Agony Quotes - Page 12

• Pay special attention to their agony so I might take some pleasure.

  Euripides

  Special, Attention, Might

  Euripides (2011). “The Complete Euripides: Volume V: Medea and Other Plays”, p.189, Oxford University Press

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• I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.

  Emile M. Cioran

  World, This World, Method

  "On the Heights of Despair". Book by Emile M. Cioran, 1934.

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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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• 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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• 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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• Writing a novel is agony.

  George Orwell

  Writing, Novel

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• The thorn is a bridge spanning the muddy depths of agony and sorrow so that one may on the other side dance to the drums of the rose of joy.

  Aberjhani

  Flower, Bridges, Rose

  Aberjhani (2012). “Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black”, p.93, Bright Skylark Book Products

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 lost track of day and night too. My time was divided into Dimitri and not-Dimitri. He was my world. When he wasn't there, the moments were agony.

  Richelle Mead

  Night, Track, World

  Richelle Mead (2009). “Blood Promise: A Vampire Academy Novel”, p.167, Penguin

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• Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.

  Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  Lying, Men, Silence

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• The song I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; only there is the agony of wishing in my heart….. I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house….. But the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house; I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Song, Heart, Voice

  Rabindranath Tagore, “Gitanjali”

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

  Lisa Kleypas

  Imagine, I Can

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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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• 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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• She remembered him smiling, and realized that time, that great old healer, had finally accomplished its work, and now, across the years, the face of love no longer stirred up agonies of grief and bitterness. Rather, one was left feeling simply grateful. For how unimaginably empty the past would be without him to remember.

  Rosamunde Pilcher

  Grief, Grateful, Past

  Rosamunde Pilcher (2013). “The Shell Seekers”, p.432, Macmillan

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• Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

  William S. Burroughs

  Children, Air, Flames

  "Naked Lunch". Book by William S. Burroughs, 1959.

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• A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Mother, Pain

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.36, GENERAL PRESS

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• my mind is a big hunk of irrevocable nothing which touch and taste and smell and hearing and sight keep hitting and chipping with sharp fatal tools in an agony of sensual chisels i perform squirms of chrome and ex -ecute strides of cobalt nevertheless i feel that i cleverly am being altered that i slightly am becoming something a little different, in fact myself hereupon helpless i utter lilac shrieks and scarlet bellowings

  e. e. cummings

  Taste And Smell, Sight, Sensual

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• we had such tremendous fun and much agony together for some years

  Charles Bukowski

  Fun, Years, Together

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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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• She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Her Beauty, Glances, Dazzling

  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.243, e-artnow

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