Pain And Agony Quotes & Sayings

The agony of this chronic stage of being cannot be endured for long. At the deepest level, toxic shame triggers our basic automatic defensive cover-ups. Freud called these automatic cover-ups our primary ego defenses. Once these defenses are in place they function automatically and unconsciously, sending our true and authentic selves into hiding. We develop a false identity out of this basic core. We become master impersonators. We avoid our core agony and pain and over a period of years, we avoid our avoidance. — John Bradshaw

I begin to cry as my walls of my resolve break down. I don't know how long I can hold on. The pain is horrid and I curl into myself wrestling with a wish to die and a wish to live. Both have their perks. Only one will release me from this agony. — Celia Mcmahon

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

She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief. — Diane Setterfield

Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:
Its wings are almost free
its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulph, it stoops and dares the final bound,
Oh I dreadful is the check
intense the agony
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain. — Emily Bronte

She knows the truth can cause a sharp pain behind your eyes and that love sometimes feels like a fist around your throat. — Jodi Picoult

What is meditation? What is leaving one's body? What is fasting? What is holding one's breath? It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice-wine or fermented coconut-milk. Then he won't feel his self any more, then he won't feel the pains of life any more, then he finds a short numbing of the senses. When he falls asleep over his bowl of rice-wine, he'll find the same what Siddhartha and Govinda find when they escape their bodies through long exercises, staying in the non-self. — Hermann Hesse

He wanted to protect her and
fuck her and comfort her and destroy her all at once. The chaos of his emotions coiled around his pain,
deepening the agony. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

In the warmer months of the year one or other of those nocturnal insects quite often strays indoors from the small garden behind my house. When I get up early in the morning, I find them clinging to the wall, motionless. I believe, said Austerlitz, they know they have lost their way, since if you do not put them out again carefully they will stay where they are, never moving, until the last breath is out of their bodies, and indeed they will remain in the place where they came to grief even after death, held fast by the tiny claws that stiffened in their last agony, until a draft of air detaches them and blows them into a dusty corner. Sometimes, seeing one of these moths that have met their end in my house, I wonder what kind of fear and pain they feel while they are lost. — W.G. Sebald

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

I guess I was lucky I didn't drown, or smother in the thick, black, icy mud that the river left behind in its slow withdrawal back within its banks.

I didn't feel lucky.

When I regained consciousness, my head and ribs winning the battle with the rest of my body for sharp, almost unbearable pain, my first thought was Chrissy. Chrissy, pulled away from me by the merciless power of the water. Chrissy, lost somewhere, maybe injured, calling for me and I wasn't there for her. Chrissy, beautiful, wonderful Chrissy, quite probably lying in the mud, dead!

My scream of anguish, of pain and loss, echoed through the empty Liverpool streets. There was no shame or embarrassment in that shout, that bellow of emotion. I had lost the woman I loved. Nothing I'd ever felt compared to the agony, the gut-wrenching loss of that moment.

I cried. I sat there in the middle of a street I didn't recognise, not knowing how far the wave had carried me, and cried. — Neil Davies

You don't forget. You don't 'get over it'. You just find a way to stuff the pain in a pocket somewhere inside. But every once in a while, something - some stupid, insignificant little thing - triggers it.
The worst pain you have ever felt. And you have to start all over. Feel the same jerking agony that only comes when you realize, when you remember that you'll never see his face again, that you'll never be able to share that stupid thing that reminded you of him in the first place.
The pain never goes away. It only dulls, waiting for another trigger. — Julie Hockley

Welcome to Barrayar, son. Here you go: have a world of wealth and poverty, wrenching change and rooted history. Have a birth; have two. Have a name. Miles means "soldier," but don't let the power of suggestion overwhelm you. Have a twisted form in a society that loathes and fears the mutations that have been its deepest agony. Have a title, wealth, power, and all the hatred and envy they will draw. Have your body ripped apart and re-arranged. Inherit an array of friends and enemies you never made. Have a grandfather from hell. Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live. — Lois McMaster Bujold

I dun knw things get trapped
In my mind
Then itss smethin
That I wanna find
I dun get the answer
Is there anyone listenin to me
No one there to see
To see the pain and the agony
Inside ur beautiful heart
To see that u kissed the pain
And kicked everythin apart — B. Bhardwaz

People in Japan and the Faeroe Islands kill dolphins and pilot whales by running steel rods into their spinal columns while they squeal in pain and terror and thrash in agony. (In Japan, it's illegal to kill cows and pigs as painfully and inhumanely as they kill dolphins.) The lack of compassion for dolphins and whales indicates that humans' "theory of mind" is incomplete. We have an empathy shortfall, a compassion deficit. And human-on-human violence, abuse, and ethnic and religious genocide are all too pervasive in our world. No elephant will ever pilot a jetliner. And no elephant will ever pilot a jetliner into the World Trade Center. We have the capacity for wider compassion, but we don't fully live up to ourselves. Why do human egos seem so threatened by the thought that other animals think and feel? Is it because acknowledging the mind of another makes it harder to abuse them? We seem so unfinished and so defensive. Maybe incompleteness is one of the things that "makes us human. — Carl Safina

We desire that God would give us the death-stroke; but we long to die without pain; we would die to our own will by the power of the will itself; we want to lose all and still hold all. Ah! what agony, what distress, when God has brought us to the end of our strength! We faint like a patient under a painful surgical operation. But the comparison is nought, for the object of the surgeon is to give us life
that of God to make us die. — Francois Fenelon

Trying to control the emotional self willfully by manipulative attempts is like trying to choose a number on a thrown die or to push back the water of the Kamo River upstream. Certainly, they end up aggravating their agony and feeling unbearable pain because of their failure in manipulating the emotions. — Shoma Morita

Some pain shouldn't be wished away so easily. It had to be dealt with, even embraced. Without the agony of the last few months, Piper never would have found her best friends, Hazel and Annabeth. She never would've discovered her own courage. She certainly wouldn't have had the guts to sing show tunes to the snake people under Athens. — Rick Riordan

I mean, her father was an alcoholic, and her mother was the suffering wife of a man who she could never predict what he would do, where he would be, who he would be. And it's sort of interesting because Eleanor Roosevelt never writes about her mother's agony. She only writes about her father's agony. But her whole life is dedicated to making it better for people in the kind of need and pain and anguish that her mother was in. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

In the pain, the agony, and the heroic endeavors of life, we pass through a refiner's fire, and the insignificant and the unimportant in our lives can melt away like dross and make our faith bright, intact, and strong. — James E. Faust

I found a brief piece of by Antonio Vivaldi around this time which became my 'Pinhead Mood Music'. Called Al Santo Sepolcro (At The Holy Sepulchre), it opens more like a piece of modern orchestral music, and although it it moves toward Vivaldi's familiar harmonies, there is always the threat that it will fall back into dissonance. The piece progresses in an exquisite agony, poised on a knife edge between beauty and disfigurement, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perfect. — Doug Bradley

My heart is broken this day. My soul cries out in agony, but I recognize my pain for what it really is. Our shared agony is born of greed, for our fathers, mothers, and friends are all in a better place now. Never again will they know sadness. Never again will they know hunger, thirst, loneliness or pain, yet still we grieve. In reality, we grieve for ourselves. We grieve because we can no longer speak with them, hug them or hold them. We can no longer lean on them when we need a shoulder to cry on. But make no mistake, my brothers and sisters: They are perfect now. Perfect, as all of us will be when the gods, in their infinite wisdom, decide it is our time. — Jeff Gunzel

Tap into what you don't want to say. Tap into that secret place, despite the agony, despite the personal pain, over and above the fatigue. — Arthur Penn

Suicidal pain includes the feeling that one has lost all capacity to effect emotional change. The agony is excruciating and looks as if it will never end. There is the feeling of having been beaten down for a very long time. There are feelings of agitation, emptiness, and incoherence. 'Snap out of it and get on with your life,' sounds like a demand to high jump ten feet. — David L. Conroy

Fuck was the best word. The most dangerous word. You couldn't whisper it. Fuck was always too loud, too late to stop it, it burst in the air above you and fell slowly right over your head. There was total silence, nothing but Fuck floating down. For a few seconds you were dead, waiting for Henno to look up and see Fuck landing on top of you. They were thrilling seconds-when he didn't look up. It was a word you couldn't say anywhere. It wouldn't come out unless you pushed it. It made you feel caught and grabbed you the minute you said it. When it escaped it was like an electric laugh, a soundless gasp followed by the kind of laughing only forbidden things could make, an inside tickle that became a brilliant pain, bashing at your mouth to be let out. It was agony. We didn't waste it. — Roddy Doyle

She moved nearer, leaned her shoulder against me - and we were one, and something flowed from her into me, and I knew: this is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, every heartbeat, so sweet it verged on pain. And what joy to submit to this 'must'. A piece of iron must feel such joy as it submits to the precise, inevitable law that draws it to a magnet. Or a stone, thrown up, hesitating a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath - and dying. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Everything stinks: creosote, bleach, disinfectant, soil, blood, gangrene.
The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she's the voice of authority here, in the Salle d'Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare.
On either side of Paul as he cuts are two long rows of feet: yellow, strong, calloused, scarred where blisters have formed and burst repeatedly. Since August they've done a lot of marching, these feet, and all their marching has brought them to this one place. — Pat Barker

There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of death. You see, something happens when the body knows it's about to go. Peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Endorphins. They attach themselves to the cells responsible for feeling pain. — Lewis Thomas

No one can sing well, play well, or write well, without living through moments of the deepest pain and anguish. Every real talent has known times of torturing depression when the heart in its agony has cried out to God: "Why hast Thou forsaken me? What have I done that I should suffer so?" And then, at the very darkest moment, suddenly, the veil is torn from their eyes! Truth, with her flaming torch, stands before them, and they understand that God sends them suffering to strengthen and ennoble their talent, that it may touch men's hearts and show to tired wanderers on earth glimpses of heaven. — Aimee Dostoyevsky

She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief ... she learned how to exist apart. — Diane Setterfield

The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life - the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself. — Robert M. Pirsig

Nobody would commit suicide if the pain of being inside herself, the agony of the sleepless, tortured hours spent watching the world get smaller and uglier, were bearable or could be relieved by other people telling her how they wanted her to feel. A depressed person is selfish because her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic serial killer can forget about the person who comes in to torture her everyday. Her body is brutalized by her mind. It hurts to breathe, eat, walk, think. The gross maneuverings of her limbs are so overwhelming, so wearying, that the fine muscle movements or quickness of wit necessary to write, to actually say something, are completely out of the question. — Stacy Pershall

He fell on his knees on that barren ground, Staring at the sky. And the sky opened up for him by raining. With the rain, every drop of his tear was washed down filling the cracks beneath. nobody got to see his pain and agony. And yet again he remained a mystery that was never solved. — Akshay Vasu

What is meditation? ... It is fleeing from the self, it is a short escape of the agony of being a self, it is a short numbing of the senses against the pain and the pointlessness of life. The same escape, the same short numbing is what the driver of an ox-cart finds in the inn, drinking a few bowls of rice wine or fermented coconut-milk. — Hermann Hesse

Hell in life indicates a state of suffering, of agony, of torture (by others, by circumstances, or by ourselves), and of insipid colors and little joy. Hell is a heavy vibration that drags us spiraling down from the highest to the lowest, darkest vibrations.. — Jacqueline Ripstein

Though the Son of Man expressed His federation with humanity, He was very careful to note that He was like man in all things save sin. He challenged His hearers to convict Him of sin. But the consequences of sin were all His as the Son of Man. Hence the prayer to let the chalice pass; His endurance of hunger and thirst; His agony and bloody sweat; perhaps even His seeming older than He actually was; His condescension to wash the feet of His disciples; His absence of resentment as the swine-owning capitalists ordered Him from their shores; His endurance of false charges of being a winebibber, a glutton; His gentleness, which expressed itself in hiding when His enemies would have stoned Him; above all, His endurance of worry, anxiety, fear, pain, mental anguish, fever, hunger, thirst, and agony during the hours of His Passion-all these things were to inspire men to imitate the Son of Man. Nothing that was human was foreign to Him. — Fulton J. Sheen

Oh," she said. "You can rest assured that I will kill him. Mostly this is to emphasize what I said before: no more time to lounge around and decide with no consequences. For every moment you waste deliberating today, the Oak King will be in the hands of my torturers, experiencing the most excruciating pain. Your delay extends that agony."
"Oh, irony," murmured Dorian. — Richelle Mead

He watched the pain's unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it was his own suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony. Such moments were rare. But when they came, he felt as he did in the quarry: that he had to drill through granite, that he had to drive a wedge and blast the thing within him which persisted in calling to his pity. — Ayn Rand

The exit from agony is always there. The tunnel out of the agony sector is always in front of you and yet you don't take it. You don't take it by choice. You want to indulge a lot and be in pain. The easiest way out is to write a list of what you're grateful for. If everybody literally did that before they went to bed at night, there'd be no unhappy people. — Jim Carrey

There is a journey that all must take regardless of its direction or apparent meaning. An artist plucks out their heart, holds it forth, and be it through agony or ecstasy, is prepared to be measured for the gift that is the highest honor, to create, and therein be judged on those merits alone. And, somewhere in the skein of all creation is that which demands of those whom would aspire to create beauty and wonder, no matter the cost, because creation, all of it, is worth every ounce the pain of its birth.

From the novel, Diminished Fifth — Duane Hewitt

I gritted my teeth and suffered my agony in silence. I did it for a sense of control, even though I knew that screaming was a release that would help ease a little of my pain. — Cristina Rayne

. . . 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

We may writhe in agony from pain
Or laugh out loud when we find happiness
As long as we're alive tomorrow will come
we become stronger and keep on living
We were born to live — Miho Obana

They say you can't remember pain - the fact of it, yes, but the truth of it, the physical texture of agony? Gone and forgotten. Which makes it easy to forget that pain hurts, that the wounded life isn't always worth living. — John Joseph Adams

It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer — Arthur Schopenhauer

It is phenomenal how fast a little toot of smack will take away the agony of withdrawal and most other kinds of pain. What it cannot take away it makes meaningless. You may still have a broken arm, but somehow it doesn't matter so much. The same is true for angst and anxiety. It cancels pain so hidden that you were unaware of its existence until it disappeared. — Edward Bunker

He is not far off; He is there, very close. He is looking at us, and He is begging this sorrow, this agony from us. He needs it for souls and for our soul ... Alas, it does pain Him to give us sorrows to drink, but He knows this is the only means of preparing us to know Him as He knows Himself and to become God's ourselves. — Therese Of Lisieux

In his (Christ's) surrender on the cross all the pain and agony of mankind was concentrated at a single point, and passed through from death to immortality, There is no pain of any creature from the beginning to the end of time which was not 'known' at this point and thus transmuted. To know all things in the Word is thus to know all the suffering of the world transfigured by the resurrection, somehow reconciled and atoned in eternal life. It was God's purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things on heaven and things on earth'. — Bede Griffiths

I'm sorry about that. I'm sure you didn't miss me like I missed you, but sometimes the things that matter to you most are also the things that hurt you the most. And in order to get over that hurt, you have to sever all the extensions that keep you tethered to that pain. You were an extension of my pain, so I guess that's what I was doing. I was just trying to save myself a little bit of agony. — Colleen Hoover

I think the most important thing to remember is that pain passes. And artistically, the pain is going to pass. It's what you want to express out of the pain as opposed to indulging in the agony-and-pain mantra of songwriting that became such a hit in the '90s and still, all the way up to now. — Alex Ebert

What can you say about pain?
Words can trace only the shadow of the thing itself. The reality of hard, sharp physical pain is like nothing else, and it is beyond language. The world is too much with us, day and night, but when we hurt, when we really hurt, the world melts and fades and becomes a ghost, a dim memory, a silly unimportant thing. Whatever ideals, dreams, loves, fears, and thoughts we might have had become ultimately unimportant. We are alone with our pain, it is the only force in the cosmos, the only thing of substance, the only thing that matters, and if the pain is bad enough and lasts long enough, if it is the sort of agony that goes on and on, then all the things that are our humanity melt before it and the proud sophisticated computer that is the human brain becomes capable of but a single thought:
Make it stop, make it STOP! (from The Glass Flower) — George R R Martin

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony. — William S. Burroughs

The woman had gasped beneath his heavy body. He rubbed against her, lubricated by the warm, sticky liquid, but as her body gradually grew cold, he felt as though they'd been glued together. She seemed to be see-sawing between agony and ecstasy, but finally Satake pressed his lips over hers to quiet the groans-of pain or pleasure-that were leaking from her mouth. He found the hole that he had made in her side and worked his finger deep into the opening. Blood was pumping from the wound, staining their sex a gruesome crimson. He wanted to get further inside, to melt into her. As he was about to come, he pulled his lips from her and she whispered in his ear: "I'm finished ... finished."
"I know," he'd said, and he could still hear the exact sound of his own voice. — Natsuo Kirino

Get through the agony and anger, the pain and strife, and take the necessary steps to try to change my life. — Ludacris

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

It is much nicer to live in perfect mind, free from pain and agony. How painful it is to be unenlightened. Buddha called it "the nightmare of the day." — Frederick Lenz

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

I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me: I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had for ever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!
Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling; but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death. — Mary Shelley

A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world. — Erich Maria Remarque

Awareness seeped in and brought its friends Pain and Agony for a visit. — Hailey Edwards

It is only two hundred years ago that we had the invention of industrial agriculture. What did that revolution do to us? It brought us power. And freedom from a life spent kneeling in sodden rice paddies or struggling fourteen hours a day to collect cotton bolls or snap peas. Freedom, in short, from an existence governed by agony, injury, and pain - one that most farmers, and most humans, have always had to endure. — Michael Specter

All of this caused Kiyoaki constant pain. In comparison with Satoko's public humiliation, however, he did not even have a slighting remark to contend with. And however acute his private agony, it was, after all, the torment of a coward. — Yukio Mishima

Tell me, Sorcerer, is there any spell you have that can take this agony from me? (Talon)
Aye, Celt. I can show you how to bury that pain so deep inside you that it will prick you no more. But be warned that nothing is ever given freely and nothing last forever. One day something will come along to make you feel again, and with it, it will bring the pain of the ages upon you. All you have hidden will come out and it could destroy not only you, but anyone near you. (Acheron) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

As he mused on the possibilities he became aware of the odor of cigarette smoke. And the sound of muted sobs ... As she tried to stifle her anguish, what came out of her was utterly mournful, the saddest thing Luke had ever heard. He wanted to scramble out of the tree house, climb back into his room, and shut the window. But he was afraid to move. She would hear him.
So he just sat there, hearing the agony of thousands of failed days bleed out of Nell. He put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes. he didn't want to hear her sobbing, didn't want to acknowledge she felt pain - nor that he knew she'd lived through more pain than anyone else he'd ever known. That maybe she had sent Norah and Kieran away because she knew Eleanor's home had to be happier than hers. He didn't want to acknowledge that. He wouldn't be able to hate her then. — Susan Meissner

He was talking. I tried not to think of how he looked and instead of what he was telling me. Once I accomplished that, my brain couldn't get past the 'running' part.
"I don't run." I walked the mile run at school. True story.
I abhorred any kind of physical exercise. I wasn't good at it. I was skinny, but I was soft; had absolutely no muscle mass at all. That's the way I liked it. Who was he to try to change that, change me? I wouldn't let him. No way, no how.
One half of his mouth lifted. He seemed to be enjoying this a little too much. "You do now. You have to be fit, you have to be strong, Taryn, if you're to stand any chance of surviving this. Come on, we'll start with stretching."
He forced me to twist my body into unimaginable positions. I even had to touch my toes. The agony. Luke took pleasure from my pain; even laughing as I moaned and groaned through it all.
Then, the worst came about. He. Made. Me. Run. — Lindy Zart

Svengal lay groaning on the turf. His thighs were sheer agony. His buttocks ached. His calf muscles were on fire. Now, afterhe had tumbled off the small pony he was riding and thudded heavily to the turf on the point of his shoulder, the shoulder would hurt too. He concentrated on trying to find one part of his body that wasn't a giant source of pain and failed miserably. He opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the face of the elderly pony that he had been riding peered down at him.
Now what made you do a strange thing like that? The creature seemed to be asking. — John Flanagan

What self-righteous persons take to themselves, is the same work that Christ was engaged in when He was in His agony and bloody sweat, and when He died on the cross, which was the greatest thing that ever the eyes of angels beheld. Christ could accomplish other parts of this work without cost; but this part cost Him His life, as well as innumerable pains and labors. Yet this is the part which self-righteous persons go about to accomplish for themselves. — Jonathan Edwards

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

Being strong means allowing yourself to cry over the things you can't change; laugh when things are funny; smile when you're happy. It means understanding where your breaking point is, and yet, going further and still remaining whole. Strong people push themselves to the limits of pain and joy. They fall to their knees in agony, then they lift up their faces to find the beautiful morning rays shining down on them, and they rise to their feet. Being strong means never giving up, no matter how crushed you are, and finding happiness in the smallest parts of life. — D. Nichole King

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

It is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all. Strangely — Viktor E. Frankl

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre. — Andy Behrman

The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much, by releasing in fulfillment all the past hours of desire and denial. It was an act of clenched teeth and hatred, it was the unendurable, the agony, an act of passion - the word born to mean sunering - it was the moment made of hatred, tension, pain - the moment that broke its own elements, inverted them, triumphed, swept into a denial of all suffering, into its antithesis, into ecstasy. — Ayn Rand

Yes, contractions can be intense,' Noura continues. 'But your bodies are designed to handle it. And what you must remember is, it's a positive pain. I'm sure you'll both agree?' She looks over at Mum and Janice.
POSITIVE?' Janice looks up, horrified. 'Ooh, no, dear. Mine was agony. 24 hours in the cruel summer heat. I wouldn't wish it on any of you poor girls.'
But there are natural methods you can use,' Noura puts in quickly. 'I'm sure you found that rocking and changing position helped with the contractions.
I wouldn't have said so,' Mum says kindly.
Or a warm bath?' Noura suggets, smile tightening.
A bath? Dear, when you're gripped by agony and wanting to die, a bath doesn't really help!'
As I glance around the room I can see that all the girls' faces have frozen. Most of the mens' too. — Sophie Kinsella

One whose spirit and mental strength have been strengthened by sparring with a never-say-die attitude should find no challenge too great to handle. One who has undergone long years of physical pain and mental agony to learn one punch, one kick, should be able to face any task, no matter how difficult, and carry it through to the end. A person like this can truly be said to have learned karate. — Gichin Funakoshi

The cup from which he shrank was something different. It symbolized neither the physical pain of being flogged and crucified, nor the mental distress of being despised and rejected even by his own people, but rather the spiritual agony of bearing the sins of the world, in other words, of enduring the divine judgment which those sins deserved. — John R.W. Stott

Our greatest hope comes from the knowledge that the Savior broke the bands of death. His victory came through His excruciating pain, suffering, and agony. He atoned for our sins if we repent. — James E. Faust

Gritting my teeth as if it requires actual physical strength, I push the memory of him dying in my arms down, deep down. It almost seems to fight me, to want to surge into the forefront of my mind, and I sigh. Long ago I came to the realization that painful memories are persistent. The agony of them stays with you much longer, sharper, and clearer than sweet memories, that soften and assume a hazy, rosy glow in your mind, almost as if they have been airbrushed. Remembrance of pain is different; there is no muting of colors, no blurring of edges. No, its colors remain stark and bold, a palette of vibrant primary reds, blues, and yellows; its edges stay defined and razor sharp. Years later it can still cut you as deeply, make you bleed as profusely, as the day it was formed.
FROM AN UNTITLED WORK IN PROGRRESS — Lily Velden

Her body was tense, her small teeth sunk into her upper lip. Her eyes flashed upward at Aloysius, and he started at what he saw in them.
Pain. It was normal to feel some pain at the bestowing of a Mark, but what he saw in Adele's eyes- was agony. — Cassandra Clare

I'm so exhausted with worry, I go to bed early that day. But hours later, I'm still awake. I can't seem to fall asleep. Not without him by my side. When did I become so addicted to Jake? Why do I crave his company? Since forever, my conscience responds. After my father's death, I went off the deep end because he was not there. I sought the BDSM lifestyle, not because I yearned for it, but because I wanted the pain. If Jake had been there, somehow I could have muddled through the aftermath of my father's funeral without looking for someone to tie me up and administer punishment. I wanted to be beaten as an outlet for my agony. Not that it made any difference. Even after I flew to Brazil, the pain was still there. It still is. And I know why. Because he's not by my side. As much as I want him to be here with me, he never signed on to babysit me for life. — Magda Alexander

The boy knelt, shoulders bowed, on the sand in the grey of morning, moaning softly, fearfully. Glowing tendrils of energy streamed across the agitated sky, converging high above him in a vortex of brightness. He flung his hands heavenward and a sheet of blinding brilliance descended from the vortex. It enveloped him and from its core a pulsing sphere of light fell, entering his body and almost tearing him apart. He went rigid, screaming to shatter the heavens, his dark eyes bulging from their sockets, his mouth wide in a rictus of agony. Sirius exploded in a burst of silver-blue radiance, as his howl rose to a shriek beyond hearing and endurance. Out of the light and the sound and the anguish, two names imprinted themselves on his mind. One of them, he knew, was his own.
The other floated for an instant above his consciousness like a fugitive white dove in the morning. — J. Valor

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she's the voice of authority here, in the Salle d'Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare. — Pat Barker

Be humble as the blade of grass that is being trodden underneath the feet. The little ant tastes joyously the sweetness of honey and sugar. The mighty elephant trembles in pain under the agony of sharp goad — Sivananda

Patsy, suffering strengthens our constitutions and builds inner fortifications so that we never fall prey to the same agony twice. We must take upon ourselves a smaller evil to defend against the greater evil. We must take upon ourselves a smaller pain in order to survive." I — Stephanie Dray

Miserably disturbed!' that is not strong enough. He was haunted by the remembrance of the handsome young man, with whom she stood in an attitude of such familiar confidence; and the remembrance shot through him like an agony, till it made him clench his hands tight in order to subdue the pain. — Elizabeth Gaskell

And speaking of this wonderful machine:
[840] I'm puzzled by the difference between
Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,
A testing of performing words, while he
Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,
The other kind, much more decorous, when
He's in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,
The abstract battle is concretely fought.
The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar
[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,
And thus it physically guides the phrase
Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.
But method A is agony! The brain
Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.
A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will
Can interrupt, while the automaton
Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before. — Vladimir Nabokov

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

And he felt a crazy desire to join the forlorn ones, to throw himself into inevitable defeat, to live his life as he saw it in spite of everything, to proclaim once more the falseness of the gospels under the cover of which greed and fear filled with more and yet more pain the already unbearable agony of human life. As — John Dos Passos

It is as great a crime to leave a woman alone in her agony and deny her relief from her suffering as it is to insist upon dulling the consciousness of a natural mother who desires above all things to be aware of the final reward of her efforts, whose ambition is to be present, in full possession of her senses, when the infant she already adores greets her with its first loud cry and the soft touch of its restless body upon her limbs. — Grantly Dick-Read

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

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails ... and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.
- Anonymous Curse on Book Theives from the Monaster of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain — Anatole Broyard

Tender Ember
... Barred and branded
to be forever unloved
I was a tender ember
seeking solace from above ... — Muse

Our Lord shouts and screams;
his tears fall from heaven and spring the streams — John E. Wordslinger

These poor people have learned to endure day to day economic agony. It's routine in daily life for them. They are so accustomed to facing economic pain that poverty doesn't hurt them anymore. Extreme negativity in their life drove learning endurance and their accomplishment to endure extreme conditions is 'positivity' they mastered — Sadashivan Nair

Lord, help us to see in your crucifixion and resurrection an example of how to endure and seemingly to die in the agony and conflict of daily life, so that we may live more fully and creatively. You accepted patiently and humbly the rebuffs of human life, as well as the torture of the cross. Help us to accept the pains and conflicts that come to us each day as opportunity to grow as people and become more like you-make us realize that it is only by frequent deaths of ourselves, and our self-centered desires that we can come to live more fully, only by dying with you that we can rise with you. — Mother Teresa

... 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

This was then the reward of my benevolence! I had saved a human being from destruction, and as a recompense I now writhed under the miserable pain of a wound which shattered the flesh and bone. The feelings of kindness and gentleness which I had entertained but a few moments before gave place to hellish rage and gnashing of teeth. Inflamed by pain, I vowed eternal hatred and vengeance to all mankind. But the agony of my wound overcame me; my pulses paused, and I fainted. — Mary Shelley