Pain and Despair

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.

For a man to become a poet he must be in love, or miserable.

He best can pity who has felt the woe.

Yet even in reaching for the beautiful there is beauty, and also in suffering whatever it is that one suffers en route.

Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away... A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him.

How singular is the thing called pleasure, and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it; for they never come to a man together, and yet he who pursues either of them is generally compelled to take the other. They are two, and yet they grow together out of one head or stem.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the blackness of corroding despair.

When a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go by any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal.

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags Like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

Perhaps adversity is a great teacher, but he charges a high price for his lessons, and often the profit we take from them is not worth the price they have cost us.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

But childhood, prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

When we sing the blues, we’re singing out our hearts, we’re singing out our feelings. Maybe we’re hurt and just can’t answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues.

The spirituals and the blues were not created out of sweet deceit. Spirituals and blues contain sublimated bitterness and humility, pathos and bewilderment.

As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

They’ve laughed to shield their crying then shuffled through the dreams and stepped ’n fetched a country to write the blues with screams.

Beauty can pierce one like a pain.

The deepest definition of Youth is Life as yet untouched by tragedy.