Pain and Despair

That which does not kill me makes me stronger.

The deeper the feeling, the greater the pain.

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.

 

No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well,—parent, child, brother, sister, intimate.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

Someone asked Sophocles, “How is your sex-life now? Are you still able to have a woman?” He replied, “Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped from a mad and savage master.”

Why love if losing hurts so much we love to know that we are not alone.

Discouragement is simply the despair of wounded self-love.

The curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life.

It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognize that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. . . . To ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.

Wearing all that weight

 

God has pity on kindergarten children. He has less pity on school children. And on grownups he has no pity at all, he leaves them alone, and sometimes they must crawl on all fours in the burning sand to reach the first-aid station covered with blood.

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the sorrow comes with years?

I am the wound and the knife! I am the blow and the cheek! I am the limbs and the wheel— The victim and the executioner! 6

God strengthen me to bear myself; That heaviest weight of all to bear, Inalienable weight of care.

How can I die alone. Where will I be then who am now alone, what groans so pathetically in this room where I am alone?

The light is buried under chains and noises in impudent challenge of rootless science. Through the suburbs sleepless people stagger, as though just delivered from a shipwreck of blood.

The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off?

Knowledge by suffering entereth, And life is perfected by death.

History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

I am Goya of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged till the craters of my eyes gape I am grief I am the tongue of war, the embers of cities on the snows of the year 1941 I am hunger

 

Human life begins on the far side of despair.