Quotes
(T)he bittersweet tradition spans centuries—it spans continents. And it teaches us that we are creatures who are born to transform pain into beauty. It also teaches us that our feelings of bittersweetness are some of the greatest gateways that we have to states of creativity and connection and love.
We live today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote. The only real difference being that the England of Dickens and the Russia of Dostoevsky could not afford the soundscreens and the smokescreens with which we so ingeniously conceal our true condition from ourselves.
To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
p. 228
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
p. 199
Without my wounds, who was I? My scars were my face, my past was my life. It wasn't like I didn't know where all this remembering got you, all that hunger for beauty and astonishing cruelty and ever-present-loss.
We all have scars [...] Better by far for them to be worn on the outside.
There was no point in making myself suffer unnecessarily. As a mortal, there would be pain enough in my life, whether I sought it out or not.
p. 119
I had never been able to truly hate anyone who’d suffered, no matter what evils they’d done in the aftermath.
p. 378
Overwhelmed by pain, he lay there in the fearsome stench for hours, listened to the men and animals die, and learned what warfare meant.
p. 120
The agony of the fractured leg began to seem no more than a mild discomfort as The Giver led Jonas firmly, little by little, in the deep and terrible suffering of the past.
p. 110
They have never known pain, he thought. The realization made him feel desperately lonely.
p. 110
It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.
