happiest day of its life when it was young and untormented Or rather, unconscious of the torment waiting to be ignited. — Wheston Chancellor Grove

What is an evil man? The man is evil who coerces obedience to his private ends, destroys beauty, produces pain, extinguishes life. — Jack Vance

It seems to me that Christians in the West are being coddled. We suffer little in the name of Christ. Therefore, we read the Bible not with a desperate hunger for evidences of God's triumph in pain, but with a view to improving our private pleasures. — John Piper

In The Godfather, for instance, they say they won't deal drugs because they have a code of behaviour. He is the last remnants of that. So playing someone like that, who is also in pain with his kidney stone, means you're beginning to find a dimension of the guy who is king and all show and the private guy who is in pain. — David Suchet

Indeed, the most intense feeling we know of, intense to the point of blotting out all other experiences, namely, the experience of great bodily pain, is at the same time the most private and least communicable of all. Not only is it perhaps the only experience which we are unable to transform into a shape fit for public appearance, it actually deprives us of our feeling for reality to such an extent that we can forget it more quickly and easily than anything else. There seems to be no bridge from the most radical subjectivity, in which I am no longer "recognizable," to the outer world of life.42 Pain, in other words, truly a borderline experience between life as "being among men" (inter homines esse) and death, is so subjective and removed from the world of things and men that it cannot assume an appearance at all.43 — Hannah Arendt

What is the secret mesmerism which friendship possesses, and under the operation of which a person ordinarily sluggish, or cold, or timid, becomes wise, active, and resolute, in another's behalf? As Alexis, after a few passes from Dr. Elliotson, despises pain, reads with the back of his head, sees miles off, looks into next week, and performs other wonders, of which, in his own private normal condition, he is quite incapable; so you see, in the affairs of the world and under the magnetism of friendships, the modest man becomes bold, the shy confident, the lazy active, or the impetuous prudent and peaceful. What — William Makepeace Thackeray

Juliette," I whisper. "What are you doing here?"
I'm half-dressed, getting ready for my day, and it's too early for visitors. These hours just before the sun rises are my only moments of peace, and no one should be in here. It seems impossible she gained access to my private quarters.
Someone should've stopped her.
Instead, she's standing in my doorway, staring at me. I've seen her so many times, but this is different - it's causing me physical pain to look at her. But somehow I still find myself drawn to her, wanting to be near her. — Tahereh Mafi

The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I've grown a second self in this room. It's the self-important fool that keeps the writer going. I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation. The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself. If the pain is real, why do I inflate it? Maybe this is the only pleasure I'm allowed. — Don DeLillo

I don't know about being a Catholic anymore, though I had a great romance with the Church. But its male hierarchy causes me pain and distress. So I can't really pay too much attention. When that encyclical from the Pope - the one about contraception - began 'Dear Sons and Brothers' I figured it must be private mail and had nothing to do with me. So I didn't read it. — Joan Hackett

If you want the naked beauty of my vulnerability, you have to have the strength to share the burden of, the private pain, that makes me feel so tender and fragile. For i am as strong, as i am, weak. If you want me to come home to you, be the safe harbor, in which, i can seek refuge. — Jaeda DeWalt

Trying to get today's Republican to accept basic facts is like trying to get your dog to take a pill. You have to feed them the truth wrapped in a piece of boloney, hold their snout shut, and stroke their throats. And even then, just when you think they've swallowed it, the spit it out on the linoleum.

If conservatives get to call universal healthcare 'socialized medicine' then I get to call private for-profit healthcare 'soulless, vampire bastards making money off human pain'. — Bill Maher

The art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others. — Joyce Carol Oates

Life, at all times full of pain, is more painful in our time than in the two centuries that preceded it. The attempt to escape from pain drives men to triviality, to self-deception, to the invention of vast collective myths. But these momentary alleviations do but increase the sources of suffering in the long run. Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, to make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space — Bertrand Russell

For me, writing isn't a way of being public or private; it's just a way of being. The process is always full of pain, but I like that. It's a reality, and I just accept it as something not to be avoided. — Jamaica Kincaid

True healing happens when we go into our pain so deeply that we see it, not just as our pain, but everyone's pain. It is immensely moving and supportive to discover that my pain is not private to me. — Steven Levine

The world appears solid to most people. It is filled with their pain, their desires, their private ecstasies, their expectations. They are that world - nothing glows. — Frederick Lenz

When I listened to her play I felt I should not be in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterward stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words. — Miriam Toews