Pain

I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increas'd;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.
~ William Blake, from Poetical Sketches (1783). Mad Song

People live through such pain only once; pain comes again,?but it finds a tougher surface.
~ Willa Sibert Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915). Part II. The Song of the Lark. Chapter XI

You can turn painful situations around through laughter.
~ Bill Cosby

Whoa, when you hear me howlin', baby, you know it hurts way down inside.
~ William James "Willie" Dixon, in I Am the Blues (1970 album). I Can't Quit You, Baby

It is the pain, it is the pain, endures.
~ William Empson, in Cambridge Poetry (1929). Villanelle (1928).

The unnatural position made every movement painful; the lacerated veins and crushed tendons throbbed with incessant anguish; the wounds, inflamed by exposure, gradually gangrened; the arteries -- especially at the head and stomach -- became swollen and oppressed with surcharged blood ... there was added to them the intolerable pang of a burning and raging thirst ...
~ Frederick William Farrar, The Life of Christ

If I were to choose between pain and nothing, I would always choose pain.
~ William Faulkner, The Wild Palms (1939).

Crying is the most powerful tool for releasing hurt.
~ Bill Ferguson

Life is pain. Anybody that says different is selling something.
~ William Goldman, The Princess Bride (1973).

To the pain.
~ William Goldman, The Princess Bride (1973).

Each generation becomes more addicted to the sedatives of life, to dull the pain of living.
~ Billy Graham

The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.
~ William Hazlitt, in Edinburgh Review (October 1829). American Literature -- Dr. Channing

Men may scoff, and men may pray, but they pay every pleasure with a pain.
~ William Ernest (W.E.) Henley, from Poems (1898). Bric-à-Brac. Ballade of Truisms

They who are afflicted with it, are seized while they are walking, (more especially if it be up hill, and soon after eating) with a painful and most disagreeable sensation in the breast, which seems as if it would extinguish life, if it were to increase or to continue; but the moment they stand still, all this uneasiness vanishes. ... In all other respects, patients are, at the beginning of this disorder, perfectly well. ... Males are most liable to this disease, especially such as have past their fiftieth year.
~ William Heberden (describing "angina pectoris" during a 1768 lecture in London), in Medical Transactions of the Royal College of Physicians, 2 (1772). Some Account of a Disorder of the Breast

A sword less hurt does, than a pen.
~ William King, The Eagle and the Robin (1709).

Our pain isn't as bad as you might think. Dead people don't suffer.
~ Bill "The Spaceman" Lee (whose team had blown six games against the Yankees in 1978).

I do claim consort with the great and strong
Who suffered ill and had the gift to speak.
~ William Ellery Leonard, from The Vaunt of Man: and Other Poems (1912). III: The Issues of Life. Compensation

If women exhibit less emotion at pain, it does not prove that they bear it better, but rather that they feel it less.
~ W. Somerset Maugham, from A Writer's Notebook (1949).

Remember, painful = PAY-IN-FULL. The more severe the pain or illness, the more severe will be the necessary changes. These may involve breaking bad habits, or acquiring some new and better ones. To hear the advice of the pain without following it is as useful (or should I say useless?) as any other unheeded good advice.
~ Peter McWilliams, Life 101: Everything We Wished We Had Learned about Life in School--But Didn't (August 1994).

There are few pains so grievous as to have seen, divined, or experienced how an exceptional man has missed his way and deteriorated.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1885-86).

It is not the delicate neurotic person who is prone to angina, but the robust, the vigorous in mind and body, the keen and ambitious man, the indicator of whose engines is always at "full speed ahead."
~ William Osler, in The Lancet (1910). The Lumieian lectures on angina pectoris

A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.
~ Will Rogers, in The Wit and Wisdom of Will Rogers (1933)

A good man will seek to take pain out of things. A foolish man will not even notice it, except in himself. And the poor unfortunate evil man will drive pain deeper into things and spread it about wherever he goes.
~ William Saroyan, The Human Comedy (1943).

Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.
~ William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost. Act V, scene ii

One fire burns out another's burning,
One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.
~ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. Act I, scene ii

Pain pays the income of each precious thing.
~ William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

The labour we delight in physics pain.
~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth. Act II, scene iii

There is the pain of something infinite
In the deep sea, and in its lonely waves,
A yearning unfulfilled, unsatisfied.
~ William Sharp, in Sea-music: An anthology of poems and passages descriptive of the sea (1887).

When it's your own pain, you notice it.
~ William Stafford, in The Way It Is (1998). Hunger

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.
~ William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990).

The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.
~ William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990).

Pain with the thousand teeth.
~ William Watson, from Lacrymae Musarum And Other Poems (1892). The Dream of Man

Oh! I know this truth, if I know no other,
That passionate Love is Pain's own mother.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox, from How Salvator Won, and Other Recitations (1895). The Way of It

There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox, from Poems of Passion (1883). Miscellanious Poems. Solitude

They say the world is round, and yet
I often think it square,
So many little hurts we get
From corners here and there.
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in Machinists Monthly Journal, v. 11 (1899). Life's Scars

Look! There is pain. There is pain among people of all ages, races, incomes, and education levels. We are all experiencing discomfort. We are all suffering. ... Once you know this simple truth in your heart, it becomes the key to understanding the nature of your own existence.
~ Angel Kyodo Williams, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace (2000).

But without painful experiences we don't grow.
~ Betty Williams, PeaceJam Foundation (4 July 1995). An Interview with Betty Williams

The part of my pain which sometimes
releases me from it fled with her, the rest,
in the rake of the late light, stayed.
~ Charles Kenneth ("C.K.") Williams, from The Singing (2003). The Doe

This country of endured but unendurable pain.
~ Thomas Lanier ("Tennessee") Williams, (on the emotional environment of his characters, whether they live in New Orleans, St Louis or abroad), in The New York Times (18 May 1986).

Years ago I used to commiserate with all people who suffered. Now I commiserate only with those who suffer in ignorance, who do not understand the purpose and ultimate utility of pain.
~ Bill Wilson, As Bill Sees It: The A.A. Way of Life (December 1967).

But, why, ungrateful, dwell on idle pain?
~ William Wordsworth, An Evening Walk. Addressed to a Young Lady (1787)

Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it -- short-term pain for long-term gain.
~ George F. Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (1983).

Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly.
~ William P. Young, The Shack (2007).