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"When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling."
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"A life of hardship and personal suffering is unavoidable. A person must endure many humiliations of the mind and body, and expect persons whom they trusted to someday betray them. People inevitably witness the death of their loved ones. We also witness acts of depravity committed by criminals that lurk in every society and rouge acts of scandal committed by government officials in charge of the public welfare. A person must nonetheless resist personal discouragement, sadness, dejection, and despondency. I must reach an accord with pain, suffering, and anguish, or forevermore be tortured by reality while constantly seeking to escape from the inescapable agony of being."

"When we suffer in silence, we think that we are alone, different, separate. When we share our stories of suffering, we find that we are the same."

"There are people who have an appetite for grief pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation."

"The unavoidable has touched the life of every human being on the face of the earth. Some have rebounded, others have given up--but all of us have felt the wings of tragedy brushing against us."

"It was well said-by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think-that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable."

"Every dimension of your suffering will instruct you, until you have learned your essential lessons."

"If you don't accept and respect your suffering, it isn't going anywhere."
Explore more quotes by Yann Martel

"Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science."

"Don't you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?"

"Some of us give up on life with only a resigned sigh. Others fight a little, then lose hope. Still others-and I am one of those-never give up. We fight and fight and fight. We fight no matter the cost of battle, the losses we take, the improbability of success. We fight to the very end. It's not a question of courage. It's something constitutional, an inability to let go."

"Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower."

"I suppose in the end the whole of life becomes an act of letting go. But what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye."

"If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."

"Even when God seemed to have abandoned me, he was watching. Even when he seemed indifferent to my suffering, he was watching. And when I was beyond all hope of saving, he gave me rest. Then he gave me a sign to continue my journey."
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