Clifford Geertz Quotes

Suffering has roused them from the sleep of gentle life, and every day fills them with a terrible intoxication. They are now something more than themselves; those we loved were merely happy shadows.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

It's not easy to find a topic. Talking of home is painful. Talking of the present unbearable.

Pain comes from the darkness. And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

I don't want to be a victim. I don't want to disappear into the darkness.

What are they going to do to me that they haven't done already? They took away my entire past. They took away my entire future. What's left for them to take?

Suicide doesn't solve your problems. It only makes them infinitely, un-countably worse.

For death is not the worst, but when one wants to die and is not able even to have that.

At that level, every goal is like a knife in the ribs.

That's painful always to lose.

The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?

Pain is a beautiful thing. When you feel pain, you know you're alive.

I've been through cancer, divorce, loss and bereavement, but they are things most humans go through.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

I think quite often a fate worse than death is life, for lots of people.

When you're young, all the accidents, all the pain you take them, but at least you're very strong. In fact through time, it's just adding more and more pain, more and more loss and it makes you more fragile.

In 2001, my father finally succumbed to the bone cancer that had tortured him for seven years. His last weeks were a terrible, black icing on the cake, the agony, the slow twisting, thinning and snapping of his skeleton. Everything fell apart.

War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.

Football's cruel sometimes.

Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. Nothing is the worst thing that can happen to us!

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

Not one has shown an iota of fear of death. They want to end this agony.

The word 'suffering' is not in my vocabulary.

Sometimes to realize you were well, someone must come along and hurt you.

Pain is love.