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A lot of suffering is just getting rid of dross in yourself, and lingering and hanging in the darkness is often - I say this against myself - a failure of imagination, to imagine the door into the light.

Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

It's a rare and precious thing to be close to suffering because our society - in many ways - tells us that suffering is wrong. If it's our own suffering, we try to hide it or isolate ourselves. If others are suffering, we're taught to put them away somewhere so we don't have to see it.

The word 'suffering' is not in my vocabulary.

Suffering without understanding in this life is a heap worse than suffering when you have at least the grain of an idea what it's all for.

I have a collective sense of suffering.

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

If you don't suffer, you don't get anything. Nothing easy in life.