Quotes & Sayings About Unbearable Things

But pain may be a gift to us. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift. — Sue Miller

Sometimes things seem so unbearable in the middle of the night, don't they? In the middle of the night, we're all such children. — Gabrielle Zevin

Don't let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you. Don't fill your mind with all the bad things that might still happen. Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself why it's so unbearable and can't be survived." - MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 8.36 — Ryan Holiday

The worst part of childhood is not knowing that bad things pass, that time passes. A terrible moment in childhood hovers with s kind of eternity, unbearable. — David Vann

The things that could be derived from the sexual sphere - happiness, endless fun and the end of capitalism - were grossly overestimated. The symbolic overglorification was downright unbearable. — Volkmar Sigusch

There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it. — Elena Ferrante

It seemed, however, that I had. I didn't want any more, so I got them. And now I am glad, for if, as I had sometimes wished at that time, I could have finished with a consciousness become unbearable, if, in other words, I had then died, I would never have known a great many very beautiful and delightful things. Evidently, then, it is wise not too soon to lose patience with life, but to wait and see what it may have round its next corner. I — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Life is a journey one that much better traveled with a companion by our side. Sometimes, we lose our companions along the way and then the journey becomes unbearable. You see, human beings are designed for many things, but loneliness isn't one of them. — Mary Alice

Rock bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable ... Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world as it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not some other way. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable. — Arthur Rimbaud

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give. — Arthur Golden

I have a conscience, but it's a feeble, withered shred of a thing. It couldn't protect you or anyone else from a stiff breeze.' Glokta sighed, long and hard. The room was too hot, too bright, his eyes were sore and twitchy and he rubbed at them slowly as he spoke. 'You could not even guess at the things that I have done. Awful, evil, obscene, the telling of them alone could make you puke.' He shrugged. 'They nag at me from time to time, but I tell myself I had good reasons. The years pass, the unimaginable becomes everyday, the hideous becomes tedious, the unbearable becomes routine. I push it all into the dark corners of my mind, and it's incredible the room back there. Amazing what one can live with. — Joe Abercrombie

I had learned to dwell with pleasure as a beloved daydream on the
thought of the separation of these elements. If each I told myself could be housed in separate identities life would be relieved of all that was unbearable the unjust might go his way delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path doing the good things in which he found his pleasure and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. — Robert Louis Stevenson

It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable. — Alexis De Tocqueville

To lose such an important listener in life is like losing my shadow. With no shadow, does a person truly exist under the sun? With no listener, does a person really have a voice? Silence means so many things to human beings. Some of them are unbearable. — Reeve Lindbergh

If our view is limited to mortal life, some things become unbearable because they seem so unfair and so permanent. — Boyd K. Packer

I think I've said this before many times - that photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you had never paid any attention to. And as you photograph, one of the benefits is that the world becomes a much richer, juicier, visual place. Sometimes it is almost unbearable - it is too interesting. And it isn't always just the photos you take that matters. It is looking at the world and seeing things that you never photograph that could be photographs if you had the energy to keep taking pictures every second of your life. — Saul Leiter

Suddenly many movements are going on within me, many things are happening, there is an almost unbearable sense of sprouting, of bursting encasements, of moving kernels, expanding flesh. — Meridel Le Sueur

I was originally supposed to become an engineer but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a loathsome capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me. — Albert Einstein

We can't pray that God make our lives free of problems; this won't happen, and it is probably just as well. We can't ask Him to make us and those we love immune to diseases, because He can't do that. We can't ask Him to weave a magic spell around us so that bad things will only happen to other people, and never to us.
People who pray for miracles usually don't get miracles, any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or good boyfriends get them as a result of praying. But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of they have lost, very often find their prayer answered. — Harold S. Kushner

The ideas of justice of Europe and Africa are not the same and those of the one world are unbearable to the other. To the African there is but one way of counter-balancing the catastrophes of existence, it shall be done by replacement; he does not look for the motive of an action. Whether you lie in wait for your enemy and cut his throat in the dark; or you fell a tree, and a thoughtless stranger passes by and is killed; so far as punishment goes, to the Native mind, it is the same thing. A loss has been brought upon the community and must be made up for, somewhere, by somebody. The Native will not give time or thought to the weighing of guilt or desert; either he fears that this may lead him too far, or he reasons that such things are no concerns of his. But he will devote himself, in endless speculations, to the method by which crime or disaster shall be weighed up in sheep and goats - time does not count to him; he leads you solemnly into a sacred maze of sophistry. — Karen Blixen

Montmorency's ambition in life, is to get in the way and be sworn at. If he can squirm in anywhere where he particularly is not wanted, and be a perfect nuisance, and make people mad, and have things thrown at his head, then he feels his day has not been wasted.
To get somebody to stumble over him, and curse him steadily for an hour, is his highest aim and object; and, when he has succeeded in accomplishing this, his conceit becomes quite unbearable. — Jerome K. Jerome

If we are overly sensitive, we will be quick to anger. More generally, says Seneca, if we coddle ourselves, if we allow ourselves to be corrupted by pleasure, nothing will seem bearable to us, and the reason things will seem unbearable is not because they are hard but because we are soft. — William B. Irvine

And I know, knew for sure, with an absolute certainty, that this is rock bottom, this what the worst possible thing feels like. It is not some grand, wretched emotional breakdown. It is, in fact, so very mundane: ... Rock Bottom is an inability to cope with the commonplace that is so extreme it makes even the grandest and loveliest things unbearable ... Rock bottom is feeling that the only thing that matters in all of life is the one bad moment ... Rock bottom is everything out of focus. It's a failure of vision, a failure to see the world how it is, to see the good in what it is, and only to wonder why the hell things look the way they do and not - and not some other way. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

There's nothing like a deadline to get the old blood flowing. All the juices, really. It doesn't follow, if you think about it. You'd assume certain things ... certain activities ... would become unimportant. Certain betrayals would become unbearable. But they don't really. In fact, quite the opposite. Everything takes on a new light. The impossible becomes possible, desirable even. It's quite remarkable. — Walter Wykes

I don't understand. She's always been so friendly toward me."
"Yes, so long as your work consisted of updating calendars and photocopying golf club bylaws."
"But there was no danger of my taking her place!"
"She was never afraid of that."
"Then why denounce me? Why would it upset her if I went to work for you?"
"Miss Mori struggled for years to get the job she has now. She probably found it unbearable for you to get that sort of promotion after being with the company only ten weeks."
"I can't believe it. That's just so ... mean."
"All I can say is that she suffered greatly during the first few years she was here."
"So she wants me to suffer the same fate? It's too pathetic. I must talk to her."
"Do you really think that's a good idea?"
"Of course. How else are we going to work things out if we don't talk?"
"You just talked to Mister Omochi. Does it strike you that things have been worked out? — Amelie Nothomb

If only we were wiser or better people, perhaps the gods would explain to us the mad, unbearable things they do. — Orson Scott Card

The things we hope in sustain us during our daily walk. They uphold us through trials, temptations, and sorrow. Everyone has experienced discouragement and difficulty. Indeed, there are times when the darkness may seem unbearable. It is in these times that the divine principles of the restored gospel we hope in can uphold us and carry us until, once again, we walk in the light. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

A smile that made his need to kiss her almost unbearable, his heart doing things inside his chest that he was sure weren't in the least macho. He couldn't find it in himself to care, because when Charlotte smiled that way, it destroyed him. — Nalini Singh

Wonder is the sense, which comes in a flash but won't go away, that things are not as straightforward as they seem, that the ordinary way, or explanation and argument leaves you with unbearable contradictions and impossibilities. — Eva Brann

No one had told her this would happen, that her girlishness would give way to the solid force of wifehood, motherhood. The choices available were all imperfect. If you chose to be with someone, you often wanted to be alone. If you chose to be alone, you often felt the unbearable need for another body - not necessarily for sex, but just to rub your foot, to sit across the table, to drop his things around the room in a way that was maddening but still served as a reminder that he was there. — Meg Wolitzer

Think about the world the way it is now. Each generation mourns for the golden years of their youth. Each generation weeps that times have never been so bad. Then their children grow old and wail that things have become even more unbearable. Their golden years are the previous generation's worst days. — James Derry

THERE WAS THIS, too: I was not longer encumbered by my wife and mother-in-law. Why did I keep them at home so long, even though it was plain that they were making the lives of my children unbearable?
It could be, I suppose, because somewhere in the back of my mind I believed that there might really be a big book in which all things were written, and that I wanted some impressive proof that I could be compassionate recorded there. — Kurt Vonnegut

It had been unbearable to hear those things, and even though she had wept in his arms afterwards, and apologized, they were in the air when he was alone, and there was no unsaying them. — Rachel Joyce

Loneliness is a long, unbearable pain ... There was never a place for me in the scheme of things ... I had become a living fantasy on a theme in dark, endless dirges ... I made another world, and real men would enter it and they would never really get hurt at all in the vivid, unreal laws of the dream. I caused dreams which caused death. This is my crime. — Dennis Nilsen

5Our standard of living, our very survival here, is based upon raw exploitation of working-class women - white black, and third world - in all parts of the world. Our hands are not clean. We must also come to terms with the that still largely unexamined, undisclosed faith in the idea of America, that no matter how unbearable it is here, it is better than anywhere else; that's slippage between third world and third rate. We eat bananas. Buy flowers. Use salt to flavour our food. Drink sweetened coffee. Use tires for the cars we drive. Depend upon state-of-the-art electronics. Travel. We consume and rely upon multiple choice to reify consumption. All those things that give material weight to idea of America - conflating capitalism and democracy, demarcating 'us' from 'them'. — M. Jacqui Alexander

If goodness can't come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable. — David Levithan

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

I did hate those people ... those false artists whose work consists of the poses they strike: saying outrageous things, cultivating complicated tastes and appetites, being artificial, irritating, unbearable. People who, in fact, take from art only what is false and external ... — Mario De Sa-Carneiro

A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possesses at least two things besides: gratitude and purity. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Come, what do we gain by evasions? We are under the harrow and can't escape. Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. And how or why did such a reality blossom (or fester) here and there into the terrible phenomenon called consciousness? Why did it produce things like us who can see it and, seeing it, recoil in loathing? Who (stranger still) want to see it and take pains to find it out, even when no need compels them and even though the sight of it makes an incurable ulcer in their hearts? People like H. herself, who would have truth at any price. — C.S. Lewis

When things get unbearable, I wrap myself into a tight ball and shut my eyes. Every muscle in my body is tense. I open my eyes and I'm still where I was when I closed them to escape. Nothing's changed. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I know things are unbearable but in spite of that we have to bear them. — Margaret Mahy

I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture - a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard. — David Foster Wallace

And what's so bad about your being deprived of that? ... All things seem unbearable to people who have become spoilt, who have become soft through a life of luxury, ailing more in the mind than they ever are in the body. — Seneca.

Purgatory basically means that God can put the pieces back together again. That He can cleanse us in such a way that we are able to be with Him and can stand there in the fullness of life. Purgatory strips off from one person what is unbearable and from another the inability to bear certain things, so that in each of them a pure heart is revealed, and we can see that we all belong together in one enormous symphony of being. — Pope Benedict XVI

He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being. — Vladimir Nabokov

This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won't just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy. — Jenny Offill

He felt closer to dust, he said, then to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places were things remain undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness. — W.G. Sebald

Of all things I find most unbearable is the injustice of one generation to another. — Joyce Cary

Many people put up with things that are unpleasant but tolerable, rather than changing them; their situation needs to become unbearable before they take action — Brendan Brazier

Identity confusion... is as if somebody lost their mental road map and has no appreciation of who they are or what is going on in their life. They may know they know but become blustered or baffled as to why they don't. The information is inaccessible and likely would remind a person about things that have gone on in their life that are simply unacceptable and unknowable, in a given moment, because of the emotional gravity involved. — Richard A Chefetz

In order not to find life unbearable, you must accept two things: the ravages of time and the injustices of man. — Nicolas Chamfort

I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of it's very truth, and then I have to change it. I tell her that I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can't-I don't have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wished they happened.
She says, "Yes, there are lives sadder than the saddest of books." I say, "Yes. No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as a life. — Agota Kristof

We kissed for a bit and I stopped shaking. We played with each other for a long time, and after we had joined, my cock and her fanny became one thing, then it seemed to vanish as we took off on a big psychic trip together. It was our souls and our minds that were doing it all; our genitals, our bodies, they were just launch pads and were soon superfluous as we went around the universe together on our shared trip, moving in and out of each other's heads and finding nothing in them but good things, nothing in them but love. The intensity increased until it became almost unbearable and we exploded together in an orgasmic crash-landing onto the shipwreck of a bed, from a long way out in some form of space. We held each other tightly, drenched in sweat and shaking with emotion — Irvine Welsh

The first five minutes in Gramacho is really overwhelming because all of your senses are being attacked. Visually, too, because your eyes move and see fragments of things you recognize, but not quite, so it's very artistic. Your eyes are moving, then there's the smell, and the noise is unbearable. — Vik Muniz

For times when you feel pain:
See that it doesn't disgrace you, or degrade your
intelligence - doesn't keep it from acting rationally or
unselfishly.
And in most cases what Epicurus said should help: that
pain is neither unbearable nor unending, as long as you keep
in mind its limits and don't magnify them in your imagination.
And keep in mind too that pain often comes in disguise
as drowsiness, fever, loss of appetite ... When you're
bothered by things like that, remind yourself: I'm giving in
to pain. — Marcus Aurelius

Josh, you saw him," Tally says, "What did he look like? Did he look nice?"
"He looked like a person," Josh grunts.
"Don't be a spoilsport," Tally says, and Caid hears her smack Josh on the arm.
"Shortish, blondish, thinish," Josh says.
"Thank you, Josh," Caid says, "Your way with words astounds me yet again."
"Well, whatever," Tally says. "What did you guys talk about? You said he's nice?"
"We talked about a lot of things. And yeah, he's - I mean, we traded numbers, so hopefully he'll call."
"I hope so, too," Tally says. "I'm glad you have somebody to hang out with now."
"Because I was such horrible company?" Josh says, voice thick and deep like he's got a mouthful of ice cream.
"I wouldn't say horrible," Caid says. "Unbearable, maybe. Like one of those YouTube videos that never loads." And with that, he shoots a shit-eating grin in Josh's direction, and shovels a spoonful of ice cream into his mouth. — Seventhswan

I thought about the earth then, really thought about it, the tsunami's and earthquakes and volcanoes, all the horrors I haven't witnessed but have changed my life, the lives of everyone I know, all the people I'll never know. I thought about life without the sun, the moon, stars, without flowers and warm days in May. I thought about a year ago and all the good things I'd taken for granted and all the unbearable things that had replaced those simple blessings. And even though I hated the thought of crying in from of Syl, tears streamed down my face. — Susan Beth Pfeffer

Behold how this drop of seawater
has taken so many forms and names;
it has existed as mist, cloud, rain, dew, and mud,
then plant, animal, and Perfect man;
and yet it was a drop of water
from which these things appeared.
Even so this universe of reason, soul, heavens, and bodies,
was but a drop of water in its beginning and ending.

...When a wave strikes it, the world vanishes;
and when the appointed time comes to heaven and stars,
their being is lost in not being. — Mahmud Shabistari

Memories can be vile. Repulsive little brutes, like children I suppose. But can we live without them? Memories are what our reason is based upon. If we can't face them, we deny reason itself! Although, why not? We aren't contractually tied down to rationality. There is no sanity clause. So when you find yourself locked down in an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember: There's always madness. You can just step outside and close the door, and all those dreadful things that happened, you can lock them away. Madness ... is an emergency exit. — Alan Moore

The war had made a man of him! It had coarsened him and hardened him. There was no other way to look at it. It had made him reach a point at which he would no longer stand unbearable things. — Ford Madox Ford

Humor can help you cope with the unbearable so that you can stay on the bright side of things until the bright side actually comes along. — Allen Klein

We all wanted this because let's face it, it's so inspiring and such a relief when people find a way to bear the unbearable, when you can organize things in such a way that a tiny miracle appears to have taken place and that love has once again turn out to be bigger than fear and death and blindness. — Anne Lamott

Stories are masks of God.
That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.
Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.
Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.
So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them. — Melanie Tem