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Quote by Katherine Center

“You let your grief make you bitter. You let your suffering make you cruel. Want to know what that makes you? A villain. That's every comic book villain ever! They suffer, and then they inflict suffering on others. Good guys do the opposite. Good guys suffer, too - but they respond by helping.”

Quote by Katherine Center

Work

Things You Save in a Fire

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Author

Katherine Center
Katherine Center

Katherine Center is an American author born on March 4, 1972. Her works are known for their warmth, humor, and profound emotional depth, which have won her a wide readership. more

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“What we think of as acts of cruelty are in reality nothing of the kind. Someone from the Middle Ages would still find the whole style of our present-day life abhorrent, but cruel, horrifying and barbaric in a quite different way. Every age, every culture, every ethos and tradition has a style of its own, has the varieties of gentleness and harshness, of beauty and cruelty that are appropriate to it. Each age will take certain kinds of suffering for granted, will patiently accept certain wrongs. Human life becomes a real hell of suffering only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. Required to live in the Middle Ages, someone from the Graeco-Roman period would have died a wretched death by suffocation, just as a savage inevitably would in the midst our civilisation. Now, there are times when a whole generation gets caught to such an extent between two eras, two styles of life, that nothing comes naturally to it since it has lost all sense of morality, security and innocence. A man of Nietzsche's mettle had to endure our present misery more than a generation in advance. Today, thousands are enduring what he had to suffer alone and without being understood.”

“Mother Teresa with almost pragmatic efficiency had brought together two perceived needs: the need for a kind of power house of prayer o the part of her Missionaries of Charity; and the need of the sick and suffering to find a meaning to their existence. Over and above this, however, many of the Sick and Suffering links became living witnesses to Mother Teresa's conviction that suffering could draw people closer to God. The letters of the Sick and Suffering bore such eloquent witness to her belief that 'suffering begets life in the soul' that in 1983 Mother Teresa would take the unusual step of actually suggesting that they should be published. The reason she gave was less uncharacteristic: 'It will help many people to love Jesus more.;”

“Parvatibai had heard that the gods visit trials and travails upon mankind to test them. Test what? Their faith, their loyalty, their fortitude, their capacity for suffering? She thought that this was what rotten parents did: they did not know how to handle their impotence and rage against their partners, fate or the world and so beat their children and said it was for their own good. She had no idea what good ensued from piling hardship upon hardship, evil and torture. If watching people lose heart, break down and squirm, gave the gods pleasure, then they were stranger than men and women.”