Agony Quotes - Page 4

• In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

  Jane Smiley

  Doctors, Self, Talking

  "Our lady of east LA" by Jane Smiley, www.theguardian.com. April 21, 2007.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Love, he thought as he held her to his heart, was an agony beyond compare.

  Nalini Singh

  Heart, Compare

  Nalini Singh (2012). “Nalini Singh: Guild Hunters Novels 1-4”, p.641, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The fiercest agonies have shortest reign; And after dreams of horror, comes again The welcome morning with its rays of peace.

  William C. Bryant

  Dream, Peace, Morning

  William Cullen Bryant, “Mutation”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• There isn't an agony in the world more powerful than tenderness

  Marlena De Blasi

  Powerful, World, Tenderness

  4 Copy quote

• The moment where the fisherman catches the fish, happiness and agony, light and darkness, joy and death come face to face!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Happiness, Light, Joy

  10 Copy quote

• Writers talk about the agony of writing; I talk about the agony of not writing.

  Laura Z. Hobson

  Writing

  7 Copy quote

• There's no agony like [getting started]. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off.

  Agatha Christie

  Typewriters, Feelings, Want

  Agatha Christie (1991). “Agatha Christie: An Autobiography”, Berkley Publishing Group

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.

  June Jordan

  Hands, Opening

  June Jordan (2012). “Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan”, p.11, Copper Canyon Press

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.

  Quentin Crisp

  Done, Way

  13 Copy quote

• I was just on the edge of getting married, and I was frenzied at the prospect of this great step in my life after having been a bachelor for so long. And I really wanted to take my mind off of the agony, and so I decided to sit down and write a book.

  Ian Fleming

  Book, Writing, Long

  7 Copy quote

• So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

  Russell Baker

  Science, Moon, Men

  1969 Editoral pages, the New York Times, 21 Jul.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Mother, Children, Passion

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Suttree”, p.74, Pan Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Night, Soul, Black

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.291, Library of Alexandria

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• ...to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself...the boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone.

  Joanne Greenberg

  Rain, Reality, Oasis

  4 Copy quote

• Excruciating agony makes me cranky.

  Brandon Mull

  Cranky

  Brandon Mull, Brandon Dorman (2010). “Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary”, p.412, Simon and Schuster

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• I sit here drunk now. I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here without committing murder or being murdered; without having ended up in the madhouse. as I drink alone again tonight my soul despite all the past agony thanks all the gods who were not there for me then.

  Charles Bukowski

  Past, Drunk, Soul

  5 Copy quote

• The great battles, the battles that decide our destiny and the destiny of generations yet unborn, are not fought on public platforms, but in the lonely hours of the night and in moments of agony.

  Samuel Logan Brengle

  Religious, Lonely, Prayer

  99 Copy quote

• The difficulties of peace are better than the agony of war.

  Menachem Begin

  Military, War, Difficulty

  66 Copy quote

• For when the heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass.

  Joseph Campbell

  Heart, Destiny, Miracle

  Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.196, New World Library

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• But you helped me and Arik. Why would you do that if you really feel that way? (Geary) What can I say? It’s so much more enjoyable to snatch victory from the hands of the gullible. You guys make the most delightful sound of agony when you’re betrayed. (Solin)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Hands, Guy, Victory

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2011). “The Dream-Hunter”, p.205, Hachette UK

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal sufferring, "No future bliss can make up for it" not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.

  C. S. Lewis

  Knowing, Heaven, Bliss

  10 Copy quote

• You call it hope-that fire of fire! It is but agony of desire.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Fire, Desire

  Edgar Allan Poe (2016). “Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works”, p.70, Lulu.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Love, from its awful throne of patient power
  In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
  Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
  And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
  And folds over the world its healing wings.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Life, Wise, Spring

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (1855). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: In Three Volumes”, p.441

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Hateful day when I received life!' I exclaimed in agony. 'Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemlance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.' - Frankenstein

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Beautiful, Men, Devil

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2015). “Frankenstein - The Modern Prometheus”, p.115, Jazzybee Verlag

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Memories, Past, Might

  Edgar Allan Poe (2017). “EDGAR ALLAN POE: 72 Short Stories and Novels & 80+ Poems; Including Essays, Letters & Biography (Illustrated): Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Raven, Tamerlane, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-tale Heart, Berenice, The Philosophy of Composition, The Poetic Principle, Eureka…”, p.293, e-artnow

  11 Copy quote

  Show source