Agonizing Quotes - Page 3

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

  Bruce McCall

  Attitude, Pride, Ideas

  Bruce McCall (1999). “Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Canada”, Vintage

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• Shun security, I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isnt agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.

  John Burdett

  Block, Writing, Enemy

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• My books are based on the "what if" principle. "What if you became invisible?" or "What if you did change into your mother for one day?" I then take it from there. Each book takes several months in the long process of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, and each has its own set of problems. The one thing I dislike about the writing process is the sometimes-loneliness of it all. Readers only get to see the glamour part of a bound book, not some of the agonizing moments one has while constructing it.

  Mary Rodgers

  Mother, Loneliness, Book

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

  Paul Davies

  Stars, Fall, Night

  Paul Davies (2008). “The Last Three Minutes: Conjectures About The Ultimate Fate Of The Universe”, p.50, Basic Books

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• We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed.... This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Commitment, Opposites, Practice

  Martin Luther King Jr. (1963). “Strength to Love”

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

  Karen Horney

  Self, Expression, Shapes

  Karen Horney (1980). “The Adolescent Diaries of Karen Horney”, Basic Books (AZ)

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• Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our­ selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment.

  Angela Davis

  Men, Thinking, Self

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

  Rachel Held Evans

  People, Purpose, Way

  Rachel Held Evans (2012). “A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband "master"”, p.263, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.

  Roger Ebert

  Thinking, Should Have, Law

  Roger Ebert (2012). “A Horrible Experience of Unbearable Length: More Movies That Suck”, p.175, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• No image, however accomplished, could have captured the agonizing poignancy of that moment. It was a moment to be lived, not framed, analysed or reduced in any way.

  Simon Roberts

  Photography, Way, Photographer

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• As agonizing a disease as cancer is, I do not think it can be said that our civilization is threatened by it. ... But a very plausible case can be made that our civilization is fundamentally threatened by the lack of adequate fertility control. Exponential increases of population will dominate any arithmetic increases, even those brought about by heroic technological initiatives, in the availability of food and resources, as Malthus long ago realized.

  Carl Sagan

  Cancer, Science, Thinking

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

  Jon Krakauer

  Struggle, Self, Deception

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• I couldn't allow myself to think about her very long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my wretched past.

  Henry Miller

  Broken Heart, Past, Thinking

  Henry Miller, John Calder (1985). “A Henry Miller reader”, Riverrun Pr

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• Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  Struggle, Names, Forever

  Kim Stanley Robinson (2013). “Pacific Edge: Three Californias”, p.95, Macmillan

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

  Brian Kolodiejchuk

  Prayer, Pain, Sacrifice

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• ...life is in Fate's hands now. You made your choice to stay... it's too late to change that, so stop agonizing over it.... You're making my scales itch. Saphira, from "Eragon

  Christopher Paolini

  Fate, Hands, Worry

  Christopher Paolini (2014). “The Inheritance Cycle Complete Collection: Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr, Inheritance”, p.434, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• I wouldn't say Musashi is ordinary. But he is. That's what's extraordinary about him. He is not content to rely on whatever natural gifts he may have. Knowing he is ordinary, he is constantly trying to improve himself. No one appreciates the agonizing effort he's had to make. Now that his years of training have yielded such spectacular results, everybody's talking about his 'God-given talent.' That's how men who don't try very hard comfort themselves.

  Eiji Yoshikawa

  Men, Talking, Years

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• In the end, we all have to decide what we're willing to give up for payback. We all have parents or grandparents or children who will need us. Agonizing decisions sometimes. You have to weigh the memories and debt against what's being taken from you.

  Iris Johansen

  Children, Giving Up, Memories

  Iris Johansen (2011). “An Eve Duncan Collection From Iris Johansen: Quicksand, Blood Game, Eight Days to Live, and Chasing the Night”, p.457, Macmillan

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• I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.

  Caroline B. Cooney

  Kids, Writing, Thinking

  Caroline B. Cooney (2012). “Twins”, p.188, Open Road Media

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• We do not want to keep our troops in Afghanistan. We see no military - we seek no military bases there. It is agonizing for America to lose our young men and women. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can.

  Barack Obama

  Military, Home, Men

  A New Beginning: Speech at Cairo University, delivered 4 June 2009, Cairo, Egypt

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

  Mary Todd Lincoln

  Grief, Silence, Tears

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

  Chris Guillebeau

  Balance, Excited, Worried

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

  Clint Eastwood

  Running, Self, Romance

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• The miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

  Victor Hugo

  Wisdom, Men, Names

  Victor Hugo (2010). “The Works of Victor Hugo”, p.2091, BookCaps Study Guides

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• It's the quintessential Greek sport: harmonious, competitive, agonizing, nautical, and above all, intelligent. It combines Odysseus's brains and brawn and love of the sea with the tactical precision of the Spartan pikeman.

  Barry S. Strauss

  Sports, Intelligent, Sea

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