Painful Quotes - Page 12

• The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.

  Rebecca West

  Sacrifice, Race, Childhood

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• I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Writing, Ends, Found

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1938). “Works”

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• It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting, articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality. In groups, it's more natural to sing, to dance, to pray: given, rather than invented (individual) speech.

  Susan Sontag

  Mean, Thinking, Interesting

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-1980”, p.351, Penguin UK

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• It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.

  Neil Simon

  Writing, Dark, Giving

  Interview with Charles Flowers, bookpage.com. October 1999.

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• Poetry is like pooping. If there is a poem inside of you, it has to come out. Sometimes it can be really difficult and take longer than you'd like (it may even be painful), but other times it can be really easy and happen much faster than you expected. But either way - it is important, and it feels so much better when it's done.

  Sarah Kay

  Important, Done, May

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• You must learn to sit with the restless, painful energy and not let the momentum pull you under and cause you to do the same thing over and over that's ruining your life and the lives of those around you.

  Pema Chodron

  Life, Learning, Energy

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• Jealousy is a painful passion; yet without some share of it, the agreeable affection of love has difficulty to subsist in its full force and violence.

  David Hume

  Jealousy, Passion, Violence

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.1298, Delphi Classics

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• Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but it magnified the bad things, so they came to feel as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage.

  Marilyn French

  Eye, Milk, Tvs

  Marilyn French (2011). “The Women's Room”, p.253, Hachette UK

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• It is resignation and contentment that are best calculated to lead us safely through life. Whoever has not sufficient power to endure privations, and even suffering, can never feel that he is armor proof against painful emotions,--nay, he must attribute to himself, or at least to the morbid sensitiveness of his nature, every disagreeable feeling he may suffer.

  Wilhelm von Humboldt

  Feelings, Suffering, Contentment

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• the sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.

  Dervla Murphy

  Home, Loss, Occupation

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• Remember that you will never reach a higher standard than you yourself set. Then set your mark high, and step by step, even though it be by painful effort, by self-denial and sacrifice, ascend the whole length of the ladder of progress.

  Ellen G. White

  Ambition, Sacrifice, Self

  Ellen G. White (2013). “Christ's Object Lessons - Illustrated”, p.264, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Infatuation is one of those slightly comic illnesses which are at once so undignified and so painful that a nice-minded world does its best to ignore their existence altogether, referring to them only under provocation and then with apology, but, like its more material brother, this boil on the neck of the spirit can hardly be forgotten either by the sufferer or anyone else in his vicinity. The malady is ludicrous, sad, excruciating and, above all, instantly diagnosable.

  Margery Allingham

  Brother, Nice, Apology

  Margery Allingham (1961). “Three Cases for Mr. Campion”

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• The nicest people fall in love indiscriminately ... while under the influence of that pre-eminently selfish lunacy they may make the most outrageous demands upon their friends with no other excuse than their painful need.

  Margery Allingham

  Falling In Love, Selfish, People

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

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• Can any thing, my good Sir, be more painful to a friendly mind than a necessity of communicating disagreeable intelligence? Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to determine, whether the relater or the receiver of evil tidings is most to be pitied.

  Fanny Burney

  Evil, Mind, Friendly

  Frances Burney, Fanny Burney (2015). “Complete Works of Frances Burney (Delphi Classics)”, p.24, Delphi Classics

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• You are quite, quite wrong if you think that ... I find your happiness painful. What matters is that happiness - the golden day - should exist in the world, not much to whom it comes. For all of us it is so transitory a thing, how could one not draw joy from its arrival?

  Winifred Holtby

  Happiness, Thinking, What Matters

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• every death diminishes us, but those that leave differences unresolved and things unsaid are the most painful of all.

  Marcia Muller

  Death, Differences, Unsaid

  Marcia Muller (2011). “The Shape of Dread”, p.171, AudioGO

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• [On her mother:] My relationship with her is close, painful, and skaky, and I always have to keep searching for a sign of love. Everything I do, I do to please her, to make her smile, to ward off her fury. This work is extremely exhausting.

  Tove Ditlevsen

  Mother, Make Her Smile, Signs Of Love

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• To what or whom does Lizzie Harris direct the imperative title of her startling first book, Stop Wanting? To the reader, the narrator, to desire itself, or to lack? This is a work of complexly, ambiguously layered narratives and identities. The opening poem asserts I want to say what happened / but am suspicious of stories. These lines become an ars poetica for the whole of this painful and exceptional collection in which the unspeakable is stubbornly confronted by a searing eloquence. This is a commanding debut.

  Lynn Emanuel

  Book, Desire, Identity

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• Cancer was the most terrifying, arduous, painful thing, but it was also a profound gift in the sense that I was holding so much in my body for so many years that was dark and terrifying which was preventing my coming back into myself.

  Eve Ensler

  Cancer, Dark, Years

  "Interview with Eve Ensler: In The Body of the World". Interview with Marianne Schnall, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 29, 2013.

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• Jealousy of other people's success is a sure sign that you feel unfulfilled in your own life. Seeing them enjoy the fruits of their labors is a painful reminder that you do not have what you want nor have you been actively seeking it.

  David J. Lieberman

  People, Want, Fruit

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• All solitary enjoyments, quickly fall, or become painful, so that, perhaps, no more insufferable misery can be conceived than that which must follow incommunicable privileges. Only imagine a human being condemned to perpetual youth while all around him decay and die. O, how sincerely would he call upon death for deliverance!

  James Sharp

  Fall, Decay, Privilege

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• I like that I've been through things, that when something happens, it resonates with something that already happened. It's not that things like loss are more or less painful. But they're deeper. I find that fascinating.

  Annette Bening

  Loss, Deeper, Happened

  "Biography / Personal Quotes".

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• Asking for forgiveness is just one of the most painful kind of experiences.

  Nick Nolte

  Asking, Kind, Just One

  "'Warrior' Star Nick Nolte Scores a Knockout in a Role Close to Home". Interview with Jenelle Riley, www.backstage.com. December 8, 2011.

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• Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I'd try to read my lessons, and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.

  James Earl Jones

  Laughter, Children, Fall

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• Providence has so ordained it, that only two women have a true interest in the happiness of a man--his own mother, and the mother of his children. Besides these two legitimate kinds of love, there is nothing between the two creatures except vain excitement, painful and vain delusion.

  Octave Feuillet

  Love, Mother, Children

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