“In other words, there was no pain. There was no pain anymore.”

“[Faith] was something other than an intellectual exercise. There were no words, no lofty concepts, that could take away the pain. Faith was living with the pain.”

“I've learned that if I stay busy, especially by helping others, I don't think about my pain. In an odd way, my pain is its own therapy. I intend to go on until I can't go anymore. ”

“Death was painful, not because people couldn't see their loved ones anymore, but because they couldn't communicate with them anymore.”

“The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.”

“The beauty of physical pain is that it wipes out the other forms of pain.”