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I think for me, food was a way for me to deal with emotional trouble.

Painful emotions show you what prevents you from creating harmony, cooperation, sharing and reverence for life.

We create our own unhappiness. The purpose of suffering is to help us understand we are the ones who cause it.

One day I looked at something in myself that I had been avoiding because it was too painful. Yet once I did, I had an unexpected surprise. Rather than self-hatred, I was flooded with compassion for myself because I realized the pain necessary to develop that coping mechanism to begin with.

Suffering is a kind of ecstasy in a way. Having pain all the time makes me terribly, terribly grateful for every moment I've got.

To return after long years of painful absence to some place which has been the scene of our former joys, and whence the force of circumstance, and not choice, has driven us, is oppressive to the heart.

It is true that I have had heartache and tragedy in my life. These are things none of us avoids. Suffering is the price of being alive.

I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings. Afterward, we withdrew from one another and tried our best to strike the event from our memories.

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

Oh, how miserable it is to have no one to share your sorrows and joys, and, when your heart is heavy, to have no soul to whom you can pour out your woes.