Ordeal Quotes & Sayings

We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man. — Henry David Thoreau

I used to suffer from stage fright, which at times was an ordeal. I won't perform live again. I'm going to do some TV shows and videos but nothing else ... I don't like to travel too much or do concerts. I'm more of a studio and home girl. — Agnetha Faltskog

Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind? Was it to leave behind a legacy of words, of memories, to help prevent history from repeating itself? Or was it simply to preserve a record of the ordeal I endured as an adolescent, at an age when one's knowledge of death and evil should be limited to what one discovers in literature? There — Elie Wiesel

I don't know what more to say ... I did not follow up in the days to come. I did not, I did, I should, I could ... Just like that, I let that entire ordeal go. — Phindiwe Nkosi

A trial is still an ordeal by battle. For the broadsword there is the weight of evidence; for the battle-ax the force of logic; for the sharp spear, the blazing gleam of truth; for the rapier, the quick and flashing knife of wit. — Lloyd Paul Stryker

Things are different here, sir," said Carrot. "It wasn't until ten years ago they replaced trial by ordeal here with trial by lawyer, and that was only because they found that lawyers were nastier. — Terry Pratchett

I didn't run from the situation. I didn't hide the ordeal from the reporters like the sissy baseball players. I fought it head-on ... We dealt with it. It's over. And now we're moving on. — James Toney

These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try. — Jacques Derrida

My father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, spent a couple of months hiding out in France in 1944, frantically memorizing a few French words to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but his ordeal had not inspired in me any action until I started taking a French class. — Bobbie Ann Mason

Pauline had restored order after the ordeal of the birth. She had swallowed her revulsion - what a mess it had made - restored order, made things right for the homecoming. — Alice McDermott

For a driver to be driven by somebody else is an ordeal, for there are only three types of drivers: the too fast, the timid and oneself. — Virginia Graham

Trust you to come at me with a story like that." The cool dismissal stabbed right into the heart of any sense that they endured this ordeal together, as one. Did the captain have no confidence in Demane's expertise, did all the faith flow only one way? It hurt in the belly and chest to be brushed off so. Demane couldn't have guessed his own expression. — Kai Ashante Wilson

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened - and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars? - Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants. — Junot Diaz

November 27 Share your master's joy! Matthew 25:21 Each of us has dreams. And if we trust Christ with all our hearts, nothing can disable God from surpassing our dreams with His divine reality. The suicide of her husband could not keep God from surpassing Kay Arthur's dreams. Sudden paralysis could not keep God from surpassing Joni Eareckson Tada's dreams. A horrifying ordeal in a Nazi concentration camp could not keep God from surpassing Corrie ten Boom's dreams. God surpasses our dreams when we reach past our personal plans and agendas to grab the hand of Christ and walk the path He has chosen for us. — Beth Moore

Under the long and discurtained ordeal of the morrow's dawn, that — Henry James

The ordeal is part of the commitment
Esquire Interview 10/10 — Philip Roth

How is it that, once victory took form and the horrible spectacle of the extermination camps was revealed, we could have shamelessly broken the promises given to the peoples in those years of ordeal? — Rene Cassin

The ordeals of others ...
prepare us, and
later become the compass ...
in our time of ordeal. — John-Talmage Mathis

Yet for all the aggravation of tending them, it was not so terrible an ordeal. He'd never kept a pet before and keeping close to fifty of them all at once in the wildlands was not how any man ought to begin, but he seemed to be having some success at it and he had to admit, he liked having someone to talk to, even if she couldn't talk back. — R. Lee Smith

The silent horror of Archie's ordeal had been temporarily replaced by the howling, agonising pain of the blood refusing to drain from his penis, the end of which was a deep purple verging on black where Officer Griff had tested how hard it was by using the back of his hand to give it a solid twang. — Dylan Perry

My last night as Isabella Swan. Tomorrow night, I would be Bella Cullen. Though the whole marriage ordeal was a thorn in my side, I had to admit that I liked the sound of that.
- bella swan — Stephenie Meyer

They were presently on hold with Comcast customer service and might not emerge for hours, if indeed they survived the ordeal at all. — Rick Riordan

Perhaps we should explore some other options before swanning off to Ireland," Dad said, pushing his glasses up. "After all, Sophie, you've been through quite the ordeal."
"I'll nap on the plane. Look, we are dealing with the possibility of an army of demons. I don't know about you guys, but those words are right up there with 'root canal' and 'school on Saturdays' in terms of things that terrify me. Were already three weeks behind. We don't have time to just sit here and explore options or read more books or listen to more half-assed prophecies from this jerk," I said, pointing to Torin. He made a gesture that I think was the old-timey version of flipping me off.
"So, yeah," I continued. "Maybe this is a totally stupid idea. But if there's even a chance one of us can get into the underworld, then we have to take it."
"Okay, I do like you," Finley said, flashing me a grin. — Rachel Hawkins

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity. — William Manchester

Some journalists have described the South Pole as 'hell on earth.' Others refer to my time here as 'an ordeal.' They would be surprised to know how beautiful Antarctica has seemed to me, with its waves of ice in a hundred shades of blue and white, its black winter sky, its ecstatic wheel of stars. They would never understand how the lights of the Dome welcomed me from a distance, or how often I danced and sang and laughed here with my friends. And how I was not afraid. — Jerri Nielsen

By the next afternoon, a shepherd boy had heard his shouts and he'd been hauled up the cliffs and confined to an empty pigeon house, the sole survivor of his doomed mission.
Gone cracked, though, from the ordeal. Ranting in perfect English about dragons and a young woman who could fly.
No one believed him. A few people swore the airships had suffered lightning strikes, although the night had seemed so clear. A few more vowed they'd spotted them off the bluffs and fired at them, and that had brought them down.
Whatever it had been, everyone seemed certain of two things. It had not been a dragon, and it had not been the poor, tormented Duke of Idylling. — Shana Abe

Basically, being alive means keeping yourself ready for the sky to fall in on you at any time. If you start from the assumption that existence is only an ordeal, a test we have to pass, then you're equipped to deal with its sorrows and its surprises. If you persist in expecting it to give you something it can't give, that just proves that you haven't understood anything. Take things as they come; don't turn them into a drama. You're not piloting the ship, you're following the course of your destiny. — Yasmina Khadra

Praying, we usually ask too much. I know I do. Sometimes we even demand. I think I am learning to ask enough for the moment
not for the whole year, utterly veiled in mystery; not even for the week, the month ahead; but just for today.
Jesus said it all when He told us to pray: 'Give us this day our daily bread.'
That bread is not only material, it is spiritual; in asking for it, we ask for a sufficiency of strength, courage, hope and light. Enough courage for the step ahead
not for the further miles. Enough strength for the immediate task or ordeal. Enough material gain to enable us to meet our daily obligations. Enough light to see the path
right before our feet. — Faith Baldwin

All comedians are people who really deeply consider the human experience not only a dirty trick perpetrated by a totally meaningless procedure of accidents, but an unbearable ordeal every day, which can be made tolerable only by mockery in one form or another. — William, Saroyan

Out in the fog, weary, yet buoyant from the drinks, his mind dulled along with his aches and his energy returning, Tully was free of the sense of impending ordeal that had been with him for weeks. He felt whole, self-sufficient, felt his life had at last opened up and that now nothing stood between him and the future's infinite possibilities. — Leonard Gardner

The only question which concerns us here is whether these "educated" persons are actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating the regime of the oppressor. — Carter G. Woodson

The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you. — Muriel Barbery

I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter. — Winston S. Churchill

The only way I hear gossip is if it's big enough and loud enough for my friends to bring it up to me. Or if it's, like, a big untrue ordeal from my publicist - and she hates making that phone call! — Taylor Swift

One of my few childhood memories is as an eight-year-old, refused permission to watch the Hitchcock season on Irish television, sneakily viewing 'The Birds' though a crack in the living-room door. It transformed my hitherto perfectly enjoyable half-mile walk to school, down a country lane patrolled by watchful birds, into a terrifying ordeal. — Mariella Frostrup

Fiji had experienced the ordeal of two military coups. — Kamisese Mara

Going out is such a hassle. The singles club scene where you sit down, talk, get to know each other, hang out-it's such a big ordeal. — Brian Austin Green

This important theme of Abraham's deep trust in God's promise and faithfulness helped shape Israel's own self-understanding and identity. So it's not surprising to hear Moses's words to Israel at Sinai: "Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test [the Hebrew verb is nasah] you, and in order that the fear [yir'ah] of Him may remain with you, so that you may not sin" (Exod. 20:20). These two key verbs link back to Genesis 22. Abraham was tested by God (Gen. 22:1) and through this ordeal demonstrated his fear of God (v. 12). Abraham's obedience is intended to serve as a model for Israel and to inspire Israel's obedience and solidify their relationship with ("fear of") God.5 — Paul Copan

I'm grateful this ordeal is over, and I'm so looking forward to getting back to the job I love. — Paula Abdul

Through the whole ordeal, I don't think we ever said to each other: "This isn't fair." We just kept going. We recognized that there were things we could do that might help the outcome in a positive ways ... and we did them. Without saying it in words, our attitude was, "Let's saddle up and ride. — Randy Pausch

New Year, the season for changes in positions and advances in salaries, approaches. If you have in your employ some who deserve more salary, do not compel them to go through the unpleasant ordeal of asking a raise, but, rather, voluntarily increase their remuneration. A raise that comes from the boss without asking is worth a lot more than one that has to be gouged out of him. Is it not true that a great many employers who would not dream of overcharging their customers have no qualms whatever about underpaying their employees if the latter will submit without protest? — B.C. Forbes

Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition. — Trinh T. Minh-ha

You mentioned law school, he said, and this grabbed her attention. They talked about it at length, with Jake careful not to make his description as dreadful as the three-year ordeal itself. Occasionally, like all lawyers, Jake was asked by students if he would recommend the law as a profession. He had never found an honest way to say no, though he had many reservations. — John Grisham

What are my thoughts on this whole ordeal?" she repeated, pausing to contemplate. And then she thought of the perfect answer. "Ali didn't manage to kill us," she said. "She only made us stronger. — Sara Shepard

The rest of dinner was an ordeal. When Adam looked at Signora Docci, he saw Professor Leonard; when he looked at Antonella, he saw himself kissing her in the garden; and when he looked at Harry, he found himself wondering if one of them had been adopted. — Mark Mills

Physically my brain is in great shape. My motor functions are fine, but I think going through the whole ordeal ... coming pretty close to death, may have affected my priorities. — Bill Berry

My run is so weird. That's what I'm most nervous about in this whole ordeal. I'm most nervous about everybody making fun of the way I run. I do, like, karate hands. Instead of running with my hands closed together like a normal person. It's like I'm trying to be aerodynamic or something, so my hands are straight like razors. Karate hands. — Jennifer Lawrence

the ordeal for more than two or three — Miklos Nyiszli

I, personally, have resolved never to display weakness, to be always strong and firm and forthright, to show neither fear nor uncertainty
no matter how fearful and uncertain I may be inside; I see no other way to survive this ordeal. — Jim Fergus

The supreme ordeal, let us say rather, the only ordeal, is the loss of the beloved being. — Victor Hugo

It is evident that it is the belief of Christian people in this country and in all other enlightened portions of the world that as a nation, we have passed through a severe ordeal - that severe judgments have been poured out upon us on account of the manner in which a poor, oppressed race was treated in this country. — Hiram Rhodes Revels

Two days after his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandonment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction.
Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth. And the outcome can't be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it. — Armistead Maupin

The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium. — Anais Nin

The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race. — Carter G. Woodson

Well, at least I can spare myself the ordeal of a whole battery of personality tests. My personality is poor; that much is clear. — Susan Juby

Speaking up for America has become a lonely ordeal. — Maurice Saatchi

He will stay, Minerva, because he needs to understand,' said Dumbledore curtly. 'Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery. He needs to know who has put him through the ordeal he has suffered tonight, and why. — J.K. Rowling

People without hope do not write novels ... [Writing fiction] is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won't survive the ordeal. — Flannery O'Connor

For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right. — Yann Martel

The American critic Dale Peck, author of Hatchet Jobs (2004), argues that reviewing finds its true character in critical GBH such as Fischer's [review of Martin Amis's Yellow Dog]. It represents a return to the prehistoric origins of reviewing in Zoilism - a kind of pelting of pretentious literature with dung, lest the writers get above themselves; it is to the novelist what the gown of humiliation was to the Roman politician - a salutary ordeal. Less grandly, bad reviews are fun, so long as you are not the author. There is, it must be admitted, a kind of furtive blood sport pleasure in seeing a novelist suffer. You read on. Whereas most of us stop reading at the first use of the word 'splendid' or 'marvellous' in a review. — John Sutherland

Throughout the ordeal, I learned that getting mad was easier than being sad. Anger was something I could control. I could settle into an easy rhythm of blame and hate. Focus my energy on something than the ache in my heart. — Emily Giffin

We must have done something very wicked before we were born, or else we must be going to be very happy indeed when we are dead, for God to let this life have all the tortures of expiation and all the sorrows of an ordeal. — Alexandre Dumas-fils

Is the girl all right?" "She's had an ordeal but she's young," Augustus said. "She won't forget it, but she might outlive it. — Larry McMurtry

More than anything else, I miss the hope. In jail, we we had the hope that we might get out, go to college, have fun, go to the movies. I am twenty-seven. I don't know what it means to love. I don't want to be secret and hidden forever. I want to know, to know who this Nassrin is.You'd call it the ordeal of freedom, I guess. — Azar Nafisi

Never marry who doesn't love you,
If you do it, your ordeal will turn into hell. — Miguel Angel Saez Gutierrez

Despite all the types of rejection, the most important part is to keep on moving forward and to not give up. If things are getting bad, take a break and seek out people for their opinion on what you may do to improve your presentation. In the end, it is all a numbers game and it does become a lot easier. It stops becoming this big ordeal and is just part of the job. — Mark Edward

Woman must have her freedom, the fundamental freedom of choosing whether or not she will be a mother and how many children she will have. Regardless of what man's attitude may be, that problem is hers - and before it can be his, it is hers alone. She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it. — Margaret Sanger

I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire. — Daphne Du Maurier

Week after week we were reduced to starting the same letter over again and copying out the same appeals, so that after a certain time words which had at first been torn bleeding from our hearts became void of sense. We copied them down mechanically, trying by means of these dead words to give some idea of our ordeal. And in the end, the conventional call of a telegram seemed to us preferable to this sterile, obstinate monologue and this arid conversation with a blank wall. — Albert Camus

Life is an ordeal, albeit an exciting one, but I wouldn't trade it for the good old days of poverty and obscurity. — Jim Carrey

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one. — Joseph Campbell

Charles gave his hat to Mary, set his lapels, wished he were dead, then went down the hall and into his ordeal. — John Fowles

The very rationalists who jeer at the trial by combat, in the old feudal ordeal, do in fact accept a trial by combat as deciding all human history. In the war of the North and South in America, some of the Southern rebels wrote on their flags the rhyme, "Conquer we must for our cause is just." The philosophy was faulty; and in that sense it served them right that their opponents copied and continued it in the form "Conquer they didn't; so their cause wasn't." But the latter logic is as bad as the former. — G.K. Chesterton

Every obnoxious circumstances in one's life is always a lesson to learn from.Whatever the ordeal you are passing through now, take them as a school that you will one day graduate from. — Osunsakin Adewale

I am just through with a summer, and a summer is to me always a trying ordeal. — Maria Mitchell

You've had many ordeals in the past. During these ordeals, life seemed unbearable. You may have collapsed from the exhaustion of hopelessness and curled into a fetal position. Regardless of how difficult this new ordeal may be, as with the others, this too will be overcome. It will make you stronger. — John-Talmage Mathis

Beyond the personal discomfort, her larger point was that women aren't going to achieve social equality until some technological alternative is invented to save us from being the only sex expected to go through it. If men were the ones forced to endure this ordeal, obviously such a technological solution would long ago have been devised. — Laura Kipnis

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business. — John Berryman

The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start. — Zane Grey

It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal
carries the cross of the redeemer
not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair. — Joseph Campbell

People who thought of my journey as a physical ordeal or an act of courage ... missed the point. Courage and physical endurance were no more than useful items of equipment for me, like facility with languages or immunity to hepatitis. The goal was comprehension, and the only way to comprehend the world was by making myself vulnerable to it so that it could change me. The challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything that came my way. The prize was to change and grow big enough to feel one with the whole world. — Ted Simon

Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy. — G.K. Chesterton

His ordeal has stripped away every bit of himself and leaves him feeling completely exposed to his Enemy. He has no way to know when the next full-scale attack will come, only that it will and that he cannot hide or protect himself from it.
Yet even in Frodo's darkness, with the fiery Ring as the only illumination he senses, there is still deep union between him and God. Evil continually forces its way into the hobbit's soul, but God is already there to strengthen him in his struggle to keep the demonic power from overwhelming him completely. As Frodo burns upon the kindled wheel, he becomes a candle set alight by both Light and Dark, a figure 'clothed in flame' (LOTR, 890), as Sam saw by the red light in the Tower chamber. The combination of this torment, God's love for him, and his own love for his world consume him in 'a holy sacrifice, truly pleasing to God' (Rom. 12:1). — Anne Marie Gazzolo

For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn't for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite. — Geraldine Brooks

Bearing ourselves humbly before God ... we await undismayed the impending assault ... be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parlay; we may show mercy - we shall ask for none. — Winston Churchill

Crush your individuality first. Shake off the dreams of personal comfort. Then start to work. Inch by inch you shall have to proceed. It needs courage, perseverance and very strong determination. No difficulties and no hardships shall discourage you. No failure and betrayals shall dishearten you. No travails (!) imposed upon you shall snuff out the revolutionary will in you. Through the ordeal of sufferings and sacrifice you shall come out victorious. And these individual victories shall be the valuable assets of the revolution. — Bhagat Singh

As he walked along, consciously enjoying the early coolness of the morning, he turned and looked behind him. People often do this and are usually surprised to find that there is some reason for turning around. Sometimes there is no apparent reason and they wonder why they did it. ("Ordeal By Water") — P.C. Wren

There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling. — Vladimir Nabokov

The mantram becomes one's staff of life and carries one through every ordeal. Each repetition has a new meaning, carrying you nearer and nearer to God. — Mahatma Gandhi

The Nobel Prize has been a disturbance at the beginning of October for some years. It would be gratifying to win, but it would be quite an ordeal, too, with all the events which go on for two days. I'd think carefully about what I was doing the day it is announced and maybe not be around, or be around, but elsewhere. — Peter Higgs

Had I not gone through the ordeal, in more than one country, of landing a job, I would he tempted to lose patience over the number of letters pouring in from fellows who want me or someone else to hand them a job on a silver platter with a guarantee that they will receive the wonderful promotion their talents warrant ... But a tragic number of young men and even older men have a notion that it is not up to them to prosecute the bettering process. They look to someone else to perform the trick for them. — B.C. Forbes

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal. — Howard Barker

They do not know what they say. If it came to a conflict of arms, the war will last at least four years. Northern politicians will not appreciate the determination and pluck of the South, and Southern politicians do not appreciate the numbers, resources, and patient perseverance of the North. Both sides forget that we are all Americans. I foresee that our country will pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation, perhaps, for our national sins. — Robert E.Lee

The difference between an ordeal and an adventure is attitude. — Bob Bitchin

There are three ways that men get what they want: by planning, by working, and by praying. Any great military operation takes careful planning or thinking. Then you must have well trained troops to carry it out: that's working. But between the plan and the operation there is always an unknown. That unknown spells defeat or victory; success or failure. It is the reaction of the actors to the ordeal when it actually comes. Some people call that getting the breaks. I call it God. God has His part or margin in everything. That's where prayer comes in. — George S. Patton Jr.

It's more going back into, I've always been really interested in the MKULTRA program and some of the programs and the fact that we really tried to create an actual, I guess you could call it an energy force of yourself. And you know, there were test subjects that were killed during the process. It have a huge ordeal, this huge congressional hearing that shut the whole thing down. — Len Wiseman

Books that recount ordeals are precious because an ordeal is what we most fear, and the stories that tell us how to survive them reassure us about what a human being is capable of, as we survive our own lives every day, our own mysterious journeys. — Ramona Koval

ordeal, remember — Leah Fleming

War provides some people with a sense of purposefulness. The drumbeat of war quickens the pulse of neighbors, relatives, tribes, and nations. Hostile nations amass weapons of destruction claiming that they seek peace through deterrence. When war comes, advocates of arms galvanize the citizenry by proclaiming the inevitability of conflict. Each side's propaganda machine cast the campaign of present war as the next Great War. Generals brashly promote armed conflict as the war to end all other wars. Saber-rattlers proclaim that the opposition's militant disciples instituted this ordeal of conquest and destruction. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Everyone was pretending to be bored to tears, or maybe they actually were, but Quentin wasn't. He was unexpectedly happy, though he instinctively kept it a secret. In fact he was so fully of joy and relief he could barely breathe. Like a receding glacier the ordeal of the Beast had left behind a changed world, jumbled and scraped and raw, but the earth was finally putting up new green shoots again. — Lev Grossman