He was conscious of his body as a heavy cold horrible container. He had the feeling, coming to him as the memory of a dream, of being a prisoner waiting to be tortured. The extremity of pain was yet to come. And even now he was denied to comfort of self-pitying misery and warm tears.

The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.

But there are times of suffering which remain in our lives like black absolutes and are not blotted out. Fortunate are those for whom these black stars shed some sort of light.

Perhaps in the end the suffering is all, it's all contained in the suffering. The final atoms of it all are simply pain.

And all the time my very soul would travel with her, invisible and crying soundlessly with pain. I had acquired a dimension of suffering which would poison and devour my whole being, as far as I could see, forever.

She felt above all, as a sort of categorical imperative, the desire to set Hannah free, to smash up all her eerie magical surroundings, to let the fresh air in at last; even if the result should be some dreadful suffering.