When you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It's only painful and difficult for others. The same applies when you are stupid.
Not only did I avoid speaking of Salinger; I resisted thinking about him. I did not reread his letters to me. The experience had been too painful.
Since I come from a family of mental instability, and I have suffered depression myself, I knew that living in shame is senseless and painful, and that by talking about it, I have come to peace with it. The stigma behind people's suffering needs to end. We as a community need to embrace these disorders, try to understand them (if only just to talk about them) so that we can cease being defined by them.
All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.
It's been painful to see the people that you love be attacked when you know it's not fair or true.
What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.
For anyone going through a divorce or any other painful challenge, the first and most important recommendation I can make is to find some kind of spiritual and emotional support.
A girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating.
It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.
If you're never called, then you don't know any better. If you are called and don't answer the call, then that is the most difficult and painful. If you are called and do answer the call, it is the adventure of your life.
My joy is as painful as my pain.
Creatively, editing was the most painful part of the process for me.
Failure to make the tough but necessary choices means slow painful death.
The way to get through anything mentally painful is to take it a little at a time. The mind can't handle dealing with a massive iceberg of pain in front of it, but it can deal with short nuggets that will come to an end. So instead of thinking, Ugh, I've got twenty-four miles to go, focus on making it to the next telephone pole in the distance. Whether you're running twenty or one hundred and twenty miles at a time, the distance has to be tackled mentally and physically one mile at a time. The ability to compartmentalize pain into these small bite sizes is key.
As to those who hoard gold and silver and spend it not in God's path, give them, then, the tidings of a painful agony: on a day when these things shall be heated in hell-fire, and their foreheads, and their sides, and their backs shall be branded therewith.
Great leaders are those who are able to look reality in the face, however painful it may be, and deal with it.
It will be difficult, even painful, but democracy will prevail in Russia. There will be no dictatorship, although relapses into authoritarianism are possible.
She was the most painful, most glorious dance of his life
When bond prices fall, interest rates soar, with painful consequences for all borrowers.
Criticism is always going to be painful. You live through it. I'll live through it now. It's even harder when you're younger. You don't have the maturity. You're still developing. If you get damaged while you're developing, it's a psychological battle after that. Today, if I get the criticism, I'm not bothered. . . if I wear the wrong thing, I'm not going to lose sleep over it. Maybe when I was younger, I might have been more affected by that.
