Quote by Frederick Buechner

“Another way, I think, is to be somehow trapped by your pain. Being stopped in your tracks. Never, in a sense, being able to escape your pain. Never being able to move on out of it into whatever lies beyond. I think a classic example of that would be the character Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Miss Havisham was at an early age all set to be married. She had on her bridal finery, and the great wedding cake was there in the parlor. Then her boyfriend jilted her, and that was the end of her life. From that day on, she lived in that room, wearing her tattered, moldering wedding clothes, with the cake still there, a sort of ruined pile on the table with cobwebs and mice. And I think I’ve known people like that, who have been somehow trapped in their pain. It becomes their confinement. It becomes like the room to the cricket—it can’t get out of it. You keep living it over and over and over again, almost relishing the bitterness of it. So you deal with your pain by allowing it to overwhelm you, by allowing it to stop you in your tracks. And I suppose it’s also a way of surviving your pain, because as in the case of Miss Havisham, you take a kind of grim, awful pleasure in your ruin.”