Aaron Anderson

52 Poignant Quotes About Pain That Will Remind You You're Never Alone

For when you feel like you're the only one alive who's hurting. 
Heidi Priebe
June 29, 2016
“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days…Lightly, lightly—it’s the best advice ever given me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling.”
— Aldous Huxley, Island
Tagged: Life, Emotion, Trying, Grief, Pain, ENFP
“Here is the truth: It is hard to be in love 
with someone who is in love with someone else. 
I don’t know how to turn that into poetry.”
— Clementine Von Radics, Untitled
Tagged: Spilled Ink, Poetry, Love, Heartbreak, Break Up, Unrequited Love, Pain
“Maybe we feel empty because we leave pieces of ourselves in everything we used to love.”
— R. M. Drake, Berlin ArtParasites
Tagged: Love, Emptiness, Break Up, Moving On
“Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.”
— Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes
Tagged: Loneliness, Love, Belonging, Being Alone, Pain, Grief, Loss
“However good we are, however correctly we seek to lead our lives, tragedies do occur. We can blame others, look for justification, imagine how our lives would have been different without them. But none of that matters: they have happened, and that is that. From this point on, it is necessary that we review our own lives, overcome fear, and begin the process of reconstruction.”
— Paulo Coelho, Warrior Of The Light
Tagged: Tragedy, Pain, Suffering, Overcoming Pain, Moving On
“My heart might be bruised, but it will recover and become capable of seeing beauty of life once more. It's happened before, it will happen again, I'm sure.”
— Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
Tagged: Love, Pain, Loss, Grief, Breakups
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Tagged: Writing, Pain, Trauma, Healing, Honesty, expression, Self-Expression, vulnerability
“Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.”
— R. R. Martin, A Game Of Thrones
Tagged: Pain, Suffering, Grief, Trauma
“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep… that have taken hold.”
— Frodo, Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King
Tagged: Pain, Loss, Trauma, Grief, Moving On
“Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds—our stories about loneliness, rejection, grief, worthlessness—that we don’t realize they are in the past. They can’t hurt us anymore. We are protecting ourselves from losses that have already happened. It’s possible to come back. To see the life we have now. To take in the its goodness. Our goodness.”
— Geneen Roth, Women Food And God: An Unexpected Path To Almost Everything
Tagged: Pain, Grief, Stories, Perception, Worthlessness, Redemption, Acceptance, Moving On, Moving Forward
“Some of the most told stories are the ones that don’t end well, the ones that are beautiful because someone laid it all on the line, was brave and vulnerable and submitted to the human condition. If that’s your story, its time to stop running from it and start taking pride in the fact that you were strong enough to let love through.”
— Brianna Wiest, Sadness Is Just Part Of The Story
Tagged: Love, Pain, Sadness, Acceptance, Broken Heart, strength
“You are not weak just because your heart feels so heavy.”
— Andrea Gibson, The Nutritionist
Tagged: Love, Pain, Breakups, strength, Weakness
“Sometimes, the most healing thing we can do is remind ourselves 
over and over and over, 

'Other people feel this way.'”
— Andrea Gibson, The Nutritionist
Tagged: Pain, Depression, Suffering, Not Alone, Loneliness
“When your heart is broken, you plant seeds in the cracks and you pray for rain.”
— Andrea Gibson, Dive
Tagged: Love, Pain, Healing, Self-Love, Self-Help, Broken Heart, Heartbreak
“It’s just how it is sometimes. Things hurt, and they hurt for a long time. You have to fight back, or it wins.”
— Robin Benway, The Extraordinary Secrets of April, May, & June
Tagged: Pain, Heartache, Fighting Back, Suffering, Sadness, hurt
“Yet writing a poem about something painful, she has discovered, can be her way of digesting it. 'One of the things I’ve learned is, if we try and put sadness off, it just waits. And in my experience, running away from sadness doesn’t do anybody any good.'”
— Frieda Hughes, Frieda Hughes: ‘I felt my parents were stolen’
Tagged: Poetry, Writing, Literature, Pain, Sad, Loneliness, Depression
“Sometimes you’re going to have to let one person go a thousand different times, a thousand different ways, and there’s nothing pathetic or abnormal about that. You are human. ”
— Heidi Priebe, Read This If You Feel Like It's Taking You Too Long To Move On
Tagged: Letting Go, On Letting Go, When Someone Leaves, Losing The One You Love, Learning To Let Go, Loss, Moving On
“It was good for a while, being empty. I didn’t hurt anymore. But as time went on, it was like I could hear myself from far away, begging for permission to come back.”
— Myra McEntire, Hourglass
Tagged: Emptiness, Pain, Depression, Self-Concept, Emotion
“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”
— Joan Didion, Where I Came From
Tagged: Loss, Grief, Perseverence, Death
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Life, Change, Loss, Heartbreak
“Sometimes you want things to change so badly, you can’t even stand to be in the same room with the way things actually are.”
— Ali Benjamin, The Thing About Jellyfish
Tagged: Change, Resisting Change, Reality, Facing Reality, Suffering, Pain
“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Tagged: Emptiness, Loss, Love, Life
“I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love.”
— Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through The Fire
Tagged: Love, Nostalgia, Pain, Lost Love
“How can something be there
and then just not be there?

How do we forgive ourselves
for all the things we did not become?”
— Doc Luben, 14 Lines From Love Letters Or Suicide Notes
Tagged: forgiveness, Change, Pain, Loss, Grief
“Every time it rains it stops raining. Every time you hurt, you heal. After darkness, there is always light and you get reminded of this every morning but you still choose to believe that the night will last forever. Nothing lasts forever. Not the good or the bad.”
— Iain Thomas, I Wrote This For You
Tagged: Pain, Suffering, Healing, Change, Permanence, Impermanence
“We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
Tagged: Tragedy, Pain, humanity, Safety
“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”
— Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions: The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe
Tagged: Compassion, Love, Empathy, Empath, Pain, strength
“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Suffering, Pain, Healing, strength
“ You're so outraged and surprised this shitty thing happened to you that there's a piece of you that isn't yet convinced it did. You're looking for the explanation, the loophole, the bright twist in the dark tale that reverses its course. Anyone would be. It's the reason I've had to narrate my own stories of injustice about seven thousand times, as if by raging about it once more the story will change and by the end of it I won't still be the woman hanging on the end of the line.”
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Tagged: Pain, Injustice, Anger
“The reality is: sometimes you lose. And you're never too good to lose. You're never too big to lose. You're never too smart to lose. It happens.”
— Beyoncé, 20 Of Beyoncé's Best & Most Brilliant Quotes
Tagged: Reality, Loss, Confidence, strength, Letting Go