Terrible Pain Quotes & Sayings

So, as Lymond strode out and stopped, rigid and white by the doorpost, Sybilla set eyes on Francis, the son of her heart; and so Francis Crawford, after four years of unharnessed power, came face to face at last with his mother.

And Kate, falling upon the door and looking up at her self-contained relative by marriage, saw his face torn apart and left, raw as a wound without features; only pain and shock and despair and appalled recognition, all the more terrible for being perfectly voiceless. — Dorothy Dunnett

If the grim realities you are facing at this time seem dark and heavy and almost unbearable, remember that in the soul-wrenching darkness of Gethsemane and the incomprehensible torture and pain of Calvary, the Savior accomplished the Atonement, which resolves the most terrible burdens that can occur in this life. He did it for you, and He did it for me. He did it because He loves us and because He obeys and loves His Father. We will be rescued from death-even from the depths of the sea. — Quentin L. Cook

Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination. — Jim Carroll

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

Hold on to the thought that no emotion lasts forever, no matter how wonderful or how terrible the emotion may be. The tears may last a little longer than you would like, but it will get better. I promise. — Osayi Emokpae Lasisi

It is a terrible thing when it is the substitute that is sent to find a new life, a sign that a person yearns for change but cannot imagine creating it herself....
If scapegoats feel pain, it is only the delegated pain of their originals. — Shelley Jackson

Sigh, and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it - I was sure!' ... She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark - too dark altogether ... Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved — Joseph Conrad

Once you get beyond the crust of the first pang it is all the same and you can easily bear it. It is just the transition from painlessness to pain that is so terrible. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

People seemed to have two different selves - an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to two single points in time, the worst moment and the last one. The remembering self seems to stick to the Peak-End rule even when the ending is an anomaly. Just a few minutes without pain at the end of their medical procedure dramatically reduced patients' overall pain ratings even after they'd experienced more than half an hour of high level of pain. "That wasn't so terrible," they'd reported afterward. A bad ending skewed the pain scores upward just as dramatically. — Atul Gawande

Why were we tortured? We were in love and life was a fast current swarming around our ankles, threatening to topple us into the wet part of the planet. It was intense, that's why we were tortured. It was enormous and exploding like palm tree. Iris was my Yuri-G, my Delilah, my Stella Marie. Strong dark women you had to love with a strong dark heart that throbbed in gorgeous pain because love is terrible. I mean, ultimately. It would go away like a needle lifting from the vinyl at the end of the song, we knew this. The music would cease, one of us would die or else we'd just break up, and this drove us to drink from each other like two twelve-year-olds sneaking vodka from the liquor cabinet, trying to get it all down, trying to get as fucked up as possible before we got caught. — Michelle Tea

The terrible threat against life, he said in his book God Is Not Yet Dead, is not death, nor pain, nor any variation on the disasters that we so obsessively try to protect ourselves against with our social systems and personal stratagems. The terrible threat is "that we might die earlier than we really do die, before death has become a natural necessity. The real horror lies in just such a premature death, a death after which we go on living for many years."[6] — Eugene H. Peterson

And two years ago this morning I woke wondering what delightful gift the new day would give me. These are the two years I thought would be filled with fun."
"Would you exchange them - now - for two years filled with fun "
"No " said Rilla slowly. "I wouldn't. It's strange - isn't it - They have been two terrible years - and yet I have a queer feeling of thankfulness for them - as if they had brought me something very precious in all their pain. I wouldn't want to go back and be the girl I was two years ago not even if I could. Not that I think I've made any wonderful progress - but I'm not quite the selfish frivolous little doll I was then. I suppose I had a soul then Miss Oliver - but I didn't know it. I know it now - and that is worth a great deal - worth all the suffering of the past few years. — L.M. Montgomery

Jonas felt a ripping sensation inside himself, the feeling of terrible pain clawing its way forward to emerge in a cry. — Lois Lowry

Edward's grief if you die will be a terrible thing. It will hurt him, a lot, and men like him never grieve alone. He will spread his grief all over us, not because we failed, but because it'll give him something to focus on so he doesn't have to feel the pain. — Laurell K. Hamilton

But now, seeing these letters his father wrote to June Bailey Roe, seeing his father's painful devotion to someone who simply wasn't real - a daughter he never had - Wade is unable to suppress his dread. All that love, all those feelings, all that pain, fastened to nothing, a terrible, drifting chaos. His future loss of mind becomes the new premise of his life, and he feels, already, the loss of the things he loves, feels himself trying to find some other way to hold on to them. — Emily Ruskovich

The emergence of pessimistic philosophies is by no means a
sign of great and terrible misery. The emergence of pessimistic
philosophies is by no means a sign of great and terrible
misery. No, these question marks about the value of all
life are put up in ages in which the refinement and
alleviation of existence make even the inevitable mosquito
bites of the soul and the body seem much too bloody and
malignant and one is so poor in real experiences of pain
that one would like to consider painful general ideas as
suffering of the first order.
There is a recipe
against pessimistic philosophers and the excessive sensitivity
that seems to me the real "misery of the present age"
but this recipe may sound too cruel and might
itself be counted among the signs that lead people
to judge that "existence is something evil."
Well, the recipe against this "misery" is: misery — Friedrich Nietzsche

I think it's terrible to show that to kids. It's - I think you should - if you - if you do a piece where something violent happens and someone dies or is badly injured, you must show the pain. — Joe Eszterhas

Something had happened, Something terrible, Raphael was raging, his unbound wrath waking every vampire in the building, threatening to tear the walls down around them and causing the very air to vibrate for those with senses to feel it. She'd never experienced such raw pain from one so powerful and she dreaded to discover what had caused it. — D.B. Reynolds

Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight. — John Cusack

A chiropractor is a doctor who performs adjustments on the spine," Rickey told the class before bending Gary backward and "adjusting" him, ripping off the false arm and spraying red hair dye all over the classroom. Gary howled in "pain" and collapsed dramatically on the threadbare school carpet, his legs flailing a bit before hitting the floor with a terrible, final-sounding thunk.
That was the first time they were sent to the principal's office together. They had to apologize to their teacher and explain to their classmates that doctor visits were unlikely to result in surprise dismemberments. — Poppy Z. Brite

There is a terrible pain," she said softly, "about being abandoned by someone who loves someone else more than you. A pain and an emptiness and a determination never again to give anyone that power. — Mary Balogh

Yeah, it's terrible really. Little fucking minions in there hacking away with their teeny individual pick axes, tearing away the lining of my uterus piece by piece, basking in glory every time I let out a little cry of pain. — Laurel Ulen Curtis

You have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help ... And then finally, the way through grief is grieving. — Jane Hamilton

Chess lied to herself every day; it was just something she did, like taking her pills or making sure she had a pen in her bag. Little lies, mostly. Insignificant. Of course there were big ones there, too, like telling herself that she was more than just a junkie who got lucky enough to possess a talent not everyone had. That she was alone by choice and that she was not terrified of other people because they couldn't be trusted, because they carried filth in their minds and pain in their hands and they would smear both all over her given half the chance. — Stacia Kane

And if the child feels loved, the body is relaxed, the eyes are bright, there is a smile on the face; in some way the flesh becomes "transparent." A child that is loved is beautiful. But what happens when children feel they are not loved? There is tension, fear, loneliness and terrible anguish, which we can call "inner pain," the opposite of "inner peace." Children are too small and weak to be able to fend for themselves; they have no defense mechanisms. If a child feels unloved and unwanted, he or she will develop a broken self-image. I have never heard any of the men or women whom we have welcomed into our community criticize their parents, even though many of them have suffered a great deal from rejection or abandonment in their families. Rather than blaming their parents, they blame themselves. "If I am not loved, it is because I am not lovable, I am no good. I am evil. — Jean Vanier

We'll be the walls that shield these terrible events from them. We can endure the pain for however long they need to heal. — Krista Ritchie

It was so beautiful to know that I would go on forever, and so terrible to know that the part of me that fought through the pain of existence as Cadence Drake would never be only Cadence Drake beyond the few brief, flickering instants that my fragile fleshself survived. I would be absorbed into the greater whole and would cease to exist. — Holly Lisle

Things are always terrible
for some people. The question
is the ratio of the palpable hurt
to the general session
of life in an era. — Maureen N. McLane

Looking at suicide - the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind - is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths — Kay Redfield Jamison

Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them ... go around them ... take evasive action. — Geraldine McCaughrean

Life is, in its very essence and character, a terrible mystery - this whole business of living by killing and eating. But it is a childish attitude to say no to life with all its pain, to say that this is something that should not have been. — Joseph Campbell

When we're in pain, people are too quick to say, Get over it, move on, it's not that bad. But we don't get over grief by denying it. We have to feel it. We have to give it its due. Somethings that means doing the exact opposite of "moving on." We have to dive down to the very depths of our sorrow, relive every terrible moment, and endure the torture of asking what could have been - and what will now be. We have to bleed out before our hearts can start beating again. — Claudia Gray

I thought I would get calmer, surer, but each time we come close I feel almost sick at first. As though each time vibrates with the times before. I feel a terrible sorrow coming up my throat, I don't know why. And it can only be consoled against the length of her body. Lying down with her for the first time ... all the pain I didn't know I had, till at her touch it disappeared like smoke. Is this what purgatory feels like? To burn painlessly? If so, why isn't it called heaven? — Ann-Marie MacDonald

For almost every addict who s mired in this terrible disease, other -- a mother or father, a child or spouse, an aunt or uncles or grandparents, a brother or sister -- are suffering too. Families are the hidden victims of addiction, enduring enormous levels of stress and pain. They suffer sleepless nights, deep anxiety, and physical exhaustion brought on by worry and desperation. They lie awake for hours on end as fear for their loved one's safety crowds out any possibility of sleep. They liveeach day with a weight inside that drags them down. Unable to laugh or smile, they are sometimes filled with bottled-up anger or a constant sadness that keeps them on the verge of tears. — Beverly Conyers

So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. they err who would assert that invariable this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. An when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bides the soul be rid of it. — Herman Melville

Stale beer sticks to wobbling tables. The cigarette machine flashes in the corner, mocking smokers who never have any change on them. There's no natural light in this pub, so it's dark and gloomy. The pain on the face of the staff tells its own story: overworked, underpaid, exploited and treated as expendable. I feel at home with them. They're so scared they will be fired from their terrible jobs, every time I order a beer they ask me if I want any peanuts or crisps, in case between drinks I've turned into the dreaded mystery shopper. The air is chewy and weighs heavy on the skin. The fruit machines in the corners don't make a sound, aware this is the last stop saloon for the drunk few who can't afford to gamble properly. Everyone here is down to their last pint and pound. — Craig Stone

Sometimes it helps to live through it," I told her. "Find a time when nobody will bother you, and imagine it. Imagine the worst-case scenario in as much detail as you can manage. Let yourself live through it; feel the fear, feel the pain. It's a terrible thing to put yourself through, but once it's done, the anxiety goes away. It never disappears completely, but it leaves you alone enough so you can function. — Ilona Andrews

I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my office and the Rosary but the words are empty - dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair. — Morris L. West

Some team! The Chief was doing so many jobs alone. I'd fix on the Chief's raw, rope-burned palms or all the gray hairs collected in his sink, and I'd suffer this terrible side pain that Kiwi said was probably an ulcer and Ossie diagnosed as lovesickness. Or rather a nausea produced by the "black fruit" of love - a terror that sprouted out of your love for someone like rotting oranges on a tree branch. Osceola knew all about this black fruit, she said, because she'd grown it for our mother, our father, Grandpa Sawtooth, even me and Kiwi. Loving a ghost was different, she explained - that kind of love was a bare branch. I pictured this branch curving inside my sister: something leafless and complete, elephantine, like a white tusk. No rot, she was saying, no fruit. You couldn't lose a ghost to death. — Karen Russell

He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and it's beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for he vision of a single flower. — Cormac McCarthy

Frank thought. Each time he became someone else's spy it got easier. The ideological virgin usually finds his first time an excruciating experience, just as an amateur hiker, used to the straight-and-narrow freeway of nine-to-five reliability, looks askance at the boulder-strewn path of mercenary betrayal, winding on up into the clouds and down into terrible moraines. But after the first time, the pain and intimacy and guilt becomes a habit subject to check listed procedures; and to the professional, the politically promiscuous soul, all that matters is the craft itself, the right skitter and stab and swing of the hips, so that in the end you can laugh at the inevitability of your own violent death. Frank was now almost at that stage. — William T. Vollmann

DUMBLEDORE: You ask me, of all people, how to protect a boy in terrible danger? We cannot protect the young from harm. Pain must and will come. HARRY: So I'm supposed to stand and watch? DUMBLEDORE: No. You're supposed to teach him how to meet life. — J.K. Rowling

During the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of torture. His — Oscar Wilde

If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! (p. 225) — Andre Aciman

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals. — Susan Sontag

He glanced up at her and somehow he'd come back to himself, contained all that terrible sorrow and anger and fear, enough to make ten strong men fall down like babes. Maximus held it all inside of him and straightened his shoulders, his chin level, and Artemis couldn't understand it - where he got the strength to hide that awful, bloody wound in his soul - but she admired him for it.
Admired him and loved him.
She felt an answering wound open within her own soul, a kind of faint reflection of all the pain he'd endured, just because she cared for him. — Elizabeth Hoyt

He felt his hunger no longer as a pain but as a tide. He felt it rising in himself through time and darkness, rising through the centuries, and he knew that it rose in a line of men whose lives were chosen to sustain it, who would wander in the world, strangers from that violent country where the silence is never broken except to shout the truth. He felt it building from the blood of Abel to his own, rising and spreading in the night, a red-gold tree of fire ascended as if it would consume the darkness in one tremendous burst of flame. The boy's breath went out to meet it. He knew that this was the fire that had encircled Daniel, that had raised Elijah from the earth, that had spoken to Moses and would in the instant speak to him. He threw himself to the ground and with his face against the dirt of the grave, he heard the command. GO WARN THE CHILDREN OF GOD OF THE TERRIBLE SPEED OF MERCY. The words were as silent as seed opening one at a time in his blood. — Flannery O'Connor

I digress, but here's the rub: The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint. Your Hazel is alive, Waters, and you mustn't impose your will upon another's decision, particularly a decision arrived at thoughtfully. She wishes to spare you pain, and you should let her. You may not find young Hazel's logic persuasive, but I have trod through this vale of tears longer than you, and from where I'm sitting, she's not a lunatic. — John Green

If we believe that this particular pain is the one that will push the baby out of the womb and into our arms, we somehow try to make a place for that pain in our heart. Pain is still there: excruciating, terrible pain. But at the moment of birth, we rarely feel betrayal or rage; we somehow feel that this is simply pain that has come with life. — Wayne Muller

In this life our sorrows are either not very long or not very great because nature either overcomes them by habits or puts an end to them by sinking under their weight. But in hell the torments cannot be overcome by habit, for while they are of terrible intensity they are at the same time of continual variety, each pain, so to speak, taking fire from another and re-endowing that which has enkindled it with a still fiercer flame. — James Joyce

The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils. But I do not think they are ... All men die, and most men miserably. That two soldiers on opposite sides, each believing his own country to be in the right, each at the moment when his selfishness is most in abeyance and his will to sacrifice in the ascendant, should kill [each] other in plain battle seems to me by no means one of the most terrible things in this terrible world. — C.S. Lewis

You write so beautifully
the inside of your mind must be a terrible place — Unknown

There are some who would vow that life isn't fair. They believe the worst is yet to come, that evil will always conquer good, and that we have no control over our fate. It's true, there are storms that shake our foundations and monsters that threaten to tear us limb from limb. We will make terrible mistakes. We will fall short of our expectations. No one is exempt from pain and fear. But life, and what comes after, is a beautiful mixture of darkness and light, sacrifice and salvation. There is no fine line between the two, for both are needed. Where there is grief, there will be joy. Where there is heartbreak, love will follow. — Rebecca Harris

But feelings, no matter how strong or "ugly," are not a part of who you are. They are the radio stations your mind listens to if you don't give it something better to do. Feelings are fluid and dynamic; they change frequently.
Feelings are something you HAVE, not something you ARE. Like physical beauty, a cold sore, or an opinion.
Admitting you feel rage or terrible pain or regret or some old, rotten blame does not mean these feelings are part of who you are as a person. What these feelings mean is, you have to change your thinking to be free of them. — Augusten Burroughs

Humans create terrible things. Why do they make things that only bring them pain? It's because they don't know what's comfortable anymore. So perhaps they don't know that they are in pain ... — CLAMP

Terrible beautiful combination of happiness and pain. — Kristin Hannah

The crimes in my books are committed by people who can't keep it together any more. They do something to express their own pain, and that has a terrible effect on somebody else. — Sophie Hannah

I had this terrible feeling that every woman who knew anything about anything was tired of Sylvia Plath, tired of her blood and bees and the level of narcissistic self-pity required to compare her father to Hitler- but I'd been left behind. I hadn't gotten the highbrow girl-memo: Don't Read the Girls Who Cried Pain. — Leslie Jamison

Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horror as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams. — Bram Stoker

Alzheimer's is a horrible thing. Some people are naive about it. They think, 'Oh it's just your memory,' but my mother was in terrible pain. Your body closes down. She didn't know if she'd eaten or if she wanted to eat. She couldn't remember how to walk. Towards the end, she didn't know us. It came gradually, then it got worse. — Bonnie Tyler

This was how it could be done. This was how you lived with a terrible secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine. You ignored the deep, cramplike pain in your stomach. You somehow anesthetized yourself so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either. — Liane Moriarty

I stood with my mom in the cemetery. She felt terrible pain. My grandmother is with God. My mom has to continue living. It's not so easy, moving forward. — Tucker Elliot

He was a flame and she'd gotten burned, and the pain was terrible, yet it didn't make the fire any less alluring. — Jennifer Donnelly

But once in a great while he remembered that he had felt pain, a terrible ache in his heart, and he swore he would never let himself feel love for a human again. — Susan Cooper

I'd made my sea garden to atone for the terrible wrong I had done to a man I loved, I said. Sometimes you have to do something with your pain because otherwise it will swallow — Rachel Joyce

Laugh at yourself and at life. Not in the spirit of derision or whining self-pity, but as a remedy, a miracle drug, that will ease your pain, cure your depression, and help you to put in perspective that seemingly terrible defeat ... Never take yourself too seriously. — Og Mandino

Willow sees her before any of the others. A walking skeleton, the victim of some terrible wasting disease, like something out of the history books, a death camp survivor. It takes Willow a moment to realize that the girl is none of those things. She's just a girl, a girl like Willow, who's chosen to inflict terrible pain on herself. Only this girl's weapon isn't a razor, it's starvation. — Julia Hoban

In spite of the terrible pain I was in, I tried to help name the hot sauces. For the allegedly mild one, which tasted like nuclear fall-out, I suggested Hot as Fuck. For the medium one, which tasted like seven lit cigarettes applied firmly to the tongue, I suggested You'd Have to Be an Idiot to Try This, and for the Scorpion sauce, which was so hot I think it gave me permanent nerve damage, I suggested Lawsuit Followed by Complete Financial Collapse.

She ignored all my suggestions... — Susan Juby

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

I believe a man is born first unto himself - for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers. — D.H. Lawrence

No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul. — C.S. Lewis

He who bears injustice alone is terrible to behold. — Friedrich Nietzsche

People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will "lessen as time passes," but it isn't true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn't be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it. — Fredrik Backman

And then, being Rose Hathaway, I said something I really shouldn't have to the boy. "You should go punch him and find out."
Jonathan's mother screamed again, but he was a fast little bastard, eluding her grasp. He ran up to Dimitri before anyone could stop him - well, I could have - and pounded his tiny fist against Dimitri's knee.
Then, with the same reflexes that allowed him to dodge enemy attacks, Dimitri immediately feinted falling backward, as though Jonathan had knocked him over. Clutching his knee, Dimitri groaned as though he were in terrible pain. — Richelle Mead

Her time has come," answered Miss Lizzie. "That's why I didn't marry Harvey - long ago when he asked me. I was afraid of 'that'. So afraid." "I don't know," Miss Lizzie said. "Sometimes I think it's better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than just to be safe." She waited until the next scream died away. "At least she knows she's living. — Betty Smith

Even at this stage, my preparations were like strapping on a parachute in an airplane that was about to crash; the whole time I was preparing to hurl myself out the door, I clung to the hope that something would happen at the last minute to forestall that terrible necessity I felt-not hostility, as psychiatric texts would say, or vengeful rage, or a desire for attention. This was done in secret, out of a need to alleviate pain which was as implacable as thirst. — Tracy Thompson

She'd fucked him over hardcore. She'd betrayed him and she'd lied to him, and she knew that as far as he was concerned she'd led him on and used him as well, had consorted with people who wanted to see him dead and given them information to help them make him so. Most of all, she'd hurt him. And if the pain in her chest was anything close to what he'd felt, she was more than willing to admit he deserved to get his own back. Was willing to do more than admit it; was willing to take it, in the hopes he'd eventually decide she'd been punished enough and they could maybe move on. — Stacia Kane

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again. — Sylvia Plath

For he alone, as the only all-gracious Son of an all-gracious Father, in accordance with the purpose of his Father's benevolence, has willingly put on the nature of us who lay prostrate in corruption, and like some excellent physician, who for the sake of saving them that are ill, examines their sufferings, handles their foul sores, and reaps pain for himself from the miseries of another, so us who were not only diseased and afflicted with terrible ulcers and wounds already mortified, but were even lying among the dead, he has saved for himself from the very jaws of death. For none other of those in heaven had such power as without harm to minister to the salvation of so many. — Eusebius

How terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed! — E.A. Bucchianeri

There are some arts which to those that possess them are painful, but to those that use them are helpful, a common good to laymen, but to those that practise them grievous. Of such arts there is one which the Greeks call medicine. For the medical man sees terrible sights, touches unpleasant things, and the misfortunes of others bring a harvest of sorrows that are peculiarly his; but the sick by means of the art rid themselves of the worst of evils, disease, suffering, pain and death. — Hippocrates

Burn wounds always elicited pain more terrible than anything else he had ever endured. He didn't relish the idea of forcing himself to suffer through such agony. But it was necessary. Earth depended on them taking possession of the key. "It's the only way out," Andrew reminded him.
"I understand that, but - "
"The trials we have faced thus far have been minimal," Andrew said, cutting off Sebastian's retort. "What we seek is the key to the universe. You didn't expect it to be easy, did you? — Laura Kreitzer

I know some people that have gone through serious struggles. People that were close to me, and I've seen some terrible things about people who lose it. So I think that type of pain is something that's human and that, actually, can help us look at ourselves a little bit. — Darren Aronofsky

A half-dozen or so FBI techies and LAPD homicide detectives were still on the scene. The latest Pearl Jam played from somebody's radio. The lead singer seemed to be in terrible pain. — James Patterson

He could almost hear the wail of pain that went up from his heart. It was a sharp terrible personal pain the kind of pain that comes only when someone to whom you have never done any harm turns on you and says goodbye goodbye forever without any reason for doing it. Without any reason at all. — Dalton Trumbo

We twist and turn, we plead and beg, we offer our tormentor what he wants so that the hurting will stop. And when there is no torturer to placate, no hooded man with hot irons and tongs, just a burn you can't escape, we bargain with God, or ourselves, depending on the size of our egos. I made mock of the dying at Mabberton and now their ghosts watched me burn. Take the pain, I said, and I will be a good man. Or if not that, a better man. We all become weasels with enough hurt on us. But I thing a small part of it was more than that. A small part was that terrible two-edged sword called experience, cutting away at the cruel child I was, carving out whatever man might be yet to come. I promised a better one. Though I have been known to lie. — Mark Lawrence

However, at fourteen years old, she didn't understand that all those terrible troubles the heroines in her books went through in real life hurt.
That the words were just words on a page, but in real life, the pain was immense. Trials and tribulations to prove your love were exactly that, trials and tribulations. — Kristen Ashley

I must say, I'm ready to go into the forest. I am ready to go in. It is time for me to enter the forest and lie down, and let the lions come for me. I've done enough, I think, I've had a good life, and I'm in such terrible pain just now. — Teju Cole

I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe. — Robert Anton Wilson

Grief was for the others; sorrow and pain were for the others; some terrible mistake had been made. — John Cheever

Realizing she was only wearing a towel, she said, 'Leave.'
'I tried to. Couldn't do it. A conscience is a terrible thing to acquire. Like it or not, you and I are going to be bonded.'
'Bonded?' She shook her head, only to realize that any kind of movement made the pain worse.
His gaze swept over her towel-covered body 'It could be worse. You could be ugly.'
'Get out of my bathroom! — C.C. Hunter

Subjecting prisoners to abuse leads to bad intelligence because under torture a detainee will tell his interrogator anything to make the pain stop, ... Second, mistreatment of our prisoners endangers U.S. troops who might be captured by the enemy ... And third, prisoner abuses exact on us a terrible toll in the war of ideas because inevitably these abuses become public. — John McCain

No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal - but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell. — Philip Ball

The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite. — Bertrand Russell

Duty o'er love was the choice you did make
My love you did spurn, my heart you did break
Your penance to pay, no pride you shall gain
Three sons on three sons find nothing but pain
I gift you my powers in memory of me
The joy of love no son shall ever see
When a Lifemate is chosen by the heart of a son
No protection can be given, again I have won
His pain will be deep, her death will be swift
Inside his heart a terrible rift
Only freely given will this curse be done
To break the spell, three must work as one. — Cherry Adair

Some imaginations help to break the bondage of the rest. The whole universe is imagination, but one set of imaginations will cure another set. Those that tell us that there is sin and sorrow and death in the world are terrible. But the other set - thou art holy, there is God, there is no pain - these are good, and help to break the bondage of the others. The highest imagination that can break all the links of the chain is that of the Personal God. — Swami Vivekananda

Beautiful is thy wristlet, decked with stars and cunningly wrought in myriad-coloured jewels. But more beautiful to me thy sword with its curve of lightning like the outspread wings of the divine bird of Vishnu, perfectly poised in the angry red light of the sunset.
It quivers like the one last response of life in ecstasy of pain at the final stroke of death; it shines like the pure flame of being burning up earthly sense with one fierce flash.
Beautiful is thy wristlet, decked with starry gems; but thy sword, O lord of thunder, is wrought with uttermost beauty, terrible to behold or think of. — Rabindranath Tagore

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable. — Hypatia

For a time, it would work well. then it worked less and my pain was more. I would go through wild bouts of depression, horrible comedowns. I understand why kids kill themselves. I absolutely do. You feel terrible. You feel soul-less. "I'll never do it to my child". — Channing Tatum

A pain exploded up high in her chest and spit her out of this terrible world. — Ann Patchett