To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.

Belane, are you nuts?"
Who knows? Insanity is comparative. Who sets the norm?

...pain that would have made even a god shiver in terror.

We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?"

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw

So be careful when you bend over.