You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
Interpretation
True suffering often lies beneath the surface and cannot be measured by outward appearances.
This quote by Salman Rushdie suggests that external indicators of pain or injury do not accurately reflect the depth or severity of what someone might be experiencing internally. It speaks to the complexity of human suffering and encourages a deeper empathy towards others, reminding us that what is visible may only be a fraction of a person's true struggles.
In practice
In a speech about mental health awareness, one might use this quote to illustrate that mental struggles are often hidden.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line: the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.
Faith is a mockery if it does not teach us that we can build a more complete and beautiful world.
Human rights pale beside the rights of machines. In more and more cities, especially in the great metropolises of the South, people have been banned. Automobiles usurp human space, poison the air, and frequently murder the interlopers who invade their conquered territory -and no one lifts a finger to stop them. Is there a difference between violence that kills by car and that which kills by knife or bullet?" (p.231)
In truth, we have delayed to pass sentence on the person of our lord the king, waiting, if perhaps he may, by God's grace, repent; but we will pass it ere long unless he does repent.
And thus we all are nighing The truth we fear to know: Death will end our crying For friends that come and go.
Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.
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