Bearable Quotes

People talk about friendship like it's only about shared loves, but it's not. It's also about finding the same things annoying and getting excited about the same silly, irrelevant things. It's the person you can share a joke with, sure. But it's also the person you can subtly roll your eyes at when someone else is talking too loudly. The person who makes the fun things better and the boring things more bearable. That's Bonnie for me. ~ Sara Barnard

It was a place where, if troubles did not vanish, they were made bearable. ~ Harper Lee

I wish that you will find love. It is the only thing in life that makes the pain of being alive bearable. ~ Lucinda Riley

Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it. ~ N. Scott Momaday

She began to think of all the people in Belfast who were drinking or drugging themselves into bearable insensibility that night. People would be hitting other people in the face with broken bottles. People were avowing and making love to people for whom they truly cared nothing; other people were screaming hatred at those whom they really did love. People were destroying things, daubing walls with paint and breaking up telephone boxes; joy-riding stolen cars into stone walls. In hospitals and homes, people were watching others dying, hoping and praying that the inevitable would not happen, while other people were planning murder. People elsewhere were trying to commit suicide, fumbling with change for the gas meter or emptying brown plastic bottles of their pills and tablets, which were bitter and dry in the mouth.

And there are, she thought, there must be, people who think as I do. ~ Deirdre Madden

Why did I laugh at his sorry, bedraggled appearance? Because ridiculousness made a repellant situation more bearable. ~ Sherwood Smith

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable. ~ Josephine Hart

Savannah shook her head and banged it against the heavy muscles of his chest. "I hate this, Gregori. I feel so useless. I feel like I'm endangering you. We are lifemates. I asked you to meet me halfway in my world, and you've done it. You've done everything I've asked of you. What have I done to live in your world with you?"
Gregori bent his dark head to the slim white column of her neck. "You are my world, ma petite, my very existence. You are what makes living bearable. You are my light, the very air I breathe." His mouth brushed her pulse, her earlobe. "You are not meant to walk in death. You never were. ~ Christine Feehan

Change, I've come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable. ~ Durga Chew-Bose

The with is shorter than the without, but the with makes the without bearable, as the shadow of memory is long and bright. Let this be a lesson in love. ~ Jarod Kintz

No one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom, and that the perfection of wisdom is what makes the happy life, although even the beginnings of wisdom make life bearable. Yet this conviction, clear as it is, needs to be strengthened and given deeper roots through daily reflection; making noble resolutions is not a important as keeping the resolutions you have made already. ~ Seneca The Younger

Dear Juliet. I could relate to her pain. Black misery painted on a blood red heart. Death would be more bearable than life without Romeo. ~ Marilyn Grey

Celebrity culture has gone crazy, and I think the reason is that real news is just not bearable, and it also seems impossible to change anything. ~ Chris Martin

It is regret for the absence of his loved one which causes a mourner to grieve: yet it is clear that this in itself is bearable enough; for we do not weep at their being absent or intending to be absent during their lifetime, although when they leave our sight we have no more pleasure in them. What tortures us, therefore, is an idea. ~ Seneca

She knew Paul D was adding something to her life - something she wanted to count on but was scared to ... His waiting eyes and awful human power. The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well - to tell, to refine and tell again. The things neither knew about the other - the things neither had word-shapes for - well, it would come in time. ~ Toni Morrison

Harm reduction is often perceived as being inimical to the ultimate purpose of "curing" addiction - that is, of helping addicts transcend their habits and to heal. People regard it as "coddling" addicts, as enabling them to continue their destructive ways. It's also considered to be the opposite of abstinence, which many regard as the only legitimate goal of addiction treatment. Such a distinction is artificial. The issue in medical practice is always how best to help a patient. If a cure is possible and probable without doing greater harm, then cure is the objective. When it isn't - and in most chronic medical conditions cure is not the expected outcome - the physician's role is to help the patient with the symptoms and to reduce the harm done by the disease process.

In rheumatoid arthritis, for example, one aims to prevent joint inflammation and bone destruction and, in all events, to reduce pain. In incurable cancers we aim to prolong life, if that can be achieved without a loss of life quality, and also to control symptoms. In other words, harm reduction means making the lives of afflicted human beings more bearable, more worth living. That is also the goal of harm reduction in the context of addiction. Although hardcore drug addiction is much more than a disease, the harm reduction model is essential to its treatment. Given our lack of a systematic, evidencebased approach to addiction, in many cases it's futile to dream of a cure.

So long as s ~ Gabor Mate

This girl who equally drove me crazy and made me care about her more than I should. She was the only one who understood. The only one who could help make what I was more bearable, even if she occasionally tortured me in the process. ~ Stacey Kade

How lucky she was to have a best friend like Jojo. A girl who relied on truth as much as humor, realizing that the former was essential and the latter was what made life bearable. ~ Susie Orman Schnall

To be young and not to know how, is bearable; to be old and not have the strength, is too great a weight to carry. And what's is so painful you can't sense your powers leaving you. It's hard for an old man to ensure such blows! ~ Ivan Turgenev

I think you learn how to live with holes in your heart. You can't patch them up, or plug them with other people, but you find ways to make it bearable, if that makes sense. ~ Helena Hunting

I always knew one thing, that life is made bearable and possible and liveable by the relations of one human being to another, the individual love and gentleness between persons, or in any case, the unbreakable bond that grows and fastens lives together in all sorts of mysterious ways ... ~ Katherine Anne Porter

The funny thing about work itself, it was so bearable. The dreariest task was perfectly bearable. It presented challenges to overcome, the distraction provided by a sense of urgency, and the things made work utterly, even harmoniously bearable. ~ Joshua Ferris

Disappointment tears the bearable film of life. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

On the fifth [day] Arnom came to me, himself weeping, and I knew his tidings without words. And this is a strange folly, that what seemed to me worst of all was that Bardia had died without ever hearing what it would have shamed him to hear. It seemed to me that all would be bearable if, once only, I could have gone to him and whispered in his ear, 'Bardia, I loved you. ~ C.S. Lewis

Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable. ~ Lily King

The actions of my government are not bearable. They devastate our natural resources and deprive our people. The politicians speak piously while practicing greed and divisiveness. They care nothing for the nation. I want to do more than withdraw my support. I want to tar and feather them. ~ Donella Meadows

Vice goes along way towards making life bearable. A little vice now and then is relished by the best of men. ~ Finley Peter Dunne

The key element in beginning to learn to embody the love of God is not heroic faith and determination. It has to do with whether or not we can take hold of the love of God as a power that includes us within it. The difference is between seeing life from the inside of God versus seeing it from within my own sensibilities and capacities. From inside the love of God, suffering becomes not only bearable, but a privilege of participating with Christ in his love for the world. This cannot be rationally explained or justified, but it is the fruit of a life trustingly lived in and for God who is all love. ~ Shane Claiborne

A counsellor at the treatment centre where I got clean, herself a woman in recovery, surprised me when she said, 'How clever of you to find drugs. Well done, you found a way to keep yourself alive.' This made me feel quite tearful. I suppose because this woman, Jackie, didn't judge me or tell me I was stupid or tubthumpingly declare that 'drugs kill'. No, she told me that I had done well by finding something that made being me bearable… To be acknowledged as a person who was in pain and fighting to survive in my own muddled-up and misguided way made me feel optimistic and understood. It is an example of the compassion addicts need from one another in order to change. ~ Russell Brand

so that I came to regard it as at least a bearable place to hibernate till one might really live again. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable. ~ Rowan Williams

But what made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn't matter who'd used the last of the rosin on their bow or who anyone had slept with, although someone - probably Sayid - had written "Sartre: Hell is other people" in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out "other people" and substituted "flutes." People ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Fate has always been the realm of the gods, though even the gods are subject to it.
In ancient Greek mythology, the Three Sisters of Fate spin out a person's destiny within three nights of their birth. Imagine your newborn child in his nursery. It's dark and soft and warm, somewhere between two and four a.m., one of those hours that belong exclusively to the newly born or the dying.
The first sister - Clotho - appears next to you. She's a maiden, young and smooth. In her hands she holds a spindle, and on it she spins the thrads of your child's life.
Next to her is Lachesis, older and more matronly than her sister. In her hands, she holds the rod used to mesure the thread of life. The length and destiny of your child's life is in her hands.
Finally we have Atropos - old, haggardly. Inevitable. In her hands she holds the terrible shears she'll use to cut the thread of your child's life. She determines the time and manner of his or her death.
Imagine the awesome and awful sight of these three sisters pressed together, presiding over his crib, dermining his future.
In modern times, the sisters have largely disappeared from the collective consiousness, but the idea of Fate hasn't. Why do we still believe? Does itmake tragedy more bearable to believe that we ourselves had no hand in it, that we couldn't have prevented it? It was always ever thus.
Things happen for a reason, says Natasha's mother. What she means is Fate has a Reason and, though yo ~ Nicola Yoon

It is not tears but determination that makes pain bearable. ~ Rose Kennedy

We are all substantially flawed, wounded, angry, hurt, here on Earth. But this human condition, so painful to us, and in someways shameful- because we feel we are weak when the reality of ourselves is exposed- is made much more bearable when it is shared, face to face, in words that have expressive human eyes behind them ... ~ Alice Walker

So this, Harriet thought, gazing at her black-clad reflection, was what bearing up looked like. The eyes in the mirror stared at her, somehow, while fixing themselves far away.
Bearing up, then, must be this: the feeling of perfect frozen stillness, so that to raise your hand was a wrenching and unnatural event. It was not being able to sleep or eat, and the small placid tone in which she heard herself decline the food. It was the presentiment that there must be a crack or a hole somewhere at hand down which she was to throw and extinguish herself, since there must surely be something provided to make this bearable. ~ Jude Morgan

I learned a lot that night - like how incredibly mind blowing ho-hos and wine coolers were together, how that you could discover the answers to life's most difficult questions by watching Buffy, but most of all, that no matter what was going on in life - a best friend could make it all seem bearable. ~ Peggy Martinez

Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality - the deception was bearable. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Life can seem awful and unfixable until the universe shifts a little and the observation point is altered, and then suddenly, everything seems more bearable. ~ Jasmine Warga

The imaginative young vagabond quickly loses the social instincts that help to make life bearable for other men. Always he hears voices calling in the night from far-away places where blue waters lap strange shores. He hears birds singing and crickets chirping a luring roundelay. He sees the moon, yellow ghost of a dead planet, haunting the earth. ~ Jim Tully

I was in awe of the mystery of human compassion and the inability of love to make the distance between us any more bearable. ~ Keith Hollihan

Life becomes bearable only when one comes to terms with who one is, both in one's own eyes and in the eyes of the world. ~ Sandor Marai

Some days it was bearable; some days it burned. Grief was like the great Southern Ocean; it moved in ebbs and flows, often turbulent and rough, or peaceful and settled, and even over time when I could navigate the waters, the tide never stopped. ~ N.R. Walker

Old age is more bearable if it can be helped by an early acceptance of being loved and of loving. ~ M.F.K. Fisher

Only those with guts could bear a great life. ~ Toba Beta

There is no such thing as no choice. There is always a choice. The only question is whether it's a bearable one. ~ David Levithan

The larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment. When the total tax burden grows beyond a bearable size, the problem of devising taxes that will not discourage and disrupt production becomes insoluble. ~ Henry Hazlitt

The only thing that can last longer than the scars we all carry, is the love that makes it bearable. Beautiful and broken, we are beloved. ~ Perci T. Brooks

As he clutched her in his shaking hands and wept against her, he whispered into her ear, the words that made him believe. "Love bears all things. Endures all things," he said. "Ours has, hasn't it?" She nodded and held him tighter. "But can it endure this, Anais? This demon who holds me so mercilessly in its claws?"
She touched his face and kissed him. "My love can and will, Lindsay. I will be here when you open your eyes. I will give you whatever you need to make it more bearable. ~ Charlotte Featherstone

An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Until recently each generation found it more expedient to plead guilty to the charge of being young and ignorant, easier to take the punishment meted out by the older generation (which had itself confessed to the same crime short years before). The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth. ~ Maya Angelou

Stupidity assumes two forms, it speaks or is silent. Mute stupidity is bearable. ~ Honore De Balzac

Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it. ~ Geoff Dyer

There's not one positive thing about being broke. The worst of it is the day-to-day grind of it all. You never know when that treadmill is finally going to buckle and hurl you into the wall. So you find yourself having to run faster and faster, just to keep from falling off. You can adjust to the hunger and the tiredness for the most part, having to choose between feeding yourself and feeding your electric meter; but one thing you can't adjust to is the nagging anxiety. Whoever designed this loathsome system must think we're all living these wonderful lives where money grows in the palms of our hands.

There's never any reassurance that everything is going to be okay; a promise that tomorrow will be slightly more bearable than today. Every minute of your life is consumed by a relentless feeling that time will only ever lead you to the worst possible outcome. And why - when you haven't eaten a decent meal in two weeks and you've spent the last four days lying on a mattress just to conserve energy - should you believe any differently? ~ Rupert Dreyfus

Everyone wants a prodigy to fail; it makes our mediocrity more bearable. ~ Harold Bloom

The principal use of prudence, of self-control, is that it teaches us to be masters of our passions, and to so control and guide them that the evils which they cause are quite bearable, and that we even derive joy from them all. ~ Rene Descartes

What frightened me most was, I could no longer believe in my own life as a story. Everyone needs a story, a part to play in order to avoid the realization that life is without significance. How else do any of us survive? It's what makes life bearable, even interesting. When it becomes neither, people say you've lost the plot. Or just lost it. ~ Amanda Craig

Like any form of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable. For a creature like man, who must forge his destiny by means of thought and reflexivity, the knowledge gained from this will perforce be unbearably lucid. We know that we are beasts who have this weapon for survival, and that we are not gods creating a world with our own thoughts, and something has to make our own wisdom bearable, something has to save us from the woeful eternal fever of biological destiny. Therefore, we have invented Art: our animal selves have devised another way to ensure the survival of our species. ~ Muriel Barbery

Money might not be able to buy happiness, but it made misery more bearable. ~ Ava Gray

I have come to believe that one thing people cannot bear is a sense of injustice. Poverty, cold, even hunger are more bearable than injustice. ~ Millicent Fenwick

All the sorrows of life are bearable if only
we can convert them into a story. ~ Isak Dinesen

The more spacious and larger our fundamental nature, the more bearable the pains in living. ~ Wayne Muller

If it can be verified, we don't need faith ... Faith is for that which lies on the other side of reason. Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

If you buy the why, the how is infinitely bearable ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The Fire

When a human is asked about a particular fire,
she comes close:
then it is too hot,
so she turns her face -

and that's when the forest of her bearable life appears,
always on the other side of the fire. The fire
she's been asked to tell the story of,
she has to turn from it, so the story you hear
is that of pines and twitching leaves
and how her body is like neither -

all the while there is a fire
at her back
which she feels in fine detail,
as if the flame were a dremel
and her back its etching glass.

You will not know all about the fire
simply because you asked.
When she speaks of the forest
this is what she is teaching you,

you who thought you were her master. ~ Katie Ford

Loving him didn't fix anything. Loving him didn't change anything. Loving him simply made everything else bearable. ~ P.C. Cast

I hope Christmas was bearable over there. How long we anticipate it and how quickly it passes. ~ Hazel Gaynor

He got into the tub and ran a little cold water. Then he lowered his thin, hairy body into the just-right warmth and stared at the interstices between the tiles. Sadness--he had experienced that emotion ten thousand times. As exhalation is to inhalation, he thought of it as the return from each thrust of happiness.

Lazily soaping himself, he gave examples.

When he was five and Irwin eight, their father had breezed into town with a snowstorm and come to see them where they lived with their grandparents in the small Connecticut city. Their father had been a vagabond salesman and was considered a bum by people who should know. But he had come into the closed, heated house with all the gimcrack and untouchable junk behind glass and he had smelled of cold air and had had snow in his curly black hair. He had raved about the world he lived in, while the old people, his father and mother, had clucked sadly in the shadows. And then he had wakened the boys in the night and forced them out into the yard to worship the swirling wet flakes, to dance around with their hands joined, shrieking at the snow-laden branches. Later, they had gone in to sleep with hearts slowly returning to bearable beatings. Great flowering things had opened and closed in Norman's head, and the resonance of the wild man's voice had squeezed a sweet, tart juice through his heart. But then he had wakened to a gray day with his father gone and the world walking gingerly over the somber crust of ~ Edward Lewis Wallant

The same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination. ~ Gloria Steinem

He saw that his mother was dwelling in an alternate time, a more bearable reality. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

We brood about what we should have done differently or better or what we should not have done, because we are doomed to do so, but it does not lead anywhere. The disaster was inevitable, is what we then say and for a while, if only a short while, we are quiet. Then we start all over again asking questions and probing and probing until we have gone half crazy. We constantly look for someone responsible, or for several persons responsible, in order to make things bearable for ourselves at least for a moment, and naturally, if we are honest, we invariably end up with ourselves. We have reconciled ourselves to the fact that we have to exist, even though most of the time against our will, because we have no other choice, and only because we have again and again reconciled ourselves to this fact, every day and every moment anew, can we progress at all. And where we are progressing to, we have, if we are honest, known all our lives, to death, except that most of the time we are careful not to admit it. ~ Thomas Bernhard

Her powerlessness even comforted her somehow. Knowing that she couldn't change things - that she didn't have a choice - made living it more bearable. ~ Etaf Rum

In modern times, the sisters have largely disappeared from the collective consciousness, but the idea of Fate hasn't. Why do we still believe? Does it make tragedy more bearable to believe that we ourselves had no hand in it, that we couldn't have prevented it? It was always ever thus.

Things happen for a reason, says Natasha's mother. What she means is Fate has a Reason and, though you may not know it, there's a certain comfort in knowing that there's a Plan.

Natasha is different. She believes in determinism- cause and effect. One action leads to another leads to another. Your actions determine your fate. In this way she's not unlike Daniel's dad.

Daniel lives in the nebulous space in between. Maybe he wasn't meant to meet Natasha today. Maybe it was random chance after all.

But.

Once they met, the rest of it, the love between them, was inevitable. ~ Nicola Yoon

I still think that maybe the "afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe we are just matter, and matter gets recycled ~ John Green

On the few occasions when we did visit my grandfather at the Evergreen Moral Home for the Aged Sick and Handicapped, I never wanted to go back. It's the smells that hit you first, the nauseatingly sweet smell of open sores and wet bandages, reeking of urine, saliva, sweat, pus - - the stench of incurable sickness blanketed by the pungent odour of strong medicine. I stood at the doorway, gagging, my lungs fighting to adapt to the atmosphere. This wasn't the smell of death - that is bearable - no, this was the noxious smell of decomposition, when flesh and soul and heart and bone separate, then rot, deteriorate until all is reduced to a putrid pile of rubbish ready to be wheeled out. The syrupy smell of decay. ~ Hwee Hwee Tan

Can't you see? Before you knew the truth, we were happy. What's the god in ferreting out the truth all that time? It's always unpleasant."
"Is it only lies that are Pleasant?"
"Usually. That's why people tell them. To make life bearable. ~ Penelope Mortimer

You've been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness. ~ Elaine Castillo

What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone's memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days. ~ Andrea Lochen

In common with most writers, he had evolved his own technique for making bearable the drudgery of his abominable trade, ~ Margery Allingham

When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have written it, however, it has somehow turned out to be very much a book about love as well: love as sustainer, as renewer, and as protector. After each seeming death within my mind or heart, love has returned to recreate hope and restore life. It has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest. It has, inexplicably and savingly, provided not only cloak but lantern for the darker seasons and grimmer weather. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

He cleared his throat, very carefully, to bring the stillness to a more bearable level without breaking the unwritten rule that governs both churches and freshly fallen blankets of snow. ~ Anna Mattaar

I thought at first she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her-green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs-would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere.

I still think that, sometimes. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just a matter, and matter gets recycled. ~ John Green

The development of the proletarian elite does not take place in an academic setting. Rather, it is brought about by battles in the factories and unions, by disciplinary punishments and some very dirty fights within the parties and outside of them, by jail sentences and illegality. Students do not flock in large numbers there as they do to the lecture halls and laboratories of the bourgeoisie. The career of a revolutionary does not consists of banquets and honarary titles, of interesting research projects and professional salaries; more likely, it will acquaint them with misery, dishonory and jail and, at the end, uncertainty. These conditions are made bearable only by a super-human faith. Understandably, this way of life will not be the choice of those who are nothing more than clever. ~ Max Horkheimer

A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing. ~ J.D. Salinger

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. ~ Carl Sagan

All sorrows are bearable, if there is bread. ~ Miguel De Cervantes

Evil would be done, that was the nature of the world; that was bearable if good could also be done. ~ Cynthia Voigt

Oakley won't," the duke said.
She turned and blinked. "I beg your pardon."
"Lord Oakley. He won't forget to find us rooms. I've known him for years. The only thing that is making this bearable is that he must be dying inside over all this."
"You don't like him?"
"On the contrary. I've long considered him a friend. It's why I enjoy his misery so much. ~ Julia Quinn

Though sympathy alone can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable. ~ Bram Stoker

The happiness of others is never bearable for very long ... ~ Francoise Sagan

All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story. ~ Isak Dinesen

Moments like this, with Colton? They make it all bearable. He doesn't fix me, doesn't heal me. He just makes life worthwhile. He helps me remember to breathe. ~ Jasinda Wilder

Humans weren't made to carry someone else's weight. We can barely lift our own."
"Maybe lifting someone else's weight makes yours a little more bearable ~ Tarryn Fisher

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first ... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. ~ Ron Rash

[T.J.] If she had gotten sick, the only thing I could have done was watch her suffer. Bury her next to Mick when she died. I didn't know if I could make it without her. The sound of her voice, her smile, her– those were the things that made living on the island bearable. I held her a little tighter and thought if she woke up I might tell her that. She didn't though. She sighed in her sleep, and eventually I drifted off. ~ Tracey Garvis Graves

Sometimes, things are sad and unfortunate. But finding the funny in a situation can make the sad and unfortunate more bearable. ~ Penny Reid

Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable. ~ Muriel Barbery

A gut wound will drop a man in his tracks every time. Harper always found it more personal than bullets, getting right up into someone. It made the war bearable. ~ Lauren Beukes