Sufferers Quotes

It's going to be a hard time; we can count on that. But with all the misery, what opportunities to show mercy and brotherly love in our land, which has sinned so greatly against love. And patience! For now is the time when the victors, in the blind triumph of their victory, are likely to make mistakes. But that's not our concern, for we shall only be the sufferers, not the agents of suffering. What a power for peace will lie in our own powerlessness if we can only glimpse in it the sign of grace! ~ Margot Benary-Isbert

Sufferers of depression have 'episodes' the same way those who suffer from multiple sclerosis do. It comes, wipes the floor with you, and then somehow returns you to the world. But it comes back. ~ Michael Redhill

A suffering person does not need a lecture - he needs a listener. ~ Billy Graham

Victims of misfortune are quick to sense another of their kind from a distance, but in old age they rarely become friends, which is in no way surprising: they have nothing to share together - not even hope. ~ Ivan Turgenev

No one was ever called by God to greater suffering than God's only begotten Son. ~ R.C. Sproul

As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake. ~ Hannah Arendt

Tens of thousands of God's saints and sufferers through the ages have found their dark nights lightened and tortured souls strengthened because they found help from the Spirit in the Word of God. ~ Billy Graham

There are two types of sufferers ~ Louis Mackey

In the "Intervention" section of the book we go into that looping from a battery of positions (where healer and sufferer are blurred). I'm very interested in "repetition and revision" (to use Suzan Lori-Parks's phrase) and in the culture's desire to loop or repeat. ~ Laura Mullen

My friends, my children, and fellow sufferers, when I reflect on the
distribution of good and evil here below, I find that much has been
given man to enjoy, yet still more to suffer. Though we should examine
the whole world, we shall not find one man so happy as to have nothing
left to wish for; but we daily see thousands who by suicide shew us they
have nothing left to hope. In this life then it appears that we cannot
be entirely blest; but yet we may be completely miserable! ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers. ~ Irvine Welsh

Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Loquacity, n. A disorder which renders the sufferer unable to curb his tongue when you wish to talk. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Sometimes, PTSD sufferers will shut out memories of painful periods in their lives and experience amnesia. Thus, a traumatized individual might not remember when his spouse died in a car accident. Another person who was abused might have gaps in her memory of childhood. ~ Glenn Schiraldi

8Most importantly, be disciplined and stay on guard. Your enemy the devil is prowling around outside like a roaring lion, just waiting and hoping for the chance to devour someone. 9Resist him and be strong in your faith, knowing that your brothers and sisters throughout the world are fellow sufferers with you. 10After you have suffered for a little while, the God of grace who has called you [to His everlasting presence]* through Jesus the Anointed will restore you, support you, strengthen you, and ground you. 11For all power belongs to God, now and forever. Amen. ~ Anonymous

Well, anyway- then came the sixth hour! It was not possible to grant every request to watch from close-up. In his wisdom, the commandant decreed that children should be given first priority. By virtue of my office, of courser, I was always nearby; often I was squatting there with a small child in either arm. How we drank in the transfigured look on the sufferer's face, how we bathed our cheeks in the warmth of that justice- achieved at long last and fading quickly. What times those were, my comrade! ~ Franz Kafka

Haphephobia. The fear of being touched that often presented itself after a traumatic event. Touch from another human being often felt like fire burning the sufferer's skin. ~ Tessa Bailey

My daughter is a real migraine sufferer; the minute she has a handful of Haribo sweets, she gets a headache. There's a connection between what the liver can't break down with what goes on to trigger a headache. You just have to be aware. ~ Sheherazade Goldsmith

If out of concern over cloning, the U.S. Congress succeeds in criminalizing embryonic stem-cell research that might bring treatments for Alzheimer's disease or diabetes - and Dr. Fukuyama lent his name to a petition that supported such laws - there would be real victims: present and future sufferers of those diseases. ~ Gregory Stock

Depression affects almost 80% of migraine sufferers at one time or another. People with migraine, especially chronic migraine, also are more likely to experience intense anxiety and to have suicidal tendencies. If we want to live happy and joyful lives with migraine, it is vital that we acknowledge and deal with the emotional realities of the disease. ~ Sarah Hackley

Religions are metaphorical systems that give us bigger containers in which to hold our lives. A spiritual life allows us to move beyond the ego into something more universal. Religious experience carries us outside of clock time into eternal time. We open ourselves into something more complete and beautiful. This bigger vista is perhaps the most magnificent aspect of a religious experience.
There is a sense in which Karl Marx was correct when he said that religion is the opiate of the people. However, he was wrong to scoff at this. Religion can give us skills for climbing up on onto a ledge above our suffering and looking down at it with a kind and open mind. This helps us calm down and connect to all of the world's sufferers. Since the beginning of human time, we have yearned for peace in the face of death, loss, anger and fear. In fact, it is often trauma that turns us toward the sacred, and it is the sacred that saves us. ~ Mary Pipher

It's a thousand tiny impulses, building on one another. First you decide it's a good idea to check the oatmeal bin for bugs. Next you're going through all the canisters, and before you know it, you're wearing a hazmat suit and examining the frosted flakes for ground-up glass. Each action further enforces the obsessive-compulsive circuit. When the disease is full-blown, sufferers are firmly entrenched in the neural loops that make them repeat thoughts and actions over and over. In other words, your brain keeps getting back in line for the same carnival ride it didn't enjoy in the first place. You lose your sunglasses, you throw up on your shirt, and two minutes later you're back on the Whizzer. Wheeee. ~ Jennifer Traig

At the bottom I was quite content, for though I have never had great cares I have never had so care-free a life as at the front. Everything is clear and simple. My rights and duties are prescribed. I need earn no money. My food is provided me, and if things go badly with me I have a thousend fellow-sufferers, and above all, the shadow of death reduces every problem to a pleasant insignificance. ~ Ernst Junger

Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal," said Allen Frances. "That boundary is very populous. The most crowded boundary is the boundary with normal."
"Why?" I asked.
"There's a societal push for conformity in all ways," he said. "There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. 'Previously I was laughed at, I was picked on, no one liked me, but now I can talk to fellow bipolar sufferers on the Internet and no longer feel alone.'" He paused. "In the old days some of them may have been given a more stigmatizing label like conduct disorder or personality disorder or oppositional defiant disorder. Childhood bipolar takes the edge of guilt away from parents that maybe they created an oppositional child. ~ Jon Ronson

You can't converse with Alzheimer's sufferers in the way you do with others; the dialogue tends to go round in circles. ~ Kevin Whately

Most people in the grip of depression at its ghastliest are, for whatever reason, in a state of unrealistic hopelessness, torn by exaggerated ills and fatal threats that bear no resemblance to actuality. It may require on the part of friends, lovers, family, admirers, an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life's worth, which is so often in conflict with a sense of their own worthlessness, but such devotion has prevented countless suicides. ~ William Styron

War ... is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Indeed, one had the impression that even for the sufferers the frantic terror of the early phase had passed, and there was a sort of mournful resignation in their present attitude toward the disease. ~ Albert Camus

What honest man would not rather be the sufferer than the defrauder? ~ Samuel Richardson

For sufferers it is sweet to know before-hand clearly the pain that still remains for them. ~ Aeschylus

Distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer's defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I am a sufferer of endometriosis. I didn't want any young women to go through what I went through. I thought that people should know about it. ~ Padma Lakshmi

There is no wrong suffering. There is imaginary, sham, feigned, simulated, pretended suffering. But the assertion that someone suffers for the right or wrong reason presupposes a divine, all-penetrating judgment able to distinguish historically obsolete forms of suffering from those in our time, instead of leaving this decision to the sufferers themselves. ~ Dorothee Solle

It is, I believe, one of the few dangerous forms of eccentricity, a highly contagious mania, to be precise, of the rampant social variety! In your friend's case, we may not yet be dealing with out-and-out insanity ... No ... Maybe his trouble is only exaggerated conviction ... But the contagious manias are well known to me! ... I've known a good many sufferers from conviction mania ... Of many different types ... And in the last analysis, those who talk about justice seem to be the maddest of the lot! ... At first, I must confess, I took a certain interest in justice fanatics ... Today those particular maniacs annoy and exasperate me more than I can tell ... Don't you feel the same way? ... Human beings show a strange aptitude for transmitting this mania. It terrifies me, and we find it, mind you, in all human beings! ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

But behind every misguided treatment - from Ottomans eating clay to keep the plague away to Victorian gents sitting in a mercury steam room for their syphilis to epilepsy sufferers sipping gladiator blood in ancient Rome - is the incredible power of the human desire to live. ~ Lydia Kang

Children are the greatest sufferers from outgrown theologies. ~ Luther Burbank

The words madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences - nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn't rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences:
"Esther's cleavage is something to be noticed" or "You can't have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture" or "I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort" or "I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed."
At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we'd rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Many of the people who consented to talk about their private lives in front of millions of television viewers would say that they were sharing their stories as a way to give comfort [to] fellow sufferers, to raise public awareness, to give a voice to their pain. None of them would ever admit that it was all about ratings and voyeurism and lurid, grotesque curiosity. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

Every sufferer who bears pain, or slander, or loss, or personal unkindness for Christ's sake, is filling up that amount of suffering which is necessary to the bringing together of the whole body of Christ, and the upbuilding of His elect Church. ~ Charles Spurgeon

Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers. ~ Eleanor Catton

In the religious life it is possible to commit an analogous error, and to prize so unwisely peaceful hours of communion, as to waive imperative duty for the sake of them; like Peter with his "Let us make here three tabernacles," while there were devil-ridden sufferers waiting to be healed down on the plain. Moments of devotion, which do not prepare for hours of practical righteousness, are very untrustworthy. But, on the other hand, the paths of righteousness will not be trodden by those who have known nothing of the green pastures and waters where the wearied can rest. ~ Alexander MacLaren

Although approximately 80% of osteoporosis sufferers are women, as the longevity of the male population increases, the disease will assume increasing importance in men. ~ Gro Harlem Brundtland

All sufferers can find comfort in the solidarity of the Crucified; but only those who struggle against evil by following the example of the Crucified will discover him at their side. To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting his way is to advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology. ~ Miroslav Volf

Practical advice. - People who read much must always keep it in mind that life is one thing, literature another. Not that authors invariably lie. I declare that there are writers who rarely and most reluctantly lie. But one must know how to read, and that isn't easy. Out of a hundred bookreaders ninety-nine have no idea what they are reading about. It is a common belief, for example, that any writer who sings of suffering must be ready at all times to open his arms to the weary and heavy-laden. This is what his readers feel when they read his books. Then when they approach him with their woes, and find that he runs away without looking back at them, they are filled with indignation and talk of the discrepancy between word and deed. Whereas the fact is, the singer has more than enough woes of his own, and he sings them because he can't get rid of them. L'uccello canta nella gabbia, non di gioia ma di rabbia, says the Italian proverb: "The bird sings in the cage, not from joy but from rage." It is impossible to love sufferers, particularly hopeless sufferers, and whoever says otherwise is a deliberate liar. "Come unto Me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." But you remember what the Jews said about Him: "He speaks as one having authority!" And if Jesus had been unable, or had not possessed the right, to answer this skeptical taunt, He would have had to renounce His words. We common mortals have neither divine powers nor divine rights, we can only l ~ Lev Shestov

He who thinks he is the doer is also the sufferer. ~ Ramana Maharshi

To multitudes of sufferers on beds of pain and languishing, Jesus has been the great physician to-day; in many a weeping circle around precious dust, He has been the Divine comforter, and the tears have almost ceased to flow as this Jesus has touched the bier. Dying lips have whispered His name, and the valley of the shadow has been illumined as with the glory from the celestial shores. ~ Abbott Eliot Kittredge

And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There are a lot of myths around Mental Health sufferers. People are very biased towards them. This should change. People should try to understand and not outcry them. The stigma should be erased. ~ Maria Karvouni

In such situations, of course, people don't nurse their anger silently, they moan aloud; but these are not frank, straightforward moans, there is a kind of cunning malice in them, and that's the whole point. Those very moans express the sufferer's delectation; if he did not enjoy his moans, he wouldn't be moaning. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I cannot worry much about your sins and miseries when I have so many of my own. I can only love you all, poor fellow travelers, fellow sufferers. I do not want to add one least straw to the burden you already carry. My prayer from day to day is that God will so enlarge my heart that I will see you all, and live with you all, in His love. ~ Dorothy Day

As Shweder points out, not only is moral responsibility virtually never assigned to sufferers but to even hint at it is considered "blaming the victim," one of the main heresies within our Western society. The responses to suffering, then, are always provided by experts, whether pain management, psychological or medical treatment, or changes in law or public policy. In ~ Timothy Keller

Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognised by clearing away "prejudice" or burrowing down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalise people different from ourselves by thinking, "They do not feel as 'we' would," or "There must always be suffering, so why not let 'them' suffer?"
This process of coming to see other human beings as "one of us" rather than as "them" is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist's report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel. Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright give us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, ~ Richard M. Rorty

Even though it inspires some of the world's greatest literature, music, and art, obsessive love is one of the most potent and compelling of tortures and one of the most difficult to overcome -- especially because it feels beyond conscious control. Tormented lovers try the patience even of those who truly love them, because they sufferers do not desire help extricating themselves though they claim to be seeking it; this is an illness from which no one wants to be cured. ~ Jeanne Safer

The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health
congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher. ~ Calvin Trillin

All behavioral or mood disorders - including depression, OCD, ADHD and addiction - have some neurochemical components, but sufferers can still work to overcome them. ~ Jeffrey Kluger

A crowd of fellow-sufferers is a miserable kind of comfort. ~ Seneca The Younger

I am the fool, and must be the sufferer, if it be not of God. ~ Joanna Southcott

Its unfortunate and I really wish I wouldn't have to say this, but I really like human beings who have suffered. They're kinder. ~ Emma Thompson

Yet I also felt, for the first time, truly and sincerely pissed. It was enough already. Enough! I'd reached that point that comes in the life of most anxiety sufferers when, fed up by the constant waking torture, dejected and buckled but not yet crushed, they at last turn to their anxiety, to themselves, and say, "Listen here: Fuck you. Fuck you! I am sick and fucking tired of this bullshit. I refuse to let you win. I am not going to take it anymore. You are ruining my fucking life and you MUST FUCKING DIE!" Unfortunately, this approach rarely solves the problem. Anxiety doesn't bend to absolutism. You have to take a subtler, more reasoned approach. But that doesn't mean anger is totally unhelpful. Being pissed off is a strong cocktail for the will. It stiffens the spine. It strengthens resolve. It makes a person less willing to run away from the anxiety and more willing to walk into it, which you're going to have to do, ultimately, if you don't want to end up a complete agoraphobic. Anger breeds defiance, and defiance is inspiriting. It's good to refuse to give in to anxiety. You just have to know how much you can take. ~ Daniel B. Smith

Retired soldiers are the worst sufferers when they engage in financial operations. I have found that their credulity far exceeds that of widows--and that is saying a good deal. ~ Agatha Christie

You may regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer, but if you cannot, mind your own business. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great sorrow makes sacred the sufferer. ~ Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl Of Lytton

In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language. ~ Mark Twain

In grief, words are a poor consolation - silence and agonizing tears are all that is left the sufferer. ~ Mary Todd Lincoln

I have seen great beauty of spirit in some who were great sufferers. I have seen men, for the most part, grow better not worse with advancing years, and I have seen the last illness produce treasures of fortitude and meekness from most unpromising subjects. ~ C.S. Lewis

Many people, particularly children, have had poison ivy very often, very badly. They speak of it. They do not forget it. But there is an outer limit, a kind that passes any question of degree. Those who have utterly had it instantly recognize each other - like the Jews and homosexuals in Proust. It has no dignity whatever. There are no poison-ivy heroes…

There are other such cabals, reverse elites of outer limit, junkies, sufferers from migraines, the truly seasick, soldiers' fear in wartime, certain cramps.Many people suffer from cramps severely, turn quite silent, green, and shaky. Someone offers them a glass of gin. But there are cramps of an entirely other order, when even hardened doctors - knowing it is not important, only temporary, just a matter of hours - reach for the Demerol and the needle. It must be so in each lonely degrading thing from which one comes back having learned nothing whatever. There are no conclusions to be drawn from it. Lonely people see double entendres everywhere. ~ Renata Adler

In fact, one wonders whether the disease would have been
recognized at all were it not for the minority of male sufferers. ~ Maya Dusenbery

Most Alzheimer's sufferers aren't diagnosed until their 70s. However, we now know that their brains began deteriorating long before that. ~ Michael Greger

There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example. ~ Aldous Huxley

There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy. The sufferings of mankind ... there is no evidence that they cause him unhappiness except when the sufferers happen to be his friends. ~ Bertrand Russell

Kshatriya, or the man who is qualified to protect the sufferers, is meant to rule the state. Untrained, lower class men or men without ambition to protect the sufferers cannot be placed on the seat as an administrator. Unfortunately in the age of Kali the lower class men without training occupy the post of a ruler by strength of popular votes and instead of protecting the sufferers, such men create a situation quite intolerable for everyone. Such rulers illegally gratify themselves at the cost of all comforts of the citizens, and thus the chaste mother earth cries to see the pitiable condition of her sons, both men and animals. ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

In short, the Gaon was a one-sided, severe ascetic, and would never have deserved the title of a good father, a good husband, an amiable man ... [T]here is no occasion at all for pitying Mrs. Gaon ... Saints are happy in their suffering, and noble souls find their happiness in sacrificing themselves for these sufferers. ~ Solomon Schechter

Only the sufferers of injustice can realize its intensity - Iman Musa Al-Kazim ~ Abu Mohammed Al H Bin Shu'ba Al Harrani

I repeat that the poor, the sufferers from leprosy, the rejected, the alcoholics, whom we serve, are beautiful people. Many of them have wonderful personalities. The experience which we have by serving them, we must pass on to people who have not had that wonderful experience. ~ Mother Teresa

Seventy-five percent of MS sufferers are women. ~ Teri Garr

By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the 'real world.' So I started working for newspapers. ~ Tom Wolfe

Revenge commonly hurts both the offerer and sufferer; as we see in a foolish bee, which in her anger invenometh the flesh and loseth her sting, and so lives a drone ever after. ~ Joseph Hall

Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author ... ~ Hannah Arendt

Though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

Maybe it's time to just scrap the word "racist." Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Eating disorder sufferers cannot be told to 'pull themselves together', to 'stop doing that' or to 'just eat'. ~ Lynn Crilly

The good news of the gospel [for sufferers] is not an exhortation from above to 'hang on at all costs,' or 'grin and bear it' in the midst of hardship. No, the good news is that God is hanging on to you, and in the end, when all is said and done, the power of God will triumph over every pain and loss. ~ Tullian Tchividjian

Because the terms "sufferers" and "victims" are objectionable, I have chosen the term "patient" by default. ~ Katrina Berne

I'm generally in favor of economic globalization. Having said that, it doesn't always work and does not immediately work in the interest of all. There are sufferers. ~ Amartya Sen

Oh, there are those who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of their certain knowledge and contemplation of irrefutable truth; there are terrible ones, wholly in communion with Satan and his proud spirit. For them hell is voluntary and insatiable; they are sufferers by their own will. For they have cursed themselves by cursing God and life. They feed on their wicked pride, as if a hungry man in the desert were to start sucking his own blood from his body. But they are insatiable unto ages of ages, and reject forgiveness, and curse God who calls to them. They cannot look upon the living God without hatred, and demand that there be no God of life, that God destroy himself and all his creation. And they will burn eternally in the fire of their wrath, thirsting for death and nonexistence. But they will not find death ... ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Playing someone who has a mental illness, the responsibility to not stuff it up is really strong. You have to get it right. Not just for the people who are sufferers, but for the people who care about them - their loved ones. ~ Debra Lawrance

The terror dementia sufferers must feel is unimaginable, but the techniques they use to hide their difficulties - the ducking and diving and keeping the world laughing - are perfectly understandable. ~ Laurie Graham

There is, I believe, a kind of telepathy between the condemned: a sort of intuitive recognition which can even make itself felt through the medium of the printed page. How else should I feel - without fear of appearing presumptuous, either - for this great man whom I never saw and to whom I could not have spoken, the tender, wincing, pathetic solicitude that painfully comes into being only between fellow-sufferers? ~ Anna Kavan

The sin of Book I is at first sight more obscure, but it is particularly significant. We have seen that there appear to be two very important episodes showing the Red-Crosse a prey to Despair. When we find, further, that of the three Paynim Brethren, Sansfoy, Sansloi and Sansjoy, it is the last who is the Red-Crosse's most formidable enemy, we are driven to assume that there is some special significance in this stressing of a tendency to melancholy. Such a tendency is not now regarded as a serious sin, but in mediaeval times melancholy leading to inertia and in extreme cases to suicide was under the name of accidie one of the recognized Deadly Sins. By Elizabeth's day the much less pregnant term Sloth had been substituted in the usual catalogue, and Spenser nowhere uses the word accidie. But the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were much preoccupied with the subject. They regarded the sufferers from it as at once in a highly dangerous spiritual state and as intensely interesting. It was the favourite pose of fashionable young men. Hamlet is the supreme treatment of it in literature, but most of the dramatists of the day are interested in it. I suggest that the first Book of the original Faerie Queene treated of the sin of accidie. ~ Janet Spens

Thus it is awkward to call motion-sickness a migraine attack, but we may very conveniently term it a migranoid reaction, and note, in support of its affinities, that a large minority (almost 50 per cent, according to Selby and Lance) of adult migraine sufferers experienced severe motion-sickness in ~ Oliver Sacks

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal. ~ James Joyce

In a typical mental health catch-22, the alienating nature of depression tends to keep its sufferers from finding their way to the very support groups that might help them. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it. ~ Simone Weil

I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it's completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who don't have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it. ~ Catherine Zeta-Jones

She used to recite the poem as a schoolgirl in England until she heard that it derived from the Great Plague of London in 1665. Allegedly, a ring around the rosie was a reference to a rose-colored pustule on the skin that developed a ring around it and indicated that one was infected. Sufferers would carry a pocketful of posies in an effort to mask the smell of their own decaying bodies as well as the stench of the city itself, where hundreds of plague victims dropped dead daily, their bodies then cremated. Ashes, ashes. We all fall down. ~ Dan Brown

Money often determines not only who gets elected, but what gets done. Which voices do lawmakers listen to, the banks or home owners, coal companies, or asthma sufferers, the CEOs or the unemployed? ~ Madeleine M. Kunin

One of the defining features of BPD is that sufferers have a difficult time in accepting emotions. This is in large part thanks to the intensity with which they experience them. ~ Emily Laven