Agony Quotes - Page 5

• The cure is in the house, not brought by other hands from distant places, but by its own, in agony and blood.

  Aeschylus

  Blood, Hands, House

  Aeschylus (1964). “The Libation Bearers: And The Eumenides: The Oresteia, Parts II and III.”

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• 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

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• A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart.

  Lewis Thomas

  Taken, Mean, Thinking

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• Empathy during agony is a portion of divinity.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Empathy, Divinity, Portions

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• Tessa exhaled. She hadn't realized that she had been holding her breath until that moment. Will must have heard her, for he raised his head and his gaze met hers across the clearing. Something in it made her look away. Agony stripped so raw was not meant for her eyes.

  Cassandra Clare

  Eye, Looks, Moments

  Cassandra Clare (2013). “Clockwork Prince”, p.129, Simon and Schuster

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• Why does death engender fear? Because death meant change, a change greater then we have ever known, and because death was indeed a mirror that made us see ourselves as never before. A mirror that we should cover, as people in olden days covered mirrors when someone died, for fear of an evil. For with all our care and pain for those who had gone, it was ourselves too we felt the agony for. Perhaps ourselves above all.

  David Clement-Davies

  Pain, Mirrors, People

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• Will looked up angrily, shaking his head in disbelief. Will you shut up? he said tautly. Horace shrugged in apology. 'I'm sorry' he said, I sneezed. A person can't help it when they sneeze. Perhaps not. But you could try to make it sound a little less like an elephant trumpeting in agony; Will told him.

  John Flanagan

  Sorry, Apology, Elephants

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• McKenna will always be a part of me, no matter where he goes. They say that people who've lost a limb sometimes feel as if they still have it. How many times I've felt that McKenna was still here, and the empty space beside me was alive with his presence." She closed her eyes and leaned forward until her forehead and the tip of her nose touched the cool glass. "I love him beyond reason," she whispered. "He's a stranger to me now, and yet he is still so familiar. I can't imagine a sweeter agony, having him so close.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Eye, I Love Him, Space

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• Though modern Marriage is a tremendous laboratory, its members are often without preparation for the partnership function. How much agony and remorse and failure could have been avoided if there had been at least some rudimentary learning before they entered the partnership.

  Carl Rogers

  Marriage, Learning, Preparation

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• Pain! Deep, tearing, throbbing, needle-sharp, hammer-blunt pain – ripping through his body and through his mind, twisting deep in his guts and slicing at his skin with razors and broken glass. Oskan wanted to scream, but his vocal cords had burned away. He was desperate for water and he could hear it dripping all around him, but his charred tongue found nothing in his mouth but blisters and scorched flesh. For hours he lay on the ropes of the low bed, unable to move, the pressure of the hemp on his destroyed skin sending new agonies deep into his body.

  Stuart Hill

  Pain, Moving, Glasses

  Stuart Hill (2011). “The Icemark Chronicles #1: Cry of the Icemark”, p.352, Scholastic Inc.

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• I can't imagine a sweeter agony, having him so close.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Imagine, I Can

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• and we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.

  George Eliot

  Discovery, Soul, Range

  George Eliot (2016). “Adam Bede: Top Novelist Focus”, p.83, 谷月社

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• Then he heard a terrible cry that pulled at his insides, that expressed agony of a kind that neither flame nor curse could cause, and he stood up, swaying, more frightened than he had been that day, more frightened, perhaps, than he had been in his whole life.

  J. K. Rowling

  Flames, Causes, Kind

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• I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree: he is more my own. [ . . . ] Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered--not uttered till; when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some!

  Charlotte Bronte

  I Love Him, Night, Light

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• I think we too often go soft in trying to spare people the agony of confronting reality.

  Gene Weingarten

  Thinking, Reality, People

  Source: live.washingtonpost.com

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• I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.

  Donald Ray Pollock

  Believe, Life Is

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• I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.

  Osamu Dazai

  Optimism, Agitation, Roles

  Osamu Dazai (1973). “No Longer Human”, p.28, New Directions Publishing

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• My life would never contain a convenient, pain-saving plan when it could stretch a problem out into an endless agony of uncertainty and torture.

  James Patterson

  Pain, Saving, Problem

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• What once seemed such a curse has become a blessing. All the agony that threatened to destroy my life now seems like the fertile ground for greater trust, stronger hope, and deeper love.

  Henri Nouwen

  Blessing, Stronger, Curse

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• Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own persons, and it is by the imagination only that we form any conception of what are his sensations...His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have this adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.

  Adam Smith

  Brother, Home, Long

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• Tonight I will suck the marrow from your bones!” it said. “I will dry them and work them most cunningly into instruments of music! Whenever I play upon them, your spirit will writhe in bodiless agony!” “You burn prettily,” I said.

  Roger Zelazny

  Play, Tonight, Dry

  Roger Zelazny (1978). “The Chronicles of Amber: Nine princes in Amber”

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• Writing a novel is agony.

  George Orwell

  Writing, Novel

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• So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight.

  Victor Hugo

  Rocks, Desire, Pounds

  Victor Hugo (2007). “Hugo's Works: Les Miserables (St. Denis)”, p.112, Wildside Press LLC

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• Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

  Pat Conroy

  Life Changing, Writing, Thinking

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• What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began in the muscles and somewhere around the upper belly but soon spread out to the chest, the thighs, and the forehead, to invade the entire body with numbing force.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Differences, Like Love, Waiting

  Orhan Pamuk (2011). “Snow”, p.252, Faber & Faber

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