To have suffered deeply makes pain feel usual.

To have suffered deeply makes pain feel usual. When someone in pain is seen, and the reaction is to cry or to “pity” them, that is not understanding—it is the absence of it. For such reactions arise not from closeness to that pain, but from a fundamental foreignness to it. One who has already shed all those tears, and thus knows all their meanings, shows no reaction at all—for they have simply accepted it as reality.