Agonizing Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• In my teens I saw the world in only black and white. Now I know that most things exist in a certain gray area. Though it took a while to get here, I now call this gray area home. I once believed that participating in a capitalist economy would be the death of me, but now realize that agonizing over the political implications of every move I make isn’t exactly living.

  Sophia Amoruso

  Moving, Home, Black And White

  Sophia Amoruso (2014). “#GIRLBOSS”, p.72, Penguin

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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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• I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.

  Alan Bradley

  Interesting, Brain, Enemy

  Alan Bradley (2010). “The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag: A Flavia de Luce Novel”, p.316, Dell

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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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• 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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• 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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• What would happen to a body that was starved, suffocated and then forced to drink poison? It would first suffer and then die an agonizing death. We willingly starve and suffocate our hearts by turning away form the remembrance of God. And then we poison our hearts through the bad company we keep, the garbage that goes into our eyes and ears, and emanates from our tongue...
  And then we wonder why our heart feels dead.

  Yasmin Mogahed

  Eye, Heart, Company We Keep

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• Every so often every artist feels, 'I'll never paint again. The muse has gone out the window.' In 1985, I hardly painted at all for three months, and it was agonizing. I looked at reproductions. I stared at Matisse. I stared at the Old Masters. I stared at the Quattrocento. And I thought to myself - Don't push it! If you try too hard to get at something, you almost push it away.

  Helen Frankenthaler

  Artist, Trying, Three

  "Artful Survivor". Interview with Deborah Salomon, www.nytimes.com. May 14, 1989.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Pause and remember - Stop mentally abusing yourself. Stop agonizing over your past mistakes and worrying about the future. Life is hard enough without the added fear, panic and anxiety. Your soul is crying out for love and encouragement. Take a moment to breathe deep, get present and find some compassion for yourself. Then, go out and treat yourself right; pamper yourself and take care of your needs. You are worth it!

  Jennifer Young

  Encouragement, Mistake, Past

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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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• Even at the cross, God permitted what he hated - the unjust and agonizing death of his own precious Son - in order to accomplish something he prized above his own Son's cruel death; that is, salvation for a world of sinners. So the world's worst murder becomes the world's only salvation.

  Joni Eareckson Tada

  Son, Order, World

  Source: www.biblegateway.com

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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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• 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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• Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

  Julianna Baggott

  Passion, Writing, Obsession

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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