There were moments when he felt something soft, something acutely sensitive vibrating within him. He, who until now had been a 'surface' person, who had been able to call everything by its name with so much self-assurance, and who had had such a concrete sense of reality, began to feel uncertain and vague, to experience a bitter-sweet indeterminate craving, as if something crippled yet trembling with life was desperately trying to break through the thick icy core inside him, crying to come out. (chapter 1)

Sometimes, pain is all that lets you know you're alive.

There is such a thing as anesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.

Even when one has climbed up into those levels of bliss where pain vanishes, it still survives disguised as intolerable ecstasy.

but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.

Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire

It was something like pain and different from pain.

Under the seams runs the pain.

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again — but it finds a tougher surface.

Everyone understands the pain that accompanies death,
but genuine pain doesn't live in the spirit,
nor in the air, nor in our lives,
nor on these terraces of billowing smoke.
The genuine pain that keeps everything awake
is a tiny, infinite burn
on the innocent eyes of other systems.

The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost. That's a running sore.

There is a pleasure which is born of pain.

…growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination

There is a pain so utter, it swallows being up;
The covers the abyss with a trance
So memory can step around, across, upon it.