Agonized Quotes & Sayings

All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher's yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then - still further - of the unavowable horrors that 'fitness' (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.) — Nick Land

For long minutes we cried, our grief inconsolable. We mourned the innocence of our childhood love; we grieved as parents of our own children. We agonized in the unfairness of the haphazard and tumultuous world we'd been pushed out into through our mothers' flesh. We wept for the first time, one among many firsts we'd shared, for the sheer emotional pain of bedrock loss. — Larry J. Dunlap

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin? — Margaret Atwood

Welcome to my gates, Ista dy Chalion. I am the Mother of Jokona." Her hand lifted from the girl's head, flicked out, fingers spreading.
Within Ista, the god unfolded.
Her second sight burst anew upon Ista's mind like a dazzling lightning stroke, brilliant beyond hope, revealing an eerie landscape. She saw it all, at one glance: the dozen demons, the swirling, crackling lines of power, the agonized souls, Joen's dark, dense, writhing passenger. The thirteenth demon, spinning wildly through the air toward her, trailing its evil umbilicus.
Ista opened her jaws in a fierce grin, and took it in a gulp.
"Welcome to mine, Joen of Jokona," said Ista. "I am the Mouth of Hell. — Lois McMaster Bujold

How agonized we are by how people die. How unconcerned we are by how they live. — P.Sainath

Satyagraha is itself an unmistakable mute prayer of an agonized soul. — Mahatma Gandhi

Not one of all the purple host Who took the flag to-day Can tell the definition So clear of victory, As he, defeated, dying, On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Break agonized and clear. — Emily Dickinson

We're not playing some minor game in Scientology. It isn't cute or something to do for lack of something better. The whole agonized future of this planet, every Man, Woman and Child on it, and your own destiny for the next endless trillions of years depend on what you do here and now with and in Scientology. — L. Ron Hubbard

But the shadow settled on them, obliquely, and was shuffled off only when Danielle rose to put on music, a Spanish soprano singing Cantaloube, her pure, agonized strains floating, their minor harmonies wavering in the small room, as if to remind them both that beauty and loss were inseparably entwined. — Claire Messud

I can't
I can't think about anything or anyone else," he whispered. A hand drifted up, dragging back through his hair. "I can't think straight when you're around. I can't sleep. It feels like I can't breathe
I just
"
"Liam, please," I begged. "You're tired. You're barely over being sick. Let's just ... Can we just go back to the others?"
"I love you." He turned toward me, that agonized expression still on his face. "I love you every second of everyday, and I don't understand why, or how to make it stop
"
He looked wild with pain; it pinned me in place, even before what he had said registered in my mind.
"I know it's wrong; I know it down to my damn bones. And I feel like I'm sick. I'm trying to be a good person, but I can't. I can't do this anymore. — Alexandra Bracken

This religion gives you goals which are outside of reality. It enriches your fantasy life with ugliness. It fills you with ideas of guilt over the most common human experiences
usually related to sex. In this room, right now, each of you, in your own lives, has agonized over the fact that you have masturbated. Masturbation isn't sinful. If it feels good
do it. You have my blessing, and you yourself know how it relaxes you. — Madalyn Murray O'Hair

I remember, when I have preached at different times in the country, and sometimes here, that my whole soul has agonized over men, every nerve of my body has been strained and I could have wept my very being out of my eyes and carried my whole frame away in a flood of tears, if I could but win souls — Charles Spurgeon

God may thunder His commands from Mount Sinai and men may fear, yet remain at heart exactly as they were before. But let a man once see his God down in the arena as a Man-suffering, tempted, sweating, and agonized, finally dying a criminal's death-and he is a hard man indeed who is untouched. — John Bertram Phillips

His agonized scream rode the cascading waves of power as they swept across the terrace. — Steven Erikson

Until we establish a felt sense of kinship between our own species and those fellow mortals who share with us the sun and shadow of life on this agonized planet, there is no hope for other species, there is no hope for the environment, and there is no hope for ourselves. — Jon Wynne-Tyson

Unfortunately they failed to appreciate the best part of you, preferring to lose themselves in the labyrinth of your grosser illusions. Didn't I show our well-behaved audience an angelized version of you? And you saw their reaction. They were bored and just sat in their seats like a bunch of stiffs. Of course, what can you expect? They wanted the death stuff, the pain stuff. All that flashy junk. They wanted cartwheels of agonized passion; somersaults into fires of doom; nosedives, if you will, into the frenzied pageant of vulnerable flesh. They wanted a tangible thrill.
("Drink To Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes") — Thomas Ligotti

There would be no point asking Sarah because she was incapable of making a decision. If Cecilia asked her if she wanted tea or coffee, she would sit for a full minute, her forehead furrowed as she agonized over the pros and cons of each beverage, before finally saying, "Coffee! No, wait, tea!" A decision like this one would give her a seizure. — Liane Moriarty

There is nothing alive more agonized than man / of all that breathe and crawl across the earth. — Homer

Making decisions was the painful part for me, the part I agonized over. But once the decision was made, I simply followed through - usually with relief that the choice was made. Sometimes the relief was tainted by despair, like my decision to come to Forks. But it was still better than wrestling with the alternatives. — Stephenie Meyer

I grew up in the Baptist Church, and going to church with my father; I remember being 8 years old, trying to determine whether I was really ready to give up sin, and for days I agonized. — Oprah Winfrey

When I got back to my office Tween was there. She rose from the foyer couch as I wheezed in off the ramp. I took one look at her and said, "Come inside." She followed me through the inner door. I waved my hand over the infra-red plate and it closed. Then I put out my arms.
She bleated like a new-born lamb and flew to me. Her tears were scalding, and I don't think human muscles are built for the wrenching those agonized sobs gave her. People should cry more. They ought to learn how to do it easily, like laughing or sweating. Crying piles up. In people like Tween, who do nothing if they can't smile and make a habit-pattern of it, it really piles up. With a reservoir like that, and no developed outlet, things get torn when the pressure builds too high.
I just held her tight so she wouldn't explode. The only thing I said to her was "sh-h-h" once when she tried to talk while she wept. One thing at a time. — Theodore Sturgeon

I have no interest at all in food and drink, but only in slaughter and blood and the agonized groans of mangled men — Homer

Life is a long agonized illness only curable by death. — Spike Milligan

With horror he saw that her hair was already afire as the tarred stake burned about her head. He held her agonized gaze with his fierce black eyes. "I'll love you forever, and beyond," he vowed as he raised both arms and plunged his sword into her heart.

~Marcus Magnus — Virginia Henley

Not called!' did you say?
'Not heard the call,' I think you should say.
Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father's house and bid their brothers and sisters and servants and masters not to come there. Then look Christ in the face - whose mercy you have professed to obey - and tell Him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish His mercy to the world. — William Booth

The career of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed the Manhattan Project, draws such questions to a focus that resembles the bead of a laser-gunsight on a victim's breastbone. It was Oppenheimer whom the public lionized as the brains behind the bomb; who agonized about the devastation his brilliance had helped to unleash; who hoped that the very destructiveness of the new "gadget," as the bombmakers called their invention, might make war obsolete; and whose sometime Communist fellow-traveling and opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb - a weapon a thousand times more powerful than the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki - brought about his political disgrace and downfall, which of course have marked him in the eyes of some as all the more heroic, a visionary persecuted by warmongering McCarthyite troglodytes. His legacy, of course, is far more complicated. — Algis Valiunas

Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes, - they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design. — James Russell Lowell

For hours, hours that could not be measured in terms of minutes or centuries, he dragged this terrible imagine round with him and was wholly oblivious to everything he suffered and by now he could not tell what was stronger, the chains with which it bound him or his own agonized desperation as he clung to it. — Laszlo Krasznahorkai

There is tremendous life and personality in a name. It should be at least as agonized over as any character trait. — Travis Beacham

a flayed body untangled
string by string and hung
to the wall, an agonized banner
displayed for the same reason
flags are. — Margaret Atwood

Leonora, as I have said, was the perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in normal circumstances her desires were those of the woman who is needed by society. She desired children, decorum, an establishment she desired to avoid waste, she desired to keep up appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal even in her utterly undeniable beauty. But I don't mean to say that she acted perfectly normally in this perfectly abnormal situation. All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the piece. What would you have? Steel is a normal, hard, polished substance. But if you put it in a hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be handled. If you put it in a fire still more hot it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora. — Ford Madox Ford

Neeta lunged for Jonas, grasping his arm and tugging him violently out of mine. So violently, I watched his shoulder wrench in an unnatural way and he let out a surprised but agonized cry of pain. When — Kristen Ashley

The humor of jazz is rich and many-sided. Some of it is obvious enough to make a dog laugh. Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro. Jazz has both white and black elements, and each in some respects has influenced the other. It's recent phase seems to throw the light of the white race's sophistication upon the anguish of the black. — Bix Beiderbecke

That had always been my way, though. Making decisions was the painful part for me, the part I agonized over. But once the decision was made, I just followed through - relieved that the choice was made. — Stephenie Meyer

The van doors were closed and - as I learned to my dismay when I tried to wrench them open - locked. I slapped my pocket and swore. "Sloane, I don't have my keys!" I shouted. "Do you?" "Like you people let me drive? Fuck, no, I don't have keys to the van." She bent, picking up a large rock from the curb. "On the other hand, I don't really need them, do I?" "Sloane - " My protest died when I heard Jeff scream inside the van. It was a shrill, agonized sound, and it hurt my heart in ways I hadn't known were possible. "Throw the fucking rock, Sloane!" The words had barely left my lips before Sloane's rock was smashing through the driver's side window — Seanan McGuire

A rush of love and agonized worry filled her at the sight of her brother. He was filthy, battered, and grinning unrepentantly. — Lisa Kleypas

Maxine," Grant said, but I barely heard him. I was lost in that vision, in those emotions - the pain, and hunger for pain, forming the root of so much
agonized rage.
" 'Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate,'" I muttered.
"Yoda, from Star Wars?"
" 'Hate leads to suffering.'" I met his gaze. "Yoda knows his shit, man."
Grant's mouth crooked in a gentle smile. — Marjorie M. Liu

Geordie wrote a letter to Mr. Webster in which the shrieking figure of Apology was hounded through a labyrinth of agonized syntax. — Robertson Davies

He realized that he agonized over everything all the time, and he admitted that part of the problem in the Carter game had been his own lack of belief in his abilities. He knew the reason why he was like this, that it was the price he paid for carefully watching out for himself ever since he had been a little boy. 'I've never taken a chance in life,' he said. 'I need to run in front of traffic bucknacked and get arrested. — H. G. Bissinger

Dying's easy." Illyan's drawn features grew distant. How much did he remember of his agonized pleading to Miles for an easy death, so few weeks ago? "Living's hard. Let the son of a bitch stand his court-martial. Every last eternal minute of it. — Lois McMaster Bujold

Jace stiffened, and for a moment Maia saw through the Daniel-like savage amusement to what was underneath, and it was dark and agonized and reminded her more of her own eyes in the mirror than of her brother's. — Cassandra Clare

On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees - where there are any trees - all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks ... I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair, - bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed; - for the sea is devouring the land. — Lafcadio Hearn

Sarah Palin's book is big, 400 pages. She wrote the book herself and agonized over every word, and so will you. — David Letterman

I got hung up on diction and syntax; I agonized over every word. — M. Pierce

During one wave, I suddenly found myself cramped over in front of my tent, stark naked, painful, liquid acidic craps, and, the humiliation of it all, surrounded by six elephants, silent, quizzical, polite, murmuring, almost solicitous, their trunks waving in the air investigating my actions and moans. They watched my agonized shitting as if it were an engrossing, silent Shakespearean tragedy performed in the round. — Robert M. Sapolsky

We've heard that the hookup culture is destroying us. We've heard that it's saving us. We've heard that it's racist. We've agonized over which one of these is true. — Hanna Rosin

Transgressions are to be understood and corrected, not dwelt upon or agonized over. — Barbara Ann Kipfer

Agonized by her longing to go on thinking of her lover, and her fear of damnation if she does, she has hit on the idea of praying God to make her forget him and as she keeps on making this prayer every minute of the day, she's found a way of never letting him out of her mind. — Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

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

When a traveler from the future must talk, he does not talk but whimpers. He whispers tortured sounds. He is agonized. For if he makes the slightest alteration in anything, he may destroy the future. At the same time, he is forced to witness events without being part of them, without changing them. He envies the people who live in their own time, who can act at will, oblivious of the future, ignorant of the effects of their actions. But he cannot act. He is an inert gas, a ghost, a sheet without soul. He has lost his personhood. He is an exile of time. — Alan Lightman

They were beautiful books, sometimes very thick, sometimes very thin, always typographically exhilarating, with their welter of title pages, subheads, epigraphs, emphatic italics, italicized catchwords taken from German philosophy and too subtle for translation, translator's prefaces and footnotes, and Kierkegaard's own endless footnotes, blanketing pages at a time as, crippled, agonized by distinctions, he scribbled on and on, heaping irony on irony, curse on curse, gnashing, sneering, praising Jehovah in the privacy of his empty home in Copenhagen. — John Updike

Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road, a long, agonized wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night. — Bram Stoker

Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong. — Thomas Hardy

It is in this unearthly first hour of spring twilight that earth's almost agonized livingness is most felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors and turn on the lights. — Elizabeth Bowen

Rather than answer, he just moans again. Low, agonized. Shit, he's desperate for it. I guess I would be too if I'd walked around all day with a plug rubbing on my prostate. I smooth my hand down his strong back, then lean in and plant a kiss between his shoulder blades as I withdraw again. "I like you like this," I murmur. "That sexy ass in the air. Having you at my mercy. Hearing you beg. — Sarina Bowen

Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. — William Booth

I'm not a great one for chatting people up, because it's phony. I don't want people to feel at ease. You want a bit of edge. There are quite long, agonized silences. I love it. Something strange might happen. I mean, taking photographs is a very nasty thing to do. It's very cruel. — Antony Armstrong-Jones