But who can remember pain, once it's over?

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

One of the blessings human beings take for granted is the ability to remember pain without re-feeling it. The pain of the physical wounds is long gone …and the other kind of hurt, the damage done to our spirits, has been healed. We are careful with those scarred places in each other.

It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.

Pain engraves a deeper memory.

Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’
‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

They say women forget the pain of childbirth. Well, they are in nature's hand. No hand took mine. I was a body of pain in an earth and sky of darkness. It will take death to make me forget.

Because we embrace our scars more than our healing. [...] We can recall the exact day we got hurt, but who remembers the day the wound was gone?

Forget that old adage 'forgive and forget.' It's an impossible standard. The human heart never forgets its pain. We can and often do choose to forgive and heal and move on. But the scars remain. Like words pounded out on an old typewriter leave impressions that can never truly be erased, the heart remembers.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.

there is no recollection which time does not put an end to, and no pain which death does not remove.

You, you'll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused! Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen, blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind from this hour on! Blind in the darkness-blind!