Quotes & Sayings About Agony Of Love

And in the kisses, what deep sweetness! There are women's mouths that seem to ignite with love the breath that opens them. Whether they are reddened by blood richer than purple, or frozen by the pallor of agony, whether they are illuminated by the goodness of consent or darkened by the shadow of disdain, they always carry within them an enigma that disturbs men of intellect, and attracts them and captivates them. A constant discord between the expression of the lips and that of the eyes generates the mystery; it seems as if a duplicitous soul reveals itself there with a different beauty, happy and sad, cold and passionate, cruel and merciful, humble and proud, laughing and mocking; and the abiguity arouses discomfort in the spirit that takes pleasure in dark things. — Gabriele D'Annunzio

Sam responded to my mental request, his leg tensing and relaxing, and then coming up against my sex, repeatedly, pounding, as I dropped onto him with furious desire. I pulled Sam to me, as I tensed every muscle in my body in one last spasm of agony, and found my glorious release. Then, I came a second time. I held Sam's head and kissed him, coming a third time as Sam slowed the motion of his leg, and I finally collapsed against him, breathing heavily, fully spent. — Simone Freier

May I reach That purest heaven - be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony; Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in the diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world. — George Eliot

The words came from him like a sob, a hoarse sound like the death rattle of a dying man; it seemed indeed like the agony of death when the father's love was powerless. — Honore De Balzac

In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

The mind is beautiful and always in search of beauty.
In a moment it can run from joy to untold agony. — Debasish Mridha

To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one were ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn't the happiest feeling. — Chris Cleave

The risk of love is loss and the price of loss is grief. But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love — Hilary Stanton Zunin

I like a character that goes on a journey. A character that has had it all, lost it all, and is trying to get back to just being OK. I love the agony of defeat just as much as I love the thrill of victory. — Jessie Pavelka

My heart's beat thy sight stole,
Taking mine unruly soul.
My pulse at rates of abrupt speed; I proclaimed love before my creed. Blooming flowers hold no compare To thy blissful beauty, oh so rare.
Give me agony or give me death,
I'll take thy heart as eternal breath.

Ceaselessly Yours,
David Chios — Nely Cab

Sometimes, in the course of my hopeless quest, I would pick up and dip into one of the ordinary books that lay strewn around the castle. Whenever I did, it seemed so insipid and insubstantial that I flew into a rage and hurled it at the wall after reading the first few sentences. I was spoilt for any other form of literature, and the mental torment I endured was comparable to the agony of unrequited love compounded by the withdrawal symptoms associated with a severe addiction. — Walter Moers

Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

My friends, if we tend to the things that are important in life, if we are right with those we love and behave in line with our faith, our lives will not be cursed with the aching throb of unfulfilled business. Our words will always be sincere, our embraces will be tight. We will never wallow in the agony of 'I could have, I should have.' We can sleep in a storm. — Mitch Albom

He held on. Weakly, struggling, in agony, he held on, drawing upon the great reservoirs of love and bravery I knew he possessed. He held on for his little girl. For his father. And I liked to think that maybe, if only a little, he held on because I refused to let him go. — Emma Scott

Kitty looked into his face, which was so close to her own, and long afterwards - for several years after - that look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame. — Leo Tolstoy

It was the quality of her feelings that shattered him - the pure belief and care that she had for him. He'd underestimated her, and he was more the fool for it, for denying this regard...this love for him. There was no other word to describe it. It truly was the same for her. The thought flooded him, filled his veins with equal parts relief and agony. — Alexandra Bracken

When I was a kid, I just read and read. We were lucky enough to have gone to England and had a whole bunch of Penguin Puffins books, like The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley, which is hilarious. I would love to be able to write a book like that, but I don't know that I have a humorous bone in my body when it comes to writing. Once on a Time by A.A. Milne. I read a lot of old, old fantasy stuff. The Carbonelbooks by Barbara Sleigh. Then when I got a little older I loved Zilpha Keatley Snyder. I was a big fan of romance and when I got a little bit older I would read a Harlequin romance or a Georgette Heyer novel and then David Copperfield, and then another genre book and then Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy. I was that kind of reader. One book that I loved was I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. I loved voice and that book had it in spades. And then of course I grew into loving Jane Eyre. — Franny Billingsley

Erienne stared up at him, and when she spoke it was almost in awe. "And what of you, Christopher? If I were to yield myself to you, would you, then, honor me?"
"Honor you?" he breathed. "Sweetest Erienne, how could I not? You are ever in my thoughts, bending me, twisting me, plucking at the fibers of my mind. The man inside me trembles whenever you're near, and I groan in agony for the touch of your hand laid upon me in a soft caress. I am beset with my desire for you, and if I thought for one moment that you would not loathe me forever, I would ease my lusts this very night, be you willing or nay. But I'd rather hear my name fall from your lips with words of love than snarled in tones of hate. 'Tis the one thing that keeps you safe from me, Erienne. 'Tis the only thing."

-Erienne & Christopher — Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

Are there not thousands in the world who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves to poor humanity, labor for mortal good? — John Keats

He shook his head, staring at her like a condemned man who beheld the face of his executioner. "Aline," he whispered, "Do you know what hell is?"
"Yes." Her eyes overflowed. "Trying to exist with your heart living somewhere outside your body."
"No. It's knowing that you have so little faith in my love, you would have condemned me to a lifetime of agony." His face contorted suddenly. "To something worse than death. — Lisa Kleypas

Love is not only pure joy, and delight, but also great and deep heaviness of heart and sorrow. But love too is full of joy and sweetness even in bitter sorrow, because it regards the misery and injury of others as its own. So also Christ was glowing with burning love in His last and greatest agony. According to St. Hilary, it was Christ's greatest joy that He endured the greatest woe. Thus God "giveth strength and power unto His people" (Ps. 68:15). While they experience the greatest sorrow, their hearts overflow with joy. — Martin Luther

I am someone who proudly and humbly affirms that love is the mystery-of-mysteries, and that nothing measurable matters 'a very good God damn'; that 'an artist, a man, a failure' is no mere whenfully accreting mechanism, but a givingly eternal complexity-neither some soulless and heartless ultrapredatory infra-animal nor any understandingly knowing and believing and thinking automaton, but a naturally and miraculously whole human being-a feelingly illimitable individual; whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow. — E. E. Cummings

God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed. — Simone Weil

Every hardship is like being in prison. People feel imprisoned by ill-health, marital discord, financial insecurity, family disputes and other problems. To anyone who feels imprisoned by life's problems I would say: be content with what you already have and never lose hope of things getting better. Be happy with your share because this is a quality of someone who truly loves Allah. When the Companion Muadh ibn Jabal (ra) was undergoing the pangs and agonies of death, he cried out, O Allah! Bear witness that I love You, so do with me whatsoever You wish! — Babar Ahmad

I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony. — Susan Sontag

There is a blood-red thunder all around you, a blinding light flashes from time to time, voices roar and cease, roar and cease, you are in the grip of an unknowable agony, it is in your shoulders, your arms, your hands, your breath, an intolerable labor- and, no, it is not at all like approaching an orgasm, an orgasm implying relief, even, sometimes, however desperately, implying the hope of love. Love and death are connected, but not in the place I was that day. — James Baldwin

Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. — Emma Goldman

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

The ecstasy of seeing her versus the agony of losing her, a million births and a million deaths. — David Whitehouse

And saying it
the first time we say it and mean it
we cross over into that other world that has so far been no more than a suspicion or a dream. Saying it, we enter the golden realm where the old structures of doubt and the agony of incompleteness disappear, and the utterance itself is the first bright rung on the ladder of new possibility. What a relief! What a joyous relief from the distinctive weight of your own soul, to be able to look unguardedly into the eyes of another and say it, meaning it and heady with knowing you mean it: "I love you." If the wind had blown through me at that moment, my body would have sung like a chime. — Glen Duncan

And broken both your hearts? How would that have benefited me? You are as dear to me as another half of my soul, Jem. I could not be happy while you were unhappy. And Tessa - she loves you. What sort of awful monster would I be, delighting in causing the two people I love the most in the world agony simply that I might have the satisfaction of knowing that if Tessa could not be mine, she could not be anybody's? — Cassandra Clare

I realized I'd been trying to protect myself from the agony of losing you. Trying to keep myself from loving you so it wouldn't destroy me. Except it was too late. I was already in love with you. I had been for a long time. Obsession, addiction, love - it's all the same thing. I can't live without you, Nora. Losing you would destroy me. I can survive anything but that. — Anna Zaires

You can love everyone, but you can never hurt anyone else without hurting yourself. You will burn yourself for the rest of your life with this fire and agony. — Debasish Mridha

Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him. — Henry Miller

In such moments of precious, invaluable misery, she rejoiced in tears of agony ... — Jane Austen

To my unsuspecting love.
When I look into your eyes, I lose all sense of time and place. Reason robbed, clear thought erased, I am lost in the paradise I find within your gaze.
I long to touch your blushing cheek, to whisper in your ear how I adore you, how I have lost my heart to you, how I cannot bear the thought of living without you.
To be so near to you without touching you is agony. Your blindness to my feelings is a daily torment, and I feel driven to the edge of madness by my love for you.
Where is your compassion when I need it most? Open your eyes , Love, and see what is right before you: that I am not merely a friend, but a man deeply, desperately , in love with you.
Longing for you. — Julianne Donaldson

I freeze and burn, love is bitter and sweet, my sighs are tempests and my tears are floods, I am in ecstasy and agony, I am possessed by memories of her and I am in exile from myself. — Francesco Petrarca

And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all. — Vladimir Nabokov

What we love is too much in the past, consists too much in the time that we have spent together for us to require the whole woman; we wish only to be sure that it is she, not to be mistaken as to her identity, a thing far more important than beauty to those who are in love; her cheeks may grow hollow, her body thin, even to those who were originally most proud, in the eyes of the world, of their domination over beauty, that little tip of a nose, that sign in which is summed up the permanent personality of a woman, that algebraical formula, that constant, is sufficient to prevent a man who is courted in the highest society and is in love with her from being free upon a single evening because he is spending his evenings in brushing and entangling, until it is time to go to bed, the hair of the woman whom he loves, or simply in staying by her side, so that he may be with her or she with him, or merely that she may not be with other people. — Marcel Proust

The worst part about losing someone you love - besides the agony of never getting to see them again - are the things you never said. The unsaid stalks you, mocks you for thinking you had all the time in the world. None of us do. — Karen Marie Moning

My youth an unripe plum. Your teeth have left their marks on it. The tooth marks still vibrate. I remember always, remember always. Since I learned how to love you, the door of my soul has been left wide open to the winds of the four directions. Reality calls for change. The fruit of awareness is already ripe, and the door can never be closed again. Fire consumes this century, and mountains and forests bear its mark. The wind howls across my ears, while the whole sky shakes violently in the snowstorm. Winter's wounds lie still, Missing the frozen blade, Restless, tossing and turning in agony all night. — Thich Nhat Hanh

The agony of love destroyed often leaves us swearing never to love again. — Ruben Papian

To-night, as ages hence, people would say this, or shut their doors on them, turn in bereaved agony from them, or toward them with love saying: "That is our star up there, yours and mine"; steer by them above the clouds or lost at sea, or standing in the spray on the forecastle head, watch them, suddenly, careen; put their faith or lack of it in them; train, in a thousand observatories, feeble telescopes upon them, across whose lenses swam mysterious swarms of stars and clouds of dead dark stars, catastrophes of exploding suns, or giant Antares raging to its end - a smouldering ember yet five hundred times greater than the earth's sun. — Malcolm Lowry

Gacela of the Flight"

I have lost myself in the sea many tunes
with my ear full of freshly cut flowers,
with my tongue full of love awl agony.
I have lost myself in the sea many times
as I lose myself in the heart of certain children.

There is no one who in giving a kiss
does not feel the smile of faceless people,
and no one who in touching a newborn child
forgets the motionless skulls of horses.

Because the roses search in the forehead
for a hard landscape of hone
and the hands of man hate no other purpose
than to imitate the roots below the earth.

As I lose myself in the heart of certain children,
I have lost myself in the sea many times.
Ignorant of the water I go seeking
a death full of light to consume me. — Federico Garcia Lorca

To be so near you without touching you is agony. Your blindness to my feelings is a daily torment, and I feel driven to the edge of madness by my love for you. — Julianne Donaldson

They say the path of true love never runs smooth. Well, Luke and my true love's path didn't run at all, it limped along in new boots that were chafing its heels. Blistered and cut, red and raw, every hopping, lopsided step, a little slice of agony. — Marian Keyes

I love working if it's with people who are capable of having a good time. People with a little bit of enjoyment of what they do. If it's enormous pressure, and people feel that their lives are at stake, then it's agony. So I try to pick projects where I feel like I'm going to avoid those traps. — Alan Arkin

The encounter and separation, for all its wildness, is typical of the sufferings of love. For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass. — Joseph Campbell

And as they stood in silence before her, prayed again. "Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life." Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey. "Please let Yvonne have her dream
dream?
of a new life with me
please let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception," he tried ... "Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to love life." That wouldn't do either ... "Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost.
Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it's only together, if it's only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world!" he cried in his heart. — Malcolm Lowry

My time with Eli was a sweet sort of agony. It was like the feeling you would get watching a bubble as a child. A thing you can't help but find magical and beautiful yet it must remain elusive. You can't try to get too close. You can't try to touch it lest it pop and be gone forever, but there is nothing you want more than to try. So frustrated you will yourself to hold back and savor it for what it is, a moment of fleeting perfection. — Jennifer Mardoll

Look at Christ on the cross. Think of the challenge that must have been for Him. The agony of betrayal by people He had trusted, and death. And afterward came the resurrection. He proved that no challenge, no matter how great, could end His love for us. — Danielle Steel

Perceptive people like you wound more easily than others. But if we're going to work on God's side, we have to decide to open our hearts to the griefs and pain all around us. It's not an easy decision. A dangerous one too. And a tiny narrow door to enter into a whole new world.
But in that world a great experience waits for us: meeting the One who's entered there before us. He suffers more than any of us could because His is the deepest emotion and the highest perception ... He doesn't just leave us and Himself in the anguish. At the point where His ultimate in love meets His total capacity to absorb and feel all our agony, there the miracle happens and the exterior situation changes. I've seen that miracle — Catherine Marshall

Even He that died for us upon the cross, in the last hour, in the unutterable agony of death, was mindful of His mother, as if to teach us that this holy love should be our last worldly thought - the last point of earth from which the soul should take its flight for heaven. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Innocence alone can be passionate. The innocent have no sorrow, no suffering, though they have had a thousand experiences. It is not the experiences that corrupt the mind but what they leave behind, the residue, the scars, the memories. These accumulate, pile up one on top of the other, and then sorrow begins. This sorrow is time. Where time is, innocency is not. Passion is not born of sorrow. Sorrow is experience, the experience of everyday life, the life of agony and fleeting pleasures, fears and certainties. You cannot escape from experiences, but they need not take root in the soil of the mind. These roots give rise to problems, conflicts and constant struggle. There is no way out of this but to die each day to every yesterday. The clear mind alone can be passionate. Without passion you cannot see the breeze among the leaves or the sunlight on the water. Without passion there is no love. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Those wounded in love, unlike those wounded in armed conflicts, are neither victims nor torturers. They chose something that is part of life, and so they must accept both the agony and the ecstasy of that choice. And those who have never been wounded by love will never be able to say: 'I have lived.' Because they haven't. — Paulo Coelho

But the first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odour breathed in a far off hour of happiness. It is a memory that gives a more exquisite touch to tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy, and adds the last keenness to the agony of despair. — George Eliot

I know for a fact that no matter where I go, the memory and the suffering of not being with you will cripple me. I will go to work, fire up my PC, only to check if you're online. I will hover the pointer to your name, it will pop your contact details
just the contact details, no photo, no one-liners, no sign of what we used to have
but I shall linger and stare at it for hours. I will attempt to start a chat, but will close it without even a word to type. I will try to divert my thoughts back to work. But will fail. I will always go back to you. One hour to another, it's 5 PM. I pack my things, unproductive for the day and smile. I'm doing that again tomorrow and the next. — CSTPimentel

The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain ... But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of supreme victory. — Alfred North Whitehead

You want me to have feelings?" he said. "I already told you that I love you. What else should I say? That I long to be near you every second of every day? I see colors, only around you ... I smell perfume, only around you. God, it's like ... like I'm alive again. Sometimes I go crazy just wondering if I imagined it all, and I wait to see when it ... you ... will be taken away from me."
"I feel all these things, Abbey," he continued on. "Rage that I can't run my fingers through your hair. Sorrow that I can't lay my face next to yours. Agony that I can't steal the breath from your lips. I can't eat or breathe or sleep for wanting to touch you, and yet I don't eat or breathe or sleep. I'm just here. Stuck in between. — Jessica Verday

. . . death isn't anything I need to be afraid of. I'm not a perfect man. But I think I'm a good man. I've lived a hell of a life, even with all the heartache. Millie told me once that the ability to devastate is what makes a song beautiful. Maybe that's what makes life beautiful too. The ability to devastate. Maybe that's how we know we've lived. How we know we've truly loved."

"The ability to devastate," I repeated. And my voice broke. If that wasn't a perfect description of the agony of love, I didn't know what was. — Amy Harmon

Love isn't some treasure that needs finding, it's something that just happens; to anyone, at any given moment; to even the most skeptical minds. It's a magical feeling to be in love, that's why it hurts so much to fall out of it. The spell wears off. But the hurt, the agony, the betrayal we find in lost love, is outweighed ten fold by the delight we discover within it. — Jo Baker

When Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn't think "I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me." No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us - denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him - and in the greatest act of love in history, he STAYED. He said, "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they are doing." He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely. — Timothy Keller

You love my teeth!" she hurled at him.
"Told you once, told you a million times, Neet, no man likes a woman's teeth scrapin' his dick. Christ, agony, somethin' you're good at dishin' out in a variety of ways." -Tate — Kristen Ashley

If we tend to the things that are important in life, if we are right with those we love, and behave in line with our faith, our lives will not be cursed with the aching throb of unfulfilled business. Our words will always be sincere, our embraces will be tight. We will never wallow in the agony of 'I could have, I should have'. We can sleep in a storm. And when its time, our goodbyes will be complete. — Mitch Albom

My secrets cry aloud.
I have no need for tongue.
My heart keeps open house,
My doors are widely swung.
An epic of the eyes
My love, with no disguise.
My truths are all foreknown,
This anguish self-revealed.
I'm naked to the bone,
With nakedness my shield.
Myself is what I wear:
I keep the spirit spare.
The anger will endure,
The deed will speak the truth
In language strict and pure.
I stop the lying mouth:
Rage warps my clearest cry
To witless agony. — Theodore Roethke

This is agony cried Mr Salteena clutching hold of a table my life will be sour grapes and ashes without you. — Daisy Ashford

Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.
How would that be? Just how would that be? — Stephen King

We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foresight of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. — Edward Abbey

To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be, it is impossible:
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony. — William Shakespeare

Even if the two lovers are mature and experienced people who know that broken hearts heal in the end and can clearly foresee that, if they once steeled themselves to go through the present agony of parting, they would almost certainly be happier ten years hence than marriage is at all likely to make them - even then, they would not part. — C.S. Lewis

We must say to ourselves something like this: 'Well, when Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn't think "I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me." No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us - denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him - and in the greatest act of love in history, he STAYED. He said, "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they are doing." He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely. That is why I am going to love my spouse.' Speak to your heart like that, and then fulfill the promises you made on your wedding day. — Timothy Keller

Longinus was suddenly aware of her biting his neck, and he experienced the agony and the ecstasy of her dark kiss. — Alan Kinross

Those boys at the counter are too dreamy and young to do anything but drool as they watch Gillian. And, to her credit, Gillian is especially kind to them, even when Ephraim, the cook, suggests she kick them out. She understands that theirs might just be the last hearts she will break. When you're thirty-six and tired, when you've been living in places where the temperature rising to a hundred and ten and the air is so dry you have to use gallons of moisturizer, when you've been smacked around, late at night, by a man who loves bourbon, you start to realize that everything is limited, including your own appeal. You begin to look at young boys with tenderness, since they know so little and think they know so much. You watch teenage girls and feel shivers up and down your arms - those poor creatures don't know the first thing about time or agony or the price they're going to have to pay for just about anything. — Alice Hoffman

The love of a dog for his master is notorious; in the agony of death he has been known to caress his master, and everyone has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life. — Charles Darwin

And still, still, there is more to describe-
we paint because drawing breath is an agony
and exhaling an ecstasy
and somewhere in the space in-between
we think we once found a truth;
and the eternal part of us desires
to share this truth at all costs
only it's never quite how we pictured it,
and it's never quite received the way we want
and the paint drips with our own blood
the handles of our brushes are our own bones
our own tears become the words to our most beautiful love songs
and we know we'll never get it right before we die-

getting up every morning and facing our own limited truth
is a courage so divine
most men quell and women stay enslaved in silence. — Marie Anzalone

Anger prevents love and isolates the one who is angry. It is an attempt, often successful, to push away what is most longed for - companionship and understanding. It is a denial of the humanness of others, as well as a denial of your own humanness. Anger is the agony of believing that you are not capable of being understood, and that you are not worthy of being understood. It is a wall that separates you from others as effectively as if it were concrete, thick, and very high. There is no way through it, under it, or over it. Certainly — Bell Hooks

Love is one of the true mysteries,' he said at last. 'The truest and the deepest of all. One thing, Maerad: to love is never wrong. It may be disastrous; it may never be possible; it may be the deepest agony. But it is never wrong. — Alison Croggon

When you go against the flow of nature and betray the spiritual laws existing within, there is, and always will be, a negative reaction. Those who try escaping life before fate shakes their hand, will forever be stuck on earth, chained to the place they so badly wanted to leave. What a complicated misery. I guarantee you it will be torture to be invisible and ignored by those you love when you can see them - but you are already dead for them to hear you utter another word. Talk about agony, more so, than remaining on this plane and continuing your spiritual cycle as it was written to be lived. — Suzy Kassem

God still speaks to us. He speaks not from a life of ease, far removed from our suffering. He speaks from the cross, the same place of agony where we live. He speaks as one who joins our suffering wherever we are. He blesses us as he says, "I am with you now in your suffering. Take courage. Soon you will be with me in Paradise." So we realize that from the cross Jesus enacts the words of Aaron's benediction. Lifted on the rough beams, Jesus is yet God shining on us in favor. Even when we killed him, Jesus was gracious to us. Lined with pain, cut and bleeding, his countenance yet radiated love. The most shameful thing human beings have ever done, putting the incarnate Son of God to death, has become the greatest sign of his blessing grace. — Gerrit Scott Dawson

What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began in the muscles and somewhere around the upper belly but soon spread out to the chest, the thighs, and the forehead, to invade the entire body with numbing force. — Orhan Pamuk

The first stanza of Eyes In Moonlight Drown, a poem from DeadVerse.

With your face framed in a halo of stars,
your hair melts into trailing clouds,
and your eyes in moonlight drown.
A man could lose himself
in those freckled irises,
reflecting the galaxies above;
surely he could fall into their promise
of eternity, of Heaven, of love.
Your lips glisten, part, and beckon,
a smile of warm invitation,
a suggestion of sweet intensity,
a loss of self in addictive agony.
For we translate these aesthetics
into something mystical;
ideas of fantasy, of fiction,
obscuring the clinical truth
of chemical reactions,
electric sparks, responses
as sure as gravity,
measurable yet beyond cold,
above philosophy and below truth. — Scott Kaelen

Oh, Lord, bestow me with the power, that as much as I love her, I extinguish the need of loving her within me. — Alireza Salehi Nejad

Not many people understood the inherent pain of a career in heroics. Your body aches from the demands of day-to-day protection. Your mind whirs with the things you did wrong, the ways you could've done better, the scores of citizens you didn't save. And when you lose someone you love, when their blood forms a puddle beneath your cheek while you watch ... Your name, Watcher, becomes the cruelest agony of all. — Shirin Dubbin

To have a few things is a comfort, reward and privilege. To own much and plenty is a duty and task on one's forehead. To waste creates agony and miserableness. Having less is a teacher of hope and guidance yet above all life is paramount because life neither needs less or much. To love less is a celebration of life because life neither needs much or less. Life is greater than less or much; to love life is an appreciation of life that is incorruptible, that will lead to life without anxiety. — David Ssembajjo

Peace is not the absence of agony
But the presence of joy of harmony — Debasish Mridha

She said to herself: 'Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream has not worn it - infants, angels, priests, the dead; why - should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?' She thought: 'He dresses to lie beside himself, who is so constructed that love, for him, can be only something special; in a room that giving back evidence of his occupancy, is as mauled as the last agony. — Djuna Barnes

Such was the code that the world had accepted and such was the key to the code: that it hooked man's love of existence to a circuit of torture, so that only the man who had nothing to offer would have nothing to fear, so that the virtues which made life possible and the values which gave it meaning became the agents of its destruction, so that one's best became the tool of one's agony, and man's life on earth became impractical. — Ayn Rand

I dream of a land of peace
where everyone can live in harmony.
I dream of a land of joy
where everyone can live without agony
I dream of a land of fairy
where everyone can live with beauty.
I dream of a land of forgiveness
where everyone can live with unity.
I dream of a land of tranquility
where everyone can live with diversity.
I dream of a land of love
where we can live in peace as a beloved humanity. — Debasish Mridha

While I have very little to say in favor of sex (it's vastly overrated, it's frequently unnecessary, and it's messy), it is greatly to be preferred to the interminable torments of romantic agony through which two people tear one another limb from limb while professing altruistic devotion. — Quentin Crisp

I have always been their rock. A mother's unconditional love is fervent enough to battle against the gates of hell, rise up from her knees and stand gallant, in spite of her gaping war wounds. If only they knew the battle fought and the flood of tearshed without having to endure such agony. — Terry A. O'Neal

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love. — George Eliot

Coco?" I whispered, standing still, hardly able to believe it. "Oh - Coco?" "It is impossible to imagine," a voice behind seemed to be saying from a great distance away, "how the dog could have reached this spot. For three days he has been immovable in his kennel." I dropped on my knees, and took his paw in my hand. He gave the faintest wag of his tail, and tried to raise his head; but it fell back again, and he could only look at me. For an instant, for the briefest instant, we looked at each other, and while we looked his eyes glazed. "Coco - I've come back. Darling - I'll never leave you any more - - " I don't know why I said these things. I knew he was dead, and that no calls, no lamentations, no love could ever reach him again. Sliding down on to the stone flags beside him, I laid my head on his and wept in an agony of bitter grief. Now indeed I was left alone in the world. Even my dog was gone. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

No story is more beautiful than the Gospel, even though it is a story full of pain and nails and hate and blood and sin and murder and betrayal and forsakenness and unimaginable agony and death. It is the story of what happens to the most beautiful thing, Perfect Love, when it enters our world: it comes to a Cross, to the crossroad between good and evil. All our most beautiful stories are like the Gospel: they are tragedies first, and then comedies; they are crosses and then crowns. They are crosses because they are conflicts between good and evil. That is the fundamental plot of every great story. To say "that story is beautiful" means "that story resembles the Gospel." If you are bored by the Gospel, that puts no black eye on the Gospel, but on you. Most likely, it means you have never listened to it. You must have heard it, but hearing is far from the same thing as listening ... — Peter Kreeft

[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. — William Faulkner

Will. For a moment her heart hesitated. She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem's violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent. — Cassandra Clare

Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper
you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end. — Louis Auchincloss

Honda ... knew that to retain Kiyoaki's affection he must check the unthinking roughness that friendship ordinarily permitted. He had to treat him as warily as one would a freshly painted wall, on which the slightest careless touch would leave an indelible fingerprint. Should the circumstances demand it, he would have to go so far as to pretend not to notice Kiyoaki's mortal agony. Especially if such assumed obtuseness served to point up the elegance that would surely characterize Kiyoaki's ultimate suffering. At such moments, Honda could even love Kiyoaki for the look of mute appeal in his eyes. Their beautiful gaze seemed to hold a plea: leave things as they are, as gloriously undefined as the line of the seashore. — Yukio Mishima

I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband - I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid - I see these sights on the earth; 5
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny - I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea - I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these - All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent. — Walt Whitman

When you have to face up to the fact that marriage to the man you love is really over, that's very tough, sheer agony. In that kind of harrowing situation, I always go away and cut myself off from the world. Also, I sober up immediately when there is genuine bad news in my life; I never face it with alcohol in my brain. I just rented a house in Palm Springs and sat there and just suffered for a couple of weeks. I suffered there until I was strong enough to face it. — Ava Gardner