Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on Suffering)

"There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live."—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Three Sisters (1901)

Quote of the Day (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, on Why Suffering Is Not So Good for Writers)

"You write better with all your problems resolved. You write better in good health. You write better without preoccupations. You write better when you have love in your life. There is a romantic idea that suffering and adversity are very good, very useful for the writer. I don't agree at all."—Colombian Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-2014), quoted in Pete Hamill, “Pete Hamill Interviews Gabriel García Marquez: Love and Solitude,” Vanity Fair, March 1988

Quote of the Day (Elie Wiesel, on the Proper Response to Human Suffering)

“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.”— Holocaust survivor, human-rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel (1928-2016), Night, translated by Marion Wiesel (1955)

Quote of the Day (Dorothy Day, on Identifying With the ‘Stricken and Abandoned’)

“All through those weary first days in jail when I was in solitary confinement, the only thoughts that brought comfort to my soul were those lines in the Psalms that expressed the terror and misery of man suddenly stricken and abandoned. Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit — these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me. I was no longer myself. I was man. I was no longer a young girl, part of a radical movement seeking justice for those oppressed, I was the oppressed. I was that drug addict, screaming and tossing in her cell, beating her head against the wall. I was that shoplifter who for rebellion was sentenced to solitary. I was that woman who had killed her children, who had murdered her lover.”—Dorothy Day (1897-1980), social activist and founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and candidate for sainthood, From Union Square to Rome (1938)

Quote of the Day (Rev. George Whitefield, on Human Extremity and God)

“Your extremity shall be God's opportunity.” — English revivalist Rev. George Whitefield, July 25, 1741 letter, in Letters of George Whitefield, for the Period 1734-1742 (1771)

Quote of the Day (Fr. John C. Flynn, on Love and Suffering)

“Love includes suffering, but nonlove (not facing love's responsibility) also includes suffering. The choice you must make is which suffering to avoid: the suffering that love demands and that brings peace, or the suffering that comes from emptiness and feelings of nonfulfillment.” —Fr John C. Flynn , quoted in David Gonzalez, “Bronx Priest of the Streets Gets a Stretch of Pavement in His Name,” The New York Times, May 30, 2016

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Man and ‘The Sufferings of the World’)

"He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world." – Nobel Prize laureate Albert Camus (1913-1960), The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (1951)

Quote of the Day (Barbara Brown Taylor, on God Not Conforming to Expectations)

“Disillusioned, we find out that God does not conform to our expectations. We glimpse our own relative size in the universe and see that no human being can say who God should be or how God should act. We review our requirements of God and recognize them as our own fictions, things we tell ourselves to make ourselves feel safe or good or comfortable. Disillusioned, we find out what is not true and we are set free to seek what is—if we dare— to turn away from the God who was supposed to be in order to seek the God who is.” —Barbara Brown Taylor, God in Pain: Teaching Sermons on Suffering (1998)