Quotes
When men must live like rats in the dark beneath the earth, they soon run out of pity, as they do of milk and honey.
Every word was bought with pain, but that was the way of the world; a man must fight to live.
We are born to suffer, that our sufferings might make us strong.
Tell me, Lord Eddard ... why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones?
Maybe he felt an allegiance to his history. It is one thing to speak around an experience, use it as reference and analogy. But to detail the hellish thing itself, to strangers who will nod and forget, this must seem a betrayal of his pain.
Our difficulty accepting impermanence is the heart of human suffering.
p. 181
The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them.
The place where you suffer is the same space where you commit yourself to act.
"Expressive writing" encourages us to see our misfortunes not as flaws that make us unfit for worldly success (or otherworldly heaven), but as the seeds of our growth.
p. 151
Whatever pain you can't get rid of, make it your creative offering.
p. 56
It's not that pain equals art. It's that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better. ... The quest to transform pain into beauty is one of the great catalysts of artistic expression.
p. 61
When you listen to music, you can transcend your own pain and turn towards another and feel bonded with the whole of humanity because you know that they have felt that grief and love. By expressing it, by communing with that song or picture, you realize you are not alone.
