Agonizing Quotes & Sayings

The faint sound of music filtered into the room, a welcome disruption from the agonizing silence. The soft melody comforted Haven. She relaxed as the tension left her body, but it did nothing to shut off her mind. She lay awake, listening as she stared at the clock, wishing for relief. — J.M. Darhower

Most dramatically, the Bridge served as an agonizing or exhilarating psychological symbol for the more than 1.2 million servicemen and women who sailed beneath it during World War II and for those soldiers and Marines who saw it from the air as their chartered World Airways or Flying Tiger plane took off from the Oakland Airport, banked westward across both bridges, and headed to Vietnam. Seen upon departure, whether from the channel or the air, the Golden Gate Bridge expressed the life left behind and the fearsome dangers to come. Seen upon return, the Bridge suggested safe harbor, recovery, the joy of life in years that now would be theirs. — Kevin Starr

We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed like endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled like movers trying to get a refrigerator into a fifth floor walk-up. — Russell Baker

You can't blame anyone else ... You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices. He knew this. That's why he deserted us like we deserted those civilians. He saw the road ahead, a steep, treacherous mountain road. We'd all have to hike that road, each of us dragging the boulder of what we'd done behind us. He couldn't do it. He couldn't shoulder the weight. - Philip Adler — Max Brooks

My first thought was that a tornado had somehow picked me up and carried me off, like in the Wizard of Oz. No old witches pedaled by, and I didn't see any flying farm animals or chicken coops, and after a few agonizing minutes, I fell deep into unconsciousness again. — J.R. Rain

He curled up, twitching and spasming, the pain stormtrooping through his entire body in agonizing, dizzying, pounding waves. He vomited, but it wasn't the contents of his stomach. It was his stomach, hanging inside-out from a slimy loop of esophagus, spilling out the precious blood he'd been digesting.
Even with everything going on, the smell of blood activated his biting reflex, and he chomped down on his own regurgitated organs, screaming as he chewed. — Blake Crouch

But should it matter what we do as long as we use our strength courageously and lead a life without desperation to the end? Isn't it wrong to escape, make a detour and be lost, all of which have led me here to the farthest-flung edge of the world? Wouldn't I have had a good courageous life if only I had been able to resist sickness and fear? Will I be made to face the consequences just because I had nothing to counter a nameless and agonizing desperation? — Annemarie Schwarzenbach

There is something intrinsically wrong about letters. For one thing they are not instantaneous ... Nor is this the only trouble about letters. They do not arrive often enough. A letter which has been passionately awaited should be immediately supplemented by another one, to counteract the feeling of flatness that comes upon us when the agonizing delights of anticipation have been replaced by the colder flood of fulfilment. — Vita Sackville-West

Your generation is so cynical. You should try to help every individual person you meet, Ari, as a reflex, without thinking." Ari put his head on the steering wheel. "Here we find a fundamental weakness of the Christ doctrine," the Minister declared, making that wise and relatable face that had always been such a success in his television lectures. "It troubles itself too much with conscience, rationale, and so on. Now, I myself am a student of human nature. I observe all faiths, and draw my own conclusions. For example, a Christian sees a tramp in the street, he begins agonizing. Should I give him the money in my pocket? What if he uses it for drink? What if he wastes it? What if there's someone else who needs it more? What if I need it more? And so on. The Jews, the Muslims - they see a tramp, they give him money, they walk on. The action is its own justification. — Zadie Smith

We lauhed together for a long time. When we
had first met, her eyes were dull with pain-killing drugs and if she
tried to talk, her face would controt with agonizing pain. I thought
how radiantly beautiful she now looked. She stood up to leave and went
to the door but then came back and kissed me.
'I hope I never see you again,' she said.
'I quite understand,' I replied. — Henry Marsh

The comparison of Rasputin and Christ was customary in that circle, and by no means accidental. The alarm of the royal couple before the menacing forces of history was too sharp to be satisfied with an impersonal God and the futile shadow of a Biblical Christ. They needed a second coming of "the Son of Man." In Rasputin the rejected and agonizing monarchy found a Christ in its own image. "If there had been no Rasputin," said Senator Tagantsev, a man of the old regime, "it would have been necessary to invent one." There is a good deal more in these words than their author imagined. — Leon Trotsky

Many billions of years will elapse before the smallest, youngest stars complete their nuclear burning and shrink into white dwarfs. But with slow, agonizing finality perpetual night will surely fall. — Paul Davies

To go through the agonizing process of learning how to walk again and write again and speak again makes you much more empathetic to people. — Mark Kirk

Excuse me.
Nine hours ago, I broke off the single most pointlessly agonizing one-way relationship of my young life.
It was a thin slice of hell, and now it is over.. He's not mine. He never will be mine, and I've thrown away three years of my life pining and hoping. Well, not anymore, and I need to get him out of my system. I've given the matter serious thought, and all I want right now is for some total stranger to nail me to a mattress for the next fourteen hours. I will almost certainly cry all over you and call you by his name, but I assure you that my sexual frustration has built to such a fever peak that I will fuck you dry. What do you say?"
"whine — Carla Speed McNeil

I learned by heart the lines of your face. I can draw them blindly on a water canvas.
Your face in the middle of an inflamed argument. Your face in the middle of a mild one-- when you're at fault.
Your face filled with rainbows of laughter. Your face filled with clouds of distress.
Your face, fluttering, when I open you the door. Your face, agonizing, every time I stand waiting, for the elevator.
Your face, eager, when you kiss me. Your face, surprised, when I lead you to bed.
Your face in the middle of pain. Your face on the outskirts of pleasure.
Your face, with a baffled look, when you wake up. Your face falling asleep, with total surrender.
Your face the first night we met. Your face the last night we parted.
I learned by heart the lines of your face. They all led me into hell.
They all led me into heaven. — Malak El Halabi

There is nothing more painful than the untimely death of someone young and dear to the heart. The harrowing grief surges from a bottomless well of sorrow, drowning the mourner in a torrent of agonizing pain; an exquisite pain that continues to afflict the mourner with heartache and loneliness long after the deceased is buried and gone. — Jocelyn Murray

For people in thrall to 'mortality', the good life means perpetual striving. For Taoists it means living effortlessly, according to our natures. The freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonizing about alternatives he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must. — John Gray

Puppy, I am getting so tired of listening to you whine about this," he snarled at Zeke. "This isn't rocket science. If you don't want to be a monster, don't be a bloody monster! Be an uptight stick in the mud like Kanin. Be a self-righteous bleeding heart like Allison. Or you can stop agonizing about it and be a fucking monster. — Julie Kagawa

The implacable logic of retribution will prove as appalling as the crime itself, consisting of the soul's slow agonizing descent into a state of such loneliness and despair as to be finally indistinguishable from Hell. — William Shakespeare

To the uninformed observer, the agonizing cramps in a marathon runner's calf muscles are heroic while the relentless explosions of a dominatrix's paddle against her client's bottoms are obscene and perverted. That the two victims might confront their ordeals for similar reasons, and take away similar benefits, has rarely been considered.

Grant Antrews, Submissions — Grant Antrews

The smile that covered a "multitude of pains" was no hypocritical mask. She was trying to hide her sufferings - even from God! - so as not to make others, especially the poor, suffer because of them. When she promised to do "a little extra praying & smiling" for one of her friends, she was alluding to an acutely painful and costly sacrifice: to pray when prayer was so difficult and to smile when her interior pain was agonizing. — Brian Kolodiejchuk

His own men, those who would attack in the morning, knelt on the earth, faces hidden behind one hand, in an agonizing tunnel of their own, a darkness where there was no time but where they tried to look on death. — Sebastian Faulks

That's the point. This healthy-feeling time now just feels like a tease. Like I'm in this holding pattern, flying in smooth circles within sight of the airport, in super-comfortable first class. But I can't enjoy the in-flight movie or free chocolate chip cookies because I know that before the airport is able to make room for us, the plane is going to run out of fuel, and we're going to crash-land into a fiery, agonizing death. — Jessica Verdi

(Dorothy) Dunnett is the master of the invisible, particularly in her later books. Where is this tension coming from? Why is this scene so agonizing? Why is this scene so emotional? Tension and emotion pervade the books, sometimes almost unbearably, yet when you look at the writing, at the actual words, there's nothing to show that the scene is emotional at all. I think it is because Dunnett layers her novels, meaning that each event is informed by what has come before (and what came before that, and what came before that) but Dunnett doesn't signpost in the text that this is happening, leaving it to the reader to bring the relevant information to the table — C.S. Pacat

I look at him with the nostalgic affection men are said to feel for their wars, their fellow veterans. I think, I once threw things at this man. I threw a glass ashtray, a fairly cheap one which didn't break. I threw a shoe (his) and a handbag (mine), not even snapping the handbag shut first, so that he was showered with a metal rain of keys and small change. The worst thing I threw was a small portable television set, standing on the bed and heaving it at him with the aid of the bouncy springs, although the instant I let fly I thought, Oh God, let him duck! I once thought I was capable of murdering him. Today I feel only a mild regret that we were not more civilized with each other at the time. Still, it was amazing, all those explosions, that recklessness, that Technicolor wreckage. Amazing and agonizing and almost lethal. — Margaret Atwood

If there is anything more poignant than a body agonizing for want of bread, it is a soul dying for hunger of light. — Victor Hugo

If you're worried about life-work balance, something is probably wrong with your life or your work. Instead of agonizing over balance, get excited and create change. — Chris Guillebeau

Scott is gone.
I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward. — Therese Anne Fowler

'Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. 'Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.' — John Burdett

If shame had a sound, it would sound like an agonizing scream, but unfortunately it's a silent emotion. One I've been hiding from for years. — B.N. Toler

I know that when I look at today's Mexicans and Central Americans, they seem to me fundamentally the same as my grandparents seeking a better life in America. On the other side, however, open immigration can't coexist with a strong social safety net; if you're going to assure health care and a decent income to everyone, you can't make that offer global. So Democrats have mixed feelings about immigration; in fact, it's an agonizing issue. — Paul Krugman

Human existence is a brutal experience to me ... it's a brutal, meaningless experience - an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, terrible experience, and so it [salvation] is what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. — Woody Allen

I realized much later in life that the reason this decision between MIT and IBM was so agonizing was because it wasn't really about choosing a career; it was about deciding who I was, which part of myself I wanted to be, and that's the hardest decision any of us has to make. — Mike Massimino

Having been privileged to consult and speak in parliaments and to the governments of some of the leading countries in the world, it would be a waste if I don't contribute my quota and do my best to help rescue my continent from that backwardness and darkness that Africa is largely agonizing in at present. — Sunday Adelaja

Hatred the only moving force, a petulant unhappy striving - childhood the only happiness, and that unknowing; then the continual battle that cannot ever possibly be won; a losing fight against ill-health - poverty for nearly all. Life is a long disease with only one termination and its last years are appalling: weak, racked by the stone, rheumatismal pains, senses going, friends, family, occupation gone, a man must pray for imbecility or a heart of stone. All under sentence of death, often ignominious,frequently agonizing: and then the unspeakable levity with which the faint chance of happiness is thrown away for some jealousy, tiff, sullenness, private vanity, mistaken sense of honour, that deadly, weak and silly notion. — Patrick O'Brian

As you get older, you're not afraid of doubt. Doubt isn't running the show. You take out all the self-agonizing. — Clint Eastwood

I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death. — Alan Bradley

The mind of the dreaming man is fully satisfied with whatever happens to it. The agonizing question of possibility does not arise. — Andre Breton

We're all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale, most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, Human happiness does not seem to be included in the design of creation. it is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more — Woody Allen

In grief, words are a poor consolation - silence and agonizing tears are all that is left the sufferer. — Mary Todd Lincoln

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages. — Victor Hugo

I am sure that deep down Ikhmenev was in a state of turmoil and pain as he witnessed the tears and torment of his poor wife; I am sure it was more agonizing for him than for her - but he could not control himself. This is what happens sometimes even with the most kind-hearted of people, who are nevertheless weak-willed, and who, despite their kind-heartedness, are apt to get carried off into a state of ecstasy when unburdening themselves of their grief and anger, even at the expense of hurting someone innocent, more often than not someone who is dear to them. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation. — Ray Bradbury

We want books that make our hearts beat harder... that relieve us of the agonizing burden of everyday life — Ben Oliveira

The serious Sylvia was agonizing over the execution of the Rosenbergs and McCarthyism; others were delighting to dream over trousseau lingerie at Vanity Fair's showroom. — Elizabeth Winder

Truly there are different kinds of pain. But the most agonizing is the pain of regret, for which there is no lasting relief and no remedy. — Richelle E. Goodrich

There's a clarity that comes with great ideas: You can [easily and simply] explain why something's a great business, how and why it's cheap, why it's cheap for temporary reasons and how, on a normal basis, it should be trading at a much higher level. You're never sitting there on the 40th page of your spreadsheet, as Buffett would say, agonizing over whether you should buy or not. — Joel Greenblatt

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The stakeout. The least glamorous and yet often the most valuable activity in investigations. To endure the agonizing boredom and forestall restlessness, I slowed my metabolism into near rigor mortis until I was nothing more than a pair of eyeballs fixed — Mario Acevedo

It was a tragedy. A horrible tragedy. You can't imagine the physical pain and despair I went through. I'm a better man than I would have been, but I would have eagerly chosen a less agonizing route to my good fortune, — Chris Knopf

Goodbye, Christian," I murmur.
"Ana, goodbye," he says softly, and he looks utterly, utterly broken,a man in agonizing pain, reflecting how I feel inside. I tear my gaze away from him before I can change my mind and try to comfort him.
The elevator doors close close and it whisks me down to the bowels of the basement and to my own personal hell. — E.L. James

I have thought about this issue of abortion time and again. It is not an easy issue for most people.I came to believe over the years that a woman should be able to make this agonizing decision with her doctor and her family and her conscience, and that we should be very careful that we don't make that decision a crime except in the most extreme circumstances. — Dick Durbin

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds. — Countee Cullen

In my teens I saw the world in only black and white. Now I know that most things exist in a certain gray area. Though it took a while to get here, I now call this gray area home. I once believed that participating in a capitalist economy would be the death of me, but now realize that agonizing over the political implications of every move I make isn't exactly living. — Sophia Amoruso

I came trusting them. They beat me with rods of dullness. They don't know, they don't understand how agonizing their complacent dullness is. Like ants and August sun on a wound. - Carol Kennicott — Sinclair Lewis

I like to experience life in all its agonizing glory. I don't want to dull the sensations in any way. — Callisto

I was sitting in my kitchen agonizing over my Christmas grocery list when I heard the noise. — R.J. Harlick

She'd thought love was painful and agonizing and all about not good enough. But it was about fitting so well with someone that everything felt bright and crisp and right. — Hailey Abbott

Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why? — John D. MacDonald

There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts. — Andrew Solomon

There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The truth may hurt, but it is never so agonizing as the dagger of lies we tell ourselves. — Wayne Thomas Batson

Agonizing really, how enduring love can be. Even after you have packed it up and put it away, it is still there - always there, yellowing around the edges and begging you to turn its pages again. — Tina L. Hook

Since the dawn of existence, you mortals have feared dying, feared the unknown and the pain of it, and yet, pain is a part of life, not death. And I - I am the first moment after pain ceases," he [Death] pronounced. "It is life that fights and struggles and rages; life, that tears at you in its last agonizing throes to hold on, even if but for one futile instant longer ... Whereas I, I come softly when it is all done. Pain and death are an ordered sequence, not a parallel pair. So easy to confuse the correlations, not realizing that one does not bring the other. — Vera Nazarian

Heartbreak is an agonizing disease that you're delighted to have — Simon Sebag Montefiore

Justice has nothing to do with it. Stark, bloody, screaming, agonizing vendeance is what I'm talking about. — Glen Cook

The healing is my working out my salvation. The need constant because my desire for seperateness constantly wrestles with my need for oneness with Jesus. The search for Jesus is bigger, deeper and agonizing. — W. Scott Lineberry

I look at it this way; you have two choices. The first is for you to stay impaled and die a slow but agonizing death. The second is that I can end it for you right here and now. Either way, you're going to die, — Frank Cereo

So much of this trip had been spent gazing at spectacular sights, which always filled me, as this one did now, with agonizing frustration. Why couldn't I simply accept and enjoy beauty? What was it that stirred up this terrible discomfort? ...We agreed it was the impermanence, the inability to possess, the reminder of death. — Lily King

The body politic: the slow agonizing death of demarcation & the quick Caesarian section birth of chaos. — Dean Cavanagh

When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself
that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control (p.82-83) — Geneen Roth

Utopias seem to be much more attainable than one would have believed in other times. And we currently find ourselves faced with a different kind of agonizing question: How can one avoid their definitive attainment? ... Utopias are attainable. Life leads us toward utopias. Perhaps a new century will begin, a century in which the intellectuals and the cultivated classes will dream again of ways to avoid utopias and to return to a non-utopian society, one less "perfect" and more free. — Aldous Huxley

What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, "Well, that's not very interesting, is it?" And there's the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there's William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant; and so on. And there are also the dogs: let's not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained. — Anne Lamott

There's still such chaos in me. Still so little firmly outlined. Just like my face: a formless mass that only takes on shape through the expression of the moment. The searching for our selves is the most agonizing — Karen Horney

... of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines ... Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred ... As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy. It is ... a faith that ... has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. — David Bentley Hart

As actors, we're always asked to portray and react to these extreme circumstances, otherwise it's not interesting. They are agonizing things to think about. — Kristin Scott Thomas

On a second note, though, I have something to say about pain. There are lots of kinds of pain. Pain of smashing your fingers in a car door, pains of loosing a baby, pain of failing a test. But in their own little ways, these pains are all agonizing. Which is sad, and yet, happy, if you really think about it. If we never lost our car keys, or stepped in gum, or had a bad hair day, what kind of people would we be? In a word? Boring. We wouldn't be passionate; we wouldn't know it was exciting to get pregnant, or score an A on a final. So that's why, today at least, I am grateful for pain. Because it's part of what makes me the whacky, goofy, jaded, person that I am. Peace. — Alysha Speer

When the lives of the unborn are snuffed out, they often feel pain, pain that is long and agonizing. — Ronald Reagan

Be a hero, Simon," Simon muttered bitterly, remembering the life Magnus Bane had dangled before him in their first meeting - or at least, the first one Simon could remember. "Have an adventure, Simon. How about, turn your life into one long agonizing gym class, Simon."
"Dude, you're talking to yourself again. — Cassandra Clare

I'm making a great effort because sometimes life is not enjoyable. Sometimes it's painful and sometimes it's stressful, sometimes it's agonizing even, so I think once you get around those humps: strive for pleasure and peace. — Morgan Freeman

Part of her did trust Mehmed, more than anyone. Part of her wanted to abandon Nicolae and meet Mehmed in his rooms. To take him as a lover instead of existing in this between state that was agonizing for both of them. To accept an easy life of being his.
And part of her wanted to stab him for that. — Kiersten White

Real men are told, "I'm sorry, I'm not interested" or "I have a friend who is single that I would like to introduce you to" when they are rejected. That is pretty much it. No dramatic scenes, no broken hearts, no agonizing pain or suffering to keep them awake at night. It just happens, life goes on, they meet another woman, and she keeps them awake at night. — W. Anton

Her unintended striptease was all the more sensual because Belle was lowering her stocking with agonizing slowness not because she had an audience but because she seemed to love the feel of the silk sliding along her soft skin. — Julia Quinn

If the general attitude of Canadians toward their mighty neighbor to the south could be distilled into a single phrase, that phrase would probably be "Oh, shut up." The Americans talked too much, mainly about themselves. Their torrid love affair with their own history and legend exceeded-painfully-the quasi-British Canadian idea of modesty and self-restraint ... They were forever busting their buttons in spasms of insufferable yahoo pride or all too publicly agonizing over their crises. — Bruce McCall

For with each bite he tasted not just the irresistible sweetness of the dessert, but the deliciously agonizing negative flavor of all the imagined foodstuffs that he could have bought with that nickel instead - a turkey leg the size of his forearm, or a milkshake with a pair of deep red strawberries floating on its surface. The single relinquished nickel sat in the custard seller's till, its gold transmuted back to lead. — Dexter Palmer

... It was the knowing that there had been a happier time, a place of joy and peace and security, that made the sudden absence of it all so agonizing ... Not the agony of what was, but the agony of what was no longer; this was the source of all life's pain
not the fear of a hell to come, but rather the knowledge of an Eden that is no more. Hell isn't the punishment ... Eden was. — Shalom Auslander

The reason so many people do not pray is because of its cost. The cost is not so much in the sweat of agonizing supplication as in the daily fidelity to the life of prayer. — Samuel Chadwick

The searching for our selves is the most agonizing, isn't it? - and yet the most stimulating - and one simply cannot escape it. — Karen Horney

I still have in my memory, almost agonizing impressions of a serious illness which I had when I was about eight years old. Those about me called it scarlet fever, and its very name seemed to have a diabolical quality. — Pierre Loti

How do you feel about vaporizing or slow,
agonizing radiation sickness?"
"I usually don't think in those terms. — Cynthia Joyce Clay

The failure of reorientation therapy is why the "ex-gay" ministry Exodus International shut down in 2013. It places gay Christians who adhere to the traditional biblical interpretation in an agonizing, irresolvable tension. In order to truly flee from sin as well as the temptation to sin, they must constantly attempt what has proven impossible: to reconstitute themselves so they are no longer sexual beings at all. — Matthew Vines

The lonely evenings in the life of a newly married girl may be really agonizing. — Girdhar Joshi

Alkaline water tastes dreadful and was the scourge of covered wagon parties crossing Wyoming for neither men nor beasts could drink it for fear of blistering their tonsils and suffering agonizing stomach cramps. — Annie Proulx

Some memories have the ability to heal, the ability to light up the dark, because the beauty of the memory is so bright, you're still able to bask in it.But the memories of us are killing me slowly. They remind me that for one moment, I had everything, while reminding me it's gone. It's the realization that we're done that's torturing me. The realization that I can see him but can't touch him, that he exists but he's not mine, is agonizing. — Aurora Rose Reynolds

Director Michelle MacLaren is the John Cage of this malevolent silence, able to wield it as precisely as a pointillist with a paintbrush. And with 'To'hajiilee,' the final episode of Breaking Bad she'll ever direct, she has painted her masterpiece. Under the unblinking eye of her relentless camera, this was television not as entertainment but as endurance. It was agonizing, nauseating, unbearable. I loved every minute but hated every second. I couldn't wait for it to be over but I never wanted it to end. And I especially never wanted it to end like that. — Andy Greenwald

The endless, agonizing recycling of what might have been, soon followed by a litany of rationalizations and self-deceptions as you struggle to reconcile the void between the person you want to be and the person you fear you are.. — Jon Krakauer

It is a tragic and agonizing irony that instructions once delivered for the purpose of avoiding needless offense are now invoked in ways that needlessly offend, that words once meant to help draw people to the gospel now repel them. — Rachel Held Evans

Love dies in different ways. For most, it is a slow, agonizing death. Meche, however, cut her love the same way the executioner might chop a head: with a single, accurate swing. — Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Even in the inevitable moments when all seems hopeless, men know that without hope they cannot really live, and in agonizing desperation they cry for the bread of hope. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Every so often every artist feels, 'I'll never paint again. The muse has gone out the window.' In 1985, I hardly painted at all for three months, and it was agonizing. I looked at reproductions. I stared at Matisse. I stared at the Old Masters. I stared at the Quattrocento. And I thought to myself - Don't push it! If you try too hard to get at something, you almost push it away. — Helen Frankenthaler