Henry Ossawa Tanner Quotes

Fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.

The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.

After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken.

Stress is a form of suffering.

We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.

I think emotional and mental pain is probably worse than physical pain. I think we don't realize that I have no arms or legs but we all have disabilities of some sort, some fear, some lost, some wishes that didn't come true, things we wish would be better.

THIS TORTURE Why should we tell you our love stories when you spill them together like blood in the dirt? Love is a pearl lost on the ocean floor, or a fire we can’t see, but how does saying that push us through the top of the head into the light above the head? Love is not an iron pot, so this boiling energy won’t help. Soul, heart, self. Beyond and within those is one saying, How long before I’m free of this torture!

Mr. Solomon was right the worst kind of torture is watching someone you love get hurt.

He sobbed in desperation at the burden of fear he carried with him every day of his life.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

The words went round and round and round in my mind and my body, until I knew they were no longer my words but something that had been carved into my heart. And now my soul was crying.

I was not wounded in any part of my body, but I had never experienced such intense pain, such a ripping of the nerves, such an ache of the heart.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

There's some things I can't write about, just terrible personal tragedies.

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure

I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.

Nobody knows the pain I've been through.

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.

Can’t sleep ‘cause all the dirt make my heart hurt

After each dream, Frankie woke with a start, soaked in tears. But she found no relief in the peaceful silence of her room, because there everything was real. And the guilt was too immense to bear. Each time she opened her eyes, she'd quickly shut them. And wish that she had woken up for the very last time.