Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.
Pain is the most individualized thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization only comes when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us away by himself Only individuals can suffer.
A Roman divorced from his wife, being highly blamed by his friends, who demanded, "Was she not chaste? Was she not fair? Was she not fruitful?" holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was not new and well made. "Yet," added he, "none of you can tell where it pinches me.''
My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be more terrible by the same degree.
No one knows whom the shoe pinches - no one.
Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches
The modern parallel in discrimination is “only the victims of discrimination can really know how bad it is.”
I can't write about your pain; I only know my own.
No man limps because another is hurt.
All people believe their suffering is greater than others.
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.
The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.
The birds suffer their suffering each in a lifetime, forgetting it as they go.
We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.
At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.
Civil war is a national crisis and also a private trauma: We suffer it collectively and in isolation.