In the country of pain we are each alone.

Sarton’s line compresses a hard truth about suffering: pain is radically private. Even when others witness it, offer care, or share similar experiences, the felt reality of pain remains untransferable—each person must inhabit it from the inside. Calling it a “country” suggests a whole landscape with its own rules, borders, and isolation, as if pain exiles the sufferer from ordinary social life. The sentence also implies limits to empathy and language: we can describe pain, but we cannot fully hand it over or make another truly feel it. The poignancy lies in its quiet universality—pain is common, yet it makes us solitary.