Ann: How does God’s character fit into things that seem totally against his character?

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas

This time around I was so lonely that I was forced to be face to face with myself. Realizing at the end of the day I only have me and I didn’t seem to like...

The trouble with this dog is that it has grown too close to human beings, it will suffer as they do.

…suffering can be a work of art. It can be made of buried and rising things, helpless and undiscovered, song of frustrated want, silence after desire. It can be the test of the self falling...

…it’s always somebody’s fault – I blame you for my helpless love – do you think I chose this? Your beauty compelled me…

You may die a hundred deaths without a break in the mental turmoil. Or, you may keep your body and die only in the mind. The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom.

My pain builds like storm clouds―massive, dark, and heavy with teardrops. Moisture falls torrential as if my world is a violent, eternal downpour; however, at long last the source runs dry and the bitter storm...

Do you know what it is?’ [Toby] said thoughtfully. ‘It’s that they haven’t had anything really awful happen to them. No wonder they seem so superficial and unfeeling.’ It was certainly an interesting theory, …...

But while they continued staring into one another’s face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.

The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop a poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously,...

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh,...

For me, an area of moral clarity is: you’re in front of someone who’s suffering and you have the tools at your disposal to alleviate that suffering or even eradicate it, and you act.

We are not a voice for the voiceless. The truth is that there is a lot of noise out there drowning out quiet voices, and many people have stopped listening to the cries of their...

…if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection;...

As I took up life as a minister, I tried to understand why so many people resisted and rejected God, I soon realized that perhaps that main reason was affliction and suffering. …But at the...

This of course no problem. People are suffering all around the world, and I’m fine whatever I do and wherever I am.

The themes that exercised the minds of survivor movements and their allies within the health and welfare professions generated a political project: how to revolutionise medical and judicial approaches to injured adults and children, how...

Everything that God sends us is beautiful, even though we may not understand it – and we only need to give it some proper thought to see that what God gives is just sheer happiness;...

When you observe that the fire in your room is getting dull, you do not always put on more coal, but simply stir with the poker; so God often uses the black poker of adversity...

All suffering has an end, David, if only you wait long enough. Sorrow has its life like people. Sorrow is born and lives and dies. And when it’s dead and gone, someone’s left behind to...

— This world is full of trouble, umfundisi.—Who knows it better?—Yet you believe?Kumalo looked at him under the light of the lamp. I believe, he said, but I have learned that it is a secret....

That is the idea — that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for...

scraps” that the abusive priests treated us like. They would use us as a scrap is used and then simply toss us aside. I was moved to tears. Holding it in my hands, I could...

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is...

Our spiritual character is formed as much by what we endure and what is taken from us as it is by our achievements and our conscious choices.

But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a...

We can only forgive the world to the extent that we forgive ourselves for being in it.

We know—more from the faces immortalized on a handful of photographs than from the words of survivors—that the women and men who experienced that moment in Hiroshima believed they had encountered the beginning of the...

I envy these people. Wide-open suffering, their messes all hanging out. Lives boiled down to raw need–a near-holiness to it. And all of us driving our cars up and down the mountain–we’ll go on forever...

She enjoyed her own pain by this egoism of suffering, if I may so express it. This aggravation of suffering and this rebelling in it I could understand; it is the enjoyment of man, of...

He were found drowned. He were coming home very hopeless o’ aught on earth. He thought God could na be harder than men; mappen not so hard; mappen as tender as a mother; mappen tenderer....

Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to...

It’s easy to thank God and to be happy when you live a sheltered life and have no concept of suffering; Suffer and then do all of the above.

The animals feel that this urgency is mutual. Their own suffering has made them aware of human suffering. More frequent contact with us has sensitized them to what troubles us. They feel our anxiety and...

Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships...

When God gets us alone through suffering, heartbreak, temptation, disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted friendship – when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are totally speechless, unable to ask even one question, then He...

Few suffer more than those who refuse to forgive themselves.

The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.

It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering.

Don’t be a zombie for anyone, if your oppressor likes zombies, cinemas are not located in mars.

Those who are in pain – most of the world’s populations at any given moment – do not do a lot of thinking, speaking, or writing about suffering. All their energy goes into surviving. That...

‘Freedom.’ He pauses a moment to reflect on the F-word. ‘Sometimes I think it’s an idea that enslaves us. We’re never free from hungering for the notion that we can even have freedom. When perhaps...

There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different...

Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best....

Life is a harsh, twisted paradox.On one hand, you wish for no pain or suffering or misery on anyone. Yet you hope to see your children grow into individuals of compassionate and kind character. And...

Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and grief! He who has not seen the things of this world, and the heart of men in this...

What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of...

I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling...

When confronted with suffering that won’t go away or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing,…not on the Master’s hand. Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it’s just...