The man who has not suffered - what does he know anyway?

A man deep-wounded may feel too much pain To feel much anger.

His tears reached deep inside and tore great chunks from what was left of his heart.

Sometimes God comforts us directly, but that's not His only strategy. Normally He comforts us through His people—so if our lives aren't open to one another, they're closed to the Father's comfort. Let's share our lives; let's fellowship in suffering so that we can fellowship in His mercy.

Where is God in suffering? He's in it with us, and in it for us.

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

The tragic loneliness black women consistently face as we stand before judgmental others—sometimes white, but sometimes black; sometimes male, but sometimes female—demands that we have some wisdom, experience, and some passion with which to combat this abuse.

Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care any more, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner's psychological reactions, and which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings. By means of this insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell.

men who comforted others and who gave away their last piece of bread who survived the longest — and who offered proof that everything can be taken away from us except the ability to choose our attitude in any given set of circumstances.

But for pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects; and sounds very remote and then very close; flesh being gashed and blood spurting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.

The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled.

He was drowned, he used to say, and lying on a cliff with gulls screaming over him. He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea. Or he was hearing music… But "Lovely!" he used to cry and the tears would run down his cheeks, which was to her the most dreadful thing of all, to see a man like Septimus, who had fought, who was brave, crying. And he would lie listening until suddenly he would cry that he was falling down, down into the flames!