“One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things.”
Source: Best Served Cold
“It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.”
Source: Unless You Become Like This Child
“Many like to suffer, and for some, suffering can be a kind of artistic expression that challenges people and defies them with their limits, and, so, pain can be a shot to recognize the architecture and the workings of their being. (“ Rooting, hogging or... dying”)”
“Be okay with having health-essential boundaries.”
Source: Triumph: Life on the Other Side of Trials, Transplants, Transition and Transformation
“What a surprise it is to discover that you have never needed to strive to survive and be happy after all. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who discovered that she always had the means for going home, you already have what you need to be happy and safe. You have never really left Home. However, if you don't believe you already have what you need to be happy and safe, it is as if it isn't true: If we don't know the ruby slippers will take us home, it's like not having them. The ego keeps us from seeing the truth about those ruby slippers- it keeps us from seeing the truth about life. Home is right here, right now, but we may not realize it and there for not experience Home, or Essence as much as we might.”
Source: What About Now?: Reminders for Being in the Moment
“They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mother's big enough, wide enough for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of of, mother's who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.”
Source: White Oleander
“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.”
Source: The Only Story
“If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.”
Source: Anne Sexton: A Biography
“Sometimes when you get older—and I'm not talking about you, I'm talking generally, because everyone ages differently—things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they're a part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they're not true—why, then you get offended.”
Source: Water for Elephants
“We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can't relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.”
Source: Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change