God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Wendy Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire: Weaving Heaven and Earth

I wish I could be good enough for once in my life

To suffer. It means god is near. Grace--like a scalpel without anesthesia

Anna Kamienska, Notebook 

Mistakes were made...

It’s all I see all around me

BellaLoveCoach ~ Twitter

We are never so defensless against suffering as when we love.

Thich Nhat Hanh // Titus Andronicus // Illustration by Muhammed Salah // Anaïs Nin // Marie Howe // Oscar Wilde // Jeanette Winterson // W.H. Auden // Ernest Hemingway // Paul McCartney // Sigmund Freud

So many of us start along the spiritual path because we are suffering. But you must realise that for real healing to occur, there must first be deep compassion for yourself, especially the parts of yourself you dislike or consider ugly.

— Pema Chödrön

While we may not recognize it at the time of a traumatic event, life-changing suffering has a way of being an opening to a greater understanding of life. The “mud” and mess of our most painful experiences can become the fertile ground for the blossoming of our understanding and self-compassion.

Sister Dang Nghiem, “Suffering Is Fertile Soil”

Our society: If you kill yourself, you’re selfish and should have reached out. If you don’t kill yourself you’re attention seeking and dramatic.

No one cares until you’re dead

I feel so left out. I don’t know why, but I feel as though people don’t actually like me. So I slowly distance myself from people and eventually I have no friends.

Juliette Drouet, from a letter to Victor Hugo, written on 1833

Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in time.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace