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Pain Quotes

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Pain Quotes

“Imagine that for hundreds of years your most formative traumas, your daily suffering and pain, the abuse you live through, the terror you live with, are unspeakable - not the basis of literature. You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.... You learn how to leave your body and create someone else who takes over when you cannot stand it any more. You develop a self who is ingratiating and obsequious and imitative and aggressively passive and silent - you learn, in a word, femininity.”

“I think you have to remember that Americans saw their purpose as so innately good that they could excuse the pain they would inflict on others to carry out those purposes. Because the purposes were so good, they would justify this pain we were inflicting on other people.”

People Thinking Pain Remember Purpose Literature Saws Excuse Justify Inflicting Pain

Author:Neil Sheehan

“The translator ... Peculiar outcast, ghost in the world of literature, recreating in another form something already created, creating and not creating, writing words that are his own and not his own, writing a work not original to him, composing with utmost pains and without recognition of his pains or the fact that the composition really is his own.”

World Writing Facts Pain Form Literature Creating Originals Ghost Recognition Peculiar Composition Composing Outcast Translators Writing Words

Author:Lydia Davis

“Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves, if he doesn't court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family or party apparatchiks... the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.”

People Ifs Giving Earth Pain Literature Results Party Secret Magic Destruction Court Liberation Marvelous Wrath Reproach Lumps Family Friends Disapproval

Author:Michael Chabon

“No matter what is happening in life or in the world - war, natural disaster, poor health, pain, the death of loved ones - if existence is filled with art, music and literature, life will be fulfilling, a joy.”

“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society . . . loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”

People Pain Used Literature Loses Breaths Dare Contemporary Transmit Contemporary Literature Contemporary Society

Author:Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.”

Way Art Pain Literature Can Do Essentials

Author:Elie Wiesel

“A man of pleasure is a man of pains.”

Men Pain Literature Pleasure

Book:The Complaint Or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, to which are Added a Glossary, a Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job, and a Poem on the Last Day

Source: The Complaint Or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, to which are Added a Glossary, a Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job, and a Poem on the Last Day