(no subject)
"My sorrow is not unusual. This very day hundreds, thousands of us perhaps, all over the world, will be dazed by a similar sentence. I am probably among the least able to control a first impulse--I know my weakness so well. But experience has also taught me that I have inherited from my mother, and no doubt from other poor women of our kind, a sort of endurance, which in the long run is almost unlimited, because it doesn't attempt to vie with pain, slips within, makes of it a habit in some way: that is our strength. Otherwise how can one explain the obstinate will to live in so many poor creatures, whose amazing patience finally wears down the callousness and cruelty of husband, children, relations. . . . Mothers--Mothers of the Poor!
"Only you mustn't talk about it. I mustn't talk for as long as silence is mine. And that may last for weeks, months. When I think how one word then, one look of sympathy, a mere question, possibly--might have sufficed to draw out my secret. It was there on my lips-- He held it back. I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don't despise it. But it can't quench pain, it slips through your soul as through a sieve. And when our suffering has been dragged from one pity to another, as from one mouth to another, we can no longer respect or love it, I feel--"
The Diary of a Country Priest
by Georges Bernanos
"Only you mustn't talk about it. I mustn't talk for as long as silence is mine. And that may last for weeks, months. When I think how one word then, one look of sympathy, a mere question, possibly--might have sufficed to draw out my secret. It was there on my lips-- He held it back. I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don't despise it. But it can't quench pain, it slips through your soul as through a sieve. And when our suffering has been dragged from one pity to another, as from one mouth to another, we can no longer respect or love it, I feel--"
The Diary of a Country Priest
by Georges Bernanos