Agonies Quotes & Sayings

At present sinners banish the remembrance and thought of death, and thus seek for peace (although they never find it) by leading a life of sin; but when they shall be in the agonies of death, about to enter into eternity, "when distress cometh upon them, they will seek for peace, and there will be none," then can they no longer fly from their evil conscience; they will seek peace, but what peace can be found by a soul laden with sins, which sting it like so many vipers? — Alfonso Maria De Liguori

There is no lie. The world is presented as it is. Nothing is concealed, except for perhaps the identity of the Creator, which is not so much a lie as it is a reasonable omission. No view is, however, disguised. No composition of the natural landscape is purposefully twisted or deformed so as to deliberately deceive, and no function of the natural world is dressed in sweet deception. No scream is muffled, no laceration sanitised, and the pain of hunger and thirst are naked for all to see and be sickened by. Diseases of every ghastly flavour are on loathsome display, the blights of parasitism are laid bare, and the crippling agonies of old age are public property. The terror of predation is revealed in every anguished look, the fear of infanticide written on every mother's face, and the misery of earthquakes, landslides, cyclones, floods, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, heat waves, and wild fires conferred uncensored upon stunned and appropriately intimidated audiences. — John Zande

After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race's agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages' sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with? — David Mitchell

It is difficult to put into words what I suffered-the longing that seemed to be tearing my heart out by the roots, the dreadful sense of being alone in an empty universe, the agonies that thrilled through me as if the blood were running ice-cold through my veins, the disgust with living, the impossibility of dying. Shakespeare himself never described this torture; but he counts it, in Hamlet, among the terrible of all the evils of existence. I had stopped composing; my mind seemed to become feebler as my feelings grew more intense. I did nothing. One power was left to me-to suffer. — Hector Berlioz

I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft which brought me hither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. — Mary Shelley

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing. — Henning Mankell

What we ought to see in the agonies of puberty is the result of the conditioning that maims the female personality in creating the feminine. — Germaine Greer

The saddest symptom about many so-called Christians is the utter absence of anything like conflict and fight against spiritual apathy in their Christianity. They eat, they drink, they dress, they work, they amuse themselves, they get money, they spend money, they go through a brief round of formal religious services once or twice every week. But of the great spiritual warfare - its watchings and strugglings, its agonies and anxieties, its battles and contests - of all things they appear to know nothing at all. Let us take care that this case is not our own. — J.C. Ryle

She confused being sick with being brave, and suffered agonies while imagining she merited praise for it. — E. Lockhart

I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist.' In thousands of agonies
I exist. I'm tormented on the rack
but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar
I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We and all the others and everyone - regardless of the lives we'd led, and more than anything else, and beyond the agonies and dangers that attend every act and action of ours in this life, we all wanted to live. And that desire, if not the result, is something to think about. — Deborah Blum

I and motherland are one. My name is Million, because for millions do I love and suffer agonies. — Adam Mickiewicz

Whatever sense we make of this world, whatever value we place upon our lives and relationships, whatever meaning we ultimately give to our joys and agonies, must necessarily be a gesture of faith. Whether we consider the whole a product of impersonal cosmic forces, a malevolent deity, or a benevolent god, depends not on the evidence, but on what we choose, deliberately and consciously, to conclude from that evidence. — Terryl L. Givens

If these were death agonies, they were fake ones, Costis thought, and was sure of it when they reached the shallow stair at the far end of the reflecting pool. No one on the verge of death has the strength to pile one foul word on top of another like a man compiling a layered pastry of obscene language, from the the bottom step all the way to the top. — Megan Whalen Turner

The entrance into the Kingdom is through the panging pains of repentance crashing into a man's respectable goodness; then the Holy Ghost, who produces these agonies begins the formation of the Son God in the life. — Oswald Chambers

Life is a struggle, from the agonies of birth to the railing against death. Devour or be devoured. The law of the wild. — David Gemmell

I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains. — Charlotte Bronte

I emptied the tub and put it back under the tarp," he said, "so Corporal Pierce and the others won't get any wild ideas about you bathing in the middle of the prairie." Lily blushed, embarrassed by what she'd done. She wondered why she never suffered these agonies before the fact, when it might do some good. "Corporal Pierce is a gentleman," Lily said stiffly. "And I'm not?" Lily shook her head. "No gentleman would do what you just did." "And no lady would howl like a she-wolf while riding a man," Caleb retorted. Lily — Linda Lael Miller

A wonderful privilege it was to be thus admitted into the soul of a man of genius, to be allowed to share the ecstasies and the agonies of his inmost life. — Upton Sinclair

I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn't want to be an academic. — Betty Friedan

My greed for agonies has made me die so many times that it strikes me as indecent to keep on abusing a corpse from which I can get nothing more. — Emil M. Cioran

Thou has left behind Powers that will work for thee,-air, earth, and skies! There 's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind. — William Wordsworth

The secret idea she was forming of an afterlife gave her the foothold she needed to endure the agonies to come, a newfound courage and optimism which found instant expression through SHOPPING. — Lucy Ellmann

For a man's life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness. — Anatole France

Curious how he jibbed away from sight of his wife and child!
One would have thought he must have rushed up at the first moment. On the contrary, he had a sort of physical shrinking from it - fastidious possessor that he was. He was afraid of what Annette was thinking of him, author of her agonies, afraid of the look of the baby, afraid of showing his disappointment with the present and - the future. — John Galsworthy

When you are deeply hurt, no person on this earth can shut out the innermost fears and deepest agonies. The best of friends cannot really understand the battle you are going through or the wounds inflicted on you. Only God can shut out the waves of depression and feelings of loneliness and failure that come over you. Faith in God's love alone can salvage the hurt mind. The bruised and broken heart that suffers in silence can be healed only by a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, and nothing short of divine intervention really works. — David Wilkerson

The middle way is still driving on the wrong side of the road; it still permits the killing of the fox for pleasure. One cannot kill half a fox. Like Monty Python parrot, a fox torn apart by hounds remains dead, deceased and off its perch for ever. Before the fox has been dispatched - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly - it will have suffered the agonies of the pursuit by animals four times its size and four times its strength. The middle way is a compromise that still seriously compromises the welfare of the fox. — Lyndon Harrison, Baron Harrison

Human beings, each one, right through the world, go through great agonies, the more sensitive, the more alert, the more observant, the greater the suffering, the anxiety, the extraordinary sense of insoluble problems. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

She remembered him smiling, and realized that time, that great old healer, had finally accomplished its work, and now, across the years, the face of love no longer stirred up agonies of grief and bitterness. Rather, one was left feeling simply grateful. For how unimaginably empty the past would be without him to remember. — Rosamunde Pilcher

You know," he said, "it amazes me sometimes that we even try. With everything they've done to us - the deaths, the tortures, the agonies - you'd think that we would just give up on things like hope and love. But we don't. — Brandon Sanderson

My sufferings I can compare to nothing else than the burning agonies of hell! — Solomon Northup

Man is not a 'fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant'. He changed drastically when he developed 'divided consciousness' to cope with complexities of civilisation, and has been changing steadily ever since. His greatest problem, the problem that has caused most of his agonies and miseries, has been his attempt to compensate for the narrowing of cinsciousness and the entrapment in the left-brain ego. His favorite method of compensation has been to seek out excitement. He feels most free in moments of conquest; so for the past three thousand years or so, most of the greatest man have led armies into their neighbours' territority, and turned order into chaos. This has plainly been a retrogressive step; the evolutionary urge has been defeating its own purpose. — Colin Wilson

The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in the excess of grief. — Mary Shelley

People who are in politics to be right all the time would be better off taking up fly-fishing. It's less dangerous. Politics that is not applied in the real world and doesn't address the real challenges and paradoxes and agonies is a hobby. — Neil Kinnock

As evacuation eases the body, so occasional ejectment of passion seems to appease the agonies of the soul, and dispose to tranquility the agitations of the heart. — Norm MacDonald

And for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in the cool of the evening. We were forced to despair. We were cut off from the world because to each moment clung a whole mass of mortal images. For five years the earth has not seen a single morning without death agonies, a single evening without prisons, a noon without slaughter. — Albert Camus

Imagine a society in which there were neither rich nor poor. What evils, afflictions, sorrows, disorders, catastrophes, disasters, tribulations, misfortunes, agonies, calamities, despair, desolation and ruin would be unknown to man! — Jules Verne

I learned something in the years I spent among suicide bombers ... The boys and girls who are willing to blow up their lives are not the true believers. They are the ones in agonies of doubt. There is always someone with nothing to prove who buckles the belt around them. — Sheri Holman

Strength is nothing more than enduring life - to be able to survive the heartaches and agonies we go through with our heads held high. Sometimes just walking through adversity to get to the other side is a sign of strength. — Sylvia Browne

EMMA: Ah. There you are. You - little
John Sublime: Shhuhh ... Hup. Don't. Please ... My mom met your parents in the Hamptons ... I ... I go through agonies of conscience every time we have to hurt one of you beautiful creatures ... Emma ... I'm doing God's will ...
EMMA: Shut up! I am very cross about this! Very very very cross indeed! I look like a bloody heavyweight boxer! — Grant Morrison

One of the biggest - and I would guess most common - mistakes parents make is to transfer their own childhood shit onto their kids. Whatever their joys and agonies were growing up, they assume will be exactly the same for their children, and they let it guide their parenting. I can see the same dumb instincts in myself. When I first started hanging out with my old boyfriend's kids, I found it depressing because I would just look at them and think of how miserable they must be, and how totally alone they must feel. To me, that's what childhood meant. But the truth was that they were fine. Happy-go-lucky, even. — Sarah Silverman

God moves the player, he in turn the piece.
But what god beyond God begins the round
Of dust and time and sleep and agonies? — Jorge Luis Borges

Keep her downstairs a minute!' I breathed desperately. I don't know why; you don't want your agonies of soul witnessed by a woman. ("Nightmare") — Cornell Woolrich

In my mind the river flows both ways. Forward, to the explanation of things; to a destination which will justify the agonies of travel. And back, back to a time when the river was real, and those who wandered along its banks had little interest in visions. — Clive Barker

I've heard that lawyers' children, on seeing their parents in court in the
heat of argument, get the wrong idea: they think opposing counsel to be the personal enemies of their parents, they suffer agonies, and are surprised to see them often go out arm-in-arm with their tormenters during the first recess. This was not true of Jem and me. We acquired no traumas from watching our father win or lose. I'm sorry that I can't provide any drama in this respect; if I did, it would not be true. We could tell, however, when debate became more acrimonious than professional, but this was from watching lawyers other than our father. I never heard Atticus raise his voice in my life, except to a deaf witness. — Harper Lee

Vice is but a nurse of agonies. — Philip Sidney

It is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace. The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in indulging the excess of grief. — Mary Shelley

[ ... ] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness. — Albert Camus

I felt an absolutely indescribable sense of menace. It was hell on earth to be there [in the presence of the entities], and yet I couldn't move, couldn't cry out, couldn't get away. I'd lay as still as death, suffering inner agonies. Whatever was there seemed so monstrously ugly, so filthy and dark and sinister. Of course they were demons. They had to be. And they were here and I couldn't get away. — Whitley Strieber

Sometimes the acutest of agonies are difficult to find expression in the given vocabulary: words fail but pain prevails. — Girdhar Joshi

In moments among my various agonies, I noticed the beauty that surrounded me, the wonder of things both small and large: the color of a desert flower that brushed against me on the trail or the grand sweep of the sky as the sun faded over the mountains. — Cheryl Strayed

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world. — John Cheever

How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of apprehension at each childish ailment, and the children clung to their parents with love and adoration; a few years passed, the children grew up, and persons not of their kin were more important to their happiness than father or mother. Indifference displaced the blind and instinctive love of the past. Their meetings were a source of boredom and irritation. Distracted once at the thought of a month's separation they were able now to look forward with equanimity to being parted for years. — W. Somerset Maugham

Rooting about in themselves for the source of their discomfort, they undergo agonies of unnecessary guilt. They seem blankly unaware that what they are feeling inside themselves is the subjective reflection of a much larger objective crisis: they are acting out an unwitting drama within a drama. — Alvin Toffler

I don't believe in prolonging agonies," said Oser. "Rather than watch you enspell the rest of my fleet man by man - while I still possess a fleet to offer - I understand the Dendarii Mercenaries are looking for recruits." It — Lois McMaster Bujold

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle ... — Emil Cioran

Of all the agonies in life, that which is most poignant and harrowing
that which for the time annihilates reason, and leaves our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart
is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love. — Bill Vaughan

And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it - it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life. And now was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog personality was precious, to whom these hog squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice? — Upton Sinclair

The teaching of the buddhas is: Find time and a place to remain unoccupied. That's what meditation is all about. Find at least one hour every day to sit silently doing nothing, utterly unoccupied, just watching whatsoever passes by inside. In the beginning you will be very sad, looking at things inside you; you will feel only darkness and nothing else, and ugly things and all kinds of black holes appearing. You will feel agony, no ecstasy at all. But if you persist, persevere, the day comes when all these agonies disappear, and behind the agonies is the ecstasy. — Rajneesh

Agonies are one of my changes of garments. — Walt Whitman

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky. — Russell Baker

The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes:-alright. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills-like a god. It is the Ordinary made beautiful: it is also the Average made lethal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his priest. My tools are very delicate. My compassion is honest. I have honestly assisted children in this room. I have talked away terrors and relieved many agonies. But also-beyond question-I have cut from the parts of individuality repugnant to this god, in both his aspects. Parts sacred to rarer and more wonderful gods. And at what length ... Sacrifices to Zeus took at the most, surely, sixty seconds each. Sacrifices to the Normal can take as long as sixty months. — Peter Shaffer

Everybody has a public life, and they have their own private life. Everybody has their secrets. Everybody has their own private, you know, agonies as well as joys. And that's what great drama, whether it's the movies or the theater, that's what it shows. — Annette Bening

I am accused. I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the
world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love. — Sylvia Plath

Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life.

Do you consider all this desirable? No, I don't. But it may be that the psychological adjustment which the working class are visibly making is the best they could make in the circumstances. They have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard. The alternative would be God knows what continued agonies of despair; or it might be attempted insurrections which, in a strongly governed country like England, could only lead to futile massacres and a regime of savage repression. — George Orwell

As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. "Life is a journey, not a destination." Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination. — Colson Whitehead

Yet I can read. Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, majesties, Sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once pour into the wide hollows of my brain. And deify me, as if some blithe wine or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, and so become immortal. — John Keats

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Pain dies quickly, and lets her weary prisoners go; the fiercest agonies have shortest reign. — William C. Bryant

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer - committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear. — George Eliot

We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer - and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply. — Tom Van Vleck

One can feel an attraction towards a particular person. But to release that fount of sorrow, that sense of the irreparable, those agonies which prepare the way for love, there must be
and this is perhaps, more than a person, the actual object which our passion seeks so anxiously to embrace
the risk of an impossibility. — Marcel Proust

Being a pop fan is a lot like Catholic devotion - lots of ritual, lots of ceremony ... We touch the icon to enter the sacred space, genuflecting to reliquaries and ostentatoria that make something splendid of our most secret desires and agonies. — Rob Sheffield

I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric. — Osamu Dazai

Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit. — Upton Sinclair

When the years have all passed, there will gape the uncomfortable and unpredictable dark void of death, and into this I shall at last fall headlong, down and down and down, and the prospect of that fall, that uprooting, that rending apart of body and spirit, that taking off into so blank an unknown, drowns me in mortal fear and mortal grief. After all, life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and of love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it, we shall not have this life again. — Rose Macaulay

Cycling is an excruciating sport - a rider's power is only as great as his capacity to endure pain - and it is often remarked that the best cyclists experience their physical agonies as a relief from private torments. The bike gives suffering a purpose. — Philip Gourevitch

In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. — Albert Camus

It was manifest that a malady of such horrors, stenches, and agonies, and especially one bringing the dismal despair that settled upon its victims before they died, was not a plague "natural" to mankind but "a chastisement from Heaven. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The night above. We two. Full moon.
I started to weep, you laughed.
Your scorn was a god, my laments
moments and doves in a chain.
The night below. We two. Crystal of pain.
You wept over great distances.
My ache was a clutch of agonies
over your sickly heart of sand.
Dawn married us on the bed,
our mouths to the frozen spout
of unstaunched blood.
The sun came through the shuttered balcony
and the coral of life opened its branches
over my shrouded heart.

- Night of Sleepless Love — Federico Garcia Lorca

Life is an oasis which is submerged in the swirling waves of sorrows and agonies. — Thomas Hardy

How the thought of meeting lost loved ones would sweeten one's last moments, how eagerly would one embrace them, and what bliss to live together once more in immortality! He suffered agonies when he considered religion's charitable lie, which compassionately conceals the terrible truth from feeble creatures. No, everything finished at death, nothing that we had loved was ever reborn, our farewells were for ever. For ever! For ever! That was the dreadful thought that carried his mind hurtling down abysses of emptiness. — Emile Zola

The night below. We two. Crystal of pain.
You wept over great distances.
My ache was a clutch of agonies
over your sickly heart of sand. — Federico Garcia Lorca

The disabilities of the people who came to him were established so young, in such delicate years, that their tender agonies were, by the time they arrived in his office, thickened into a stunned arrangement of expressions, deflections, and shrewd manipulations. No, — Elizabeth Strout

They who know the agonies of an ambitious, indolent, doubting, self-accusing man, - of a man who has a skeleton in his cupboard as to which he can ask for sympathy from no one, - will understand what feelings were at work within the bosom of Sir Thomas when his Percycross friends left him alone in his chamber. — Anthony Trollope

To see the convulsions, agonies and tortures of a poor fellow-creature, whom they cannot restore nor recompense, dying to gratify luxury and tickle callous and rank organs, must require a rocky heart, and a great degree of cruelty and ferocity. I cannot find any great difference between feeding on human flesh and feeding on animal flesh, except custom and practice. — George Cheyne

Is there then any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or all men's lives like the lives of us good people - like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords - broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows? — Ford Madox Ford

There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror. — Karl Marx

When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide. For what better grounds for suicide can there be than to go on making the same series of false moves which invariably lead to the same disaster and to repeat a pattern without knowing why it is false or wherein lies the flaw? And yet to percieve that in ourselves revolves a cycle of activity which is certain to end in paralysis of the will, desertion, panic and despair - always to go on loving those who have ceased to love us, and who have quite lost all resemblance to the selves who we loved! Suicide is infectious; what if the agonies which suicide endure before they are driven to take their own life, the emotion of 'all is lost' - are infectious too? — Cyril Connolly

Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter. So that the real lie of Satan may be flung back in the face of this blasphemer, so that by tears and torture we may earn the right to say to this man, 'You lie!' No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, 'We also have suffered. — G.K. Chesterton

Night of Sleepless Love The night above. We two. Full moon. I started to weep, you laughed. Your scorn was a god, my laments moments and doves in a chain. The night below. We two. Crystal of pain. You wept over great distances. My ache was a clutch of agonies over your sickly heart of sand. Dawn married us on the bed, our mouths to the frozen spout of unstaunched blood. The sun came through the shuttered balcony and the coral of life opened its branches over my shrouded heart. — Federico Garcia Lorca

In former times great objects were attained by great work. When evils were to be reformed, reformers set about their heavy task with grave decorum and laborious argument. An age was occupied in proving a grievance, and philosophical researches were printed in folio pages, which it took a life to write, and an eternity to read. We get on now with a lighter step, and quicker: ridicule is found to be more convincing than argument, imaginary agonies touch more than true sorrows, — Anthony Trollope

The ego will endure the worst agonies of neurotic misery rather than consent to one minute of diminishment of its sense of importance. — Helen M. Luke

He was one of those idealistic beings common in Russia, who are suddenly struck by some overmastering idea which seems, as it were, to crush them at once, and sometimes for ever. They are never equal to coping with it, but put passionate faith in it, and their whole life passes afterwards, as it were, in the last agonies under the weight of the stone that has fallen upon them and half crushed them. In — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As my own father was sick, and miserably tied to his invalid's chair, he would have been abandoned had not an old servant performed for him a so-called service of love. My mother gave parties while he was perishing in solitude, and amused herself while he was suffering bitter agonies — Arthur Schopenhauer

We're all so preposterous, aren't we. Holding onto our traumas, our agonies, our small dramas and using them to sabotage that which we so want, and actually deserve. ' (Petra Dussman in 'The Moment') — Douglas Kennedy

I wanted to inflict exquisite agonies upon Aunt Patience; and had I been informed that a few weeks later, I would serve her the deepest cut imaginable, I am not certain that I would not have smiled. Morbidity — Lyndsay Faye

A long suburb of red brick houses -some with patches of garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace.
On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies.
Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses. — Charles Dickens

There was a time, not so long ago, when Simon Lewis had been convinced that all gym teachers were actually demons escaped from some hell dimension, nourishing themselves on the agonies of uncoordinated youth.
Little did he know he'd been almost right. — Cassandra Clare

Love cannot exist in peace, it will always come accompanied by agonies, ecstasies, intense joys and profound sadnesses. — Paulo Coelho