Unendurable Quotes - Page 2

• Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Dream, Color, Shadow

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.241, e-artnow

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• And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Heart, Way, Ordinary

  E.L. Doctorow (2001). “City of God: A Novel”, p.81, Random House

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• There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick.

  Annie Dillard

  Moving, Later In Life, Cells

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• The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without contradiction is only half a life; or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.

  Carl Jung

  Angel, Half, Conflict

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• Lost in loneliness and pain. Black and unendurable, Thinking of you with every Corpuscle of my flesh, in Every instant of night And day.

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Thinking Of You, Pain, Loneliness

  Kenneth Rexroth (1967). “The Collected Shorter Poems”, p.230, New Directions Publishing

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• I am persuaded that we are all surrounded by an atmosphere - a separate, sensitive, distinct envelope extending some distance from our visible persons - and whenever my invisible atmosphere is invaded, it affects my whole nervous system. The proximity of any bodies but those I love best is unendurable to my body.

  Fanny Kemble

  Distance, Love Is, Atmosphere

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• When the immense drugged universe explodes In a cascade of unendurable colour And leaves us gasping naked, This is no more than the ectasy of chaos: Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love Which alone, as we know certainly, restores Fragmentation into true being. Ecstasy of Chaos

  Robert Graves

  Hands, Naked, Royal

  Robert Graves, Beryl Graves, Dunstan Ward (1999). “Complete poems”, Carcanet Pr

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• Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose. These are the last resources of an insulted and unendurable existence.

  Herman Melville

  Men, Dying, Lasts

  Herman Melville (1970). “White-jacket: Or, The World in a Man-of-war”, p.280, Northwestern University Press

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• There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable.

  Elias Canetti

  Atheist, Grief, Fate

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• On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.

  Alan Moore

  Writing, Trying, Found

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. October 24, 2001.

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• Mercedes nursed a special grievance - the grievance of sex. She was pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But the present treatment by her husband and brother was everything save chivalrous. It was her custom to be helpless. They complained. Upon which impeachment of what to her was her most essential sex pregorative, she made their lives unendurable.

  Jack London

  Brother, Sex, Husband

  Jack London (2017). “Jack London for Kids – Breathtaking Adventure Tales & Animal Stories (Illustrated Edition): Children’s Book Classics, Including The Call of the Wild, White Fang, Jerry of the Islands, The Cruise of the Dazzler, Michael Brother of Jerry & Before Adam”, p.134, e-artnow

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• We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

  Alain de Botton

  Envy, Groups, Close Friends

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• The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Would Be, Habit, Terrible

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “The Gay Science”, p.129, Courier Corporation

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• One does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour's.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Grief, Heart, Caring

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• The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable.

  Mark Twain

  Soul, Mediocre, Satisfying

  Mark Twain (1976). “Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume II: (1877-1883)”, p.142, Univ of California Press

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• One person's roar is another's whine, just as one person's music is another's unendurable noise.

  Henry Rollins

  Noise, Music Is, Persons

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• International friendly games are not worth the lives of the silk worms who perish to make the pennants. They do not even have the philanthropic excuse that softens the otherwise unendurable tedium of testimonial matches. Quite simply, they are rotten games staged to pick the public's pocket, tiresome red tape left over from an era when nations and players were still insular and therefore curious about each other's potential.

  Danny Baker

  Soccer, Football, Player

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• No single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable.

  David Foster Wallace

  Inspirational, Powerful, Infinite Jest

  "Infinite Jest". Book by David Foster Wallace, 1996.

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• This Revolution is genuine because it was born from the same womb that always gives birth to massive social upheavals - the womb of intolerable conditions and unendurable situations.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Giving, Upheaval, Revolution

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2011). “Why We Can't Wait”, p.98, Beacon Press

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• What makes us leave what we love best? What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself When we need it most, That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake And holds us flush there until we begin to love it And have to begin again? What is it within our own lives we decline to live Whenever we find it, making our days unendurable, And nights almost visionless? I still don't know yet, but I do it.

  Charles Wright

  Night, Needs, Sake

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• Nothing seems to me to be rarer today then genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Strong, Hypocrisy, Atmosphere

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• And the night smells like snow.
  Walking home for a moment
  you almost believe you could start again.
  And an intense love rushes to your heart,
  and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

  Franz Wright

  Believe, Home, Heart

  Franz Wright (2009). “God's Silence”, p.5, Knopf

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• You learned that if you're tired enough, you can sleep sitting up. That the unendurable is perfectly endurable if you just take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes ever.

  Allison Pearson

  Tired, Sleep, Alternatives

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• It was not a mere man he was holding, but a giant; or a block of granite. The pull was unendurable. The pain unendurable.

  James Ramsey Ullman

  Pain, Block, Men

  James Ramsey Ullman (1988). “Banner in the sky”

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• The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, and knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one's clothes in a community of blind men.

  Joseph Conrad

  Believe, Heart, Fate

  Joseph Conrad (2015). “The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad”, p.89, Cambridge University Press

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