What does it take to break a person?Torturers and interrogators would be able to provide statistics. This many nights without sleep, this many needles, this much water, this voltage of current on this many occasions. But there is considerable variation in people's ability to withstand torture. Sometimes one can achieve the desired result simply by showing the instruments and explaining what is to be done with them. Sometimes it takes weeks; one may be forced to restart a heart which has given out from the pain, and even then one may not manage to break the subject down. However, it is presumably possible to discern some kind of average. This many needles, this many blows to the soles of the feet, before most people are sufficiently destroyed to give up what they once held most dear. But in everyday life?

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;Weep, and you weep alone;For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,But has trouble enough of its own.Sing, and the hills will answer;Sigh, it is lost on the air;The echoes bound to a joyful sound,But shrink from voicing care.Rejoice, and men will seek you;Grieve, and they turn and go;They want full measure of all your pleasure,But they do not need your woe.Be glad, and your friends are many;Be sad, and you lose them all,—There are none to decline your nectared wine,But alone you must drink life’s gall.Feast, and your halls are crowded;Fast, and the world goes by.Succeed and give, and it helps you live,But no man can help you die.There is room in the halls of pleasureFor a large and lordly train,But one by one we must all file onThrough the narrow aisles of pain.

بالماض حدثت أولادي عن سيرة وطن,عن خطوط الطول موصولة مابين عدنانية الشام وقحطانية عدن,لم يبقى من عرس الانتصارات سوى محو القدس من خارطة الزمن

Nobody would commit suicide if the pain of being inside herself, the agony of the sleepless, tortured hours spent watching the world get smaller and uglier, were bearable or could be relieved by other people telling her how they wanted her to feel. A depressed person is selfish because her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic serial killer can forget about the person who comes in to torture her everyday. Her body is brutalized by her mind. It hurts to breathe, eat, walk, think. The gross maneuverings of her limbs are so overwhelming, so wearying, that the fine muscle movements or quickness of wit necessary to write, to actually say something, are completely out of the question.

Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didn't like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing. The one thing we don't want to do is to ignore or rupture the essential connections that can complete relevant feedback loops and restore self-regulation and balance. Our real challenge when we have symptoms is to see if we can listen to their message and really hear them and take them to heart, that is, make the connection fully.

Loving you is no more a beautiful memory, but now just a pain,I cry and weep every time I walk down the memory lane,Your love always completed me in every sense as a whole,But now it’s just emptiness and sorrow in my heart that drains,Of all the people in the world, you choose me to be hurt,Of all the hearts in the world, you choose mine to break…Why did you leave me I ask myself every morning and dawn?Why my love was incomplete tell me why you were gone?A silence surrounds my heart and fills it again with despair,Oh this pain is just too much, and the damage beyond repair,Please come back baby, just come back and bring that old smile,Or just come to see me every once in a while,So my heart no more bleeds, and no more my soul aches,So I can be peaceful after my death, in my ashes and burnt flakes…

We are all running towards a destination which doesn't exist. On our way, dogs of life keep barking at us where we respond to some and some we throw stones at. Every dog teaches a lesson we are better off without. Every knife stabs a little deeper than we deserve. Every bruise stays a lot longer than it is meant to. Encumbered by forceful lessons of life we fight for the air of elation from the breaths we take to covert them into the moments of our real existence. Everything starts with life's tyrannical dominance and ends with our impelled submissiveness. We are the puppets of external circumstances and still we believe it's all on the inside. We should be laughing at our plight, someone has framed it with such sublimity. But all we do is ache at every shred of it because that's what keeps it alive.

Πόνος βαθύς, δεν μπορείς να ορίσεις το σημείο απ' όπου σου 'ρχεται. Πόνος τόσο πλατύς, δε γίνεται να τον αποδιώξεις. Γιατί είσαι ολόκληρος αυτός ο πόνος.

Wanna know what a bullet feels like, Warren? A real one? It’s not like in the comics…I think you need to. Feel it…It’s not going to make a neat little hole. First - it’ll obliterate your internal organs. Your lung will collapse, feels like drowning…When it finally hits your spine, it’ll blow your central nervous system-…I’m talking. The pain will be unbearable, but you won’t be able to move… A bullet usually travels faster than this, of course. But the dying? It seems like it takes forever. Something, isn’t it? One tiny piece of metal destroys everything. It ripped her insides out… It took her light away. From me. From the world… And now the one person who should be here is gone - and a waste like you gets to live. A tiny piece of metal. Can you feel it now?

الأجراس تدق ولكن في صمت . . لا أحد ينتبه وربما لا يريدالكل يترقب وينتظر ، لا يساعدون أنفسهم أبداً وكأنهم إرتضوا جميعاً بـأن تكون حياتهم موتاً مؤجلاً !

In the emptiness that was all around me, I noticed an old tennis ball in the plantings; I picked it up and dropped it at Zoë’s feet. I didn’t know what I was doing, if I had a specific intention. Was I trying to lighten the mood? I don’t know, but I felt I had to do something. So there the ball bounced to a stop at her bare feet.She looked down at the ball but did nothing with it.Maxwell noticed what I had done, and he noticed Zoë’s lack of reaction. He picked up the ball and, with a mighty heave, threw it so far into the woods behind the house that I lost sight of it and could only barely hear it crash through the leaves of bushes on its way back to earth. It was quite an impressive toss, the pale tennis ball sailing through the air against the clear blue sky. What amount of psychic pain was expended on that ball, I had no idea.

I mean, in the last few months alone, I've been pinned in a big set of white-water rapids, been bitten by an angry snake in a jungle, had a close escapewith a big mountain rockfall, narrowly avoided being eaten by a huge croc in the Australian swamps, and had to cut away from my main parachute and come down on my reserve, some five thousand feet above the Arctic plateau.When did all this craziness become my world?It's as if - almost accidentally - this madness had become my life. And don't get me wrong - I love it all.The game, though, now, is to hang on to that life. Every day is the most wonderful of blessings, and a gift that I never, ever take for granted.Oh, and as for the scars, broken bones, aching limbs and sore back?I consider them just gentle reminders that life is precious - and that maybe, just maybe, I am more fragile than I dare to admit.

Walker and Timothy sat quietly for a very long time. “Why do so many people make it so hard for anyone to help them or to love them?” Walker asked finally. Timothy chuckled. “Ah, Walker—if I could explain all of humanity’s foibles, I’d be a rich man indeed, at least as far as money goes. I believe people are like that because of fear. They fear being loved because they fear that if they’re loved, they’ll have to love back. And if they love back, they may get hurt. And many people aren’t ready to put their hearts on the line like that. Mostly because they don’t have anything to fall back on. It’s quite a shame, really, because they hurt themselves by trying to avoid getting hurt. But we have to be willing to die many times if we’re ever going to get on with this business of living.

The boy knelt, shoulders bowed, on the sand in the grey of morning, moaning softly, fearfully. Glowing tendrils of energy streamed across the agitated sky, converging high above him in a vortex of brightness. He flung his hands heavenward and a sheet of blinding brilliance descended from the vortex. It enveloped him and from its core a pulsing sphere of light fell, entering his body and almost tearing him apart. He went rigid, screaming to shatter the heavens, his dark eyes bulging from their sockets, his mouth wide in a rictus of agony. Sirius exploded in a burst of silver-blue radiance, as his howl rose to a shriek beyond hearing and endurance. Out of the light and the sound and the anguish, two names imprinted themselves on his mind. One of them, he knew, was his own. The other floated for an instant above his consciousness like a fugitive white dove in the morning.

For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead---indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can’t sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed.