Torture Quotes - Page 37

• Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing... I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Betrayal, Sleep, Humanity

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1989). “Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited”

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• No matter where i go, i still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but i'm still the same incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that i can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as i'll come to defining myself.

  Haruki Murakami

  Change, Being Yourself, Thinking

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• If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.

  William James

  Style, Toil, Firsts

  "The Letters of William James".

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• As for those who protest that I am robbing people of the great comfort and consolation they gain from Christianity, I can only say that Christianity includes hell, eternal torture for the vast majority of humanity, for most of your relatives and friends. . . . If I could feel that I had robbed anybody of his faith in hell, I should not be ashamed or regretful.

  Rupert Hughes

  Relatives And Friends, People, Humanity

  Rupert Hughes (1940). “Why I Quit Going to Church: With Answers to Critics and Correspondents”

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• Through all the centuries of the worship of the mindless, whatever stagnation humanity chose to endure, whatever brutality to practice-it was only by the grace of the men who perceived that wheat must have water in order to grow, that stones laid in a curve will form an arch, that two and two make four, that love is not served by torture and life is not fed by destruction-only by the grace of those men did the rest of them learn to experience moments when they caught the spark of being human.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Love Is, Two

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• I had prepared myself for prison and torture as a soldier in peacetime prepares for the hardships of war. I had studied the lives of Christians who had faced similar pains and temptations to surrender and thought how I might adapt their experiences. Many who had not so prepared themselves were crushed by suffering, or deluded into saying what they should not.

  Richard Wurmbrand

  Christian, Pain, War

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• It's been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don't suppose anybody really understands yet.

  Jane Goodall

  Flower, Garden, Needs

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• Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.

  Poppy Z. Brite

  Good Night, Loneliness, Reflection

  "Lost souls". Book by Poppy Z. Brite, 1992.

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• Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is around us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to gaurd us; and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures, recognize our innocence, and God waits ony a speration of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Pain, Angel, Men

  "Jane Eyre". Book by Charlotte Bronte, October 16, 1847.

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• Why do I have to do this?" Gator demanded. Cuz you're such a pretty boy. Our photographer isn't going to fall for one of us as the tied up model," Nico pointed out. Dumbest plan you've ever come up with," Gator rumbled. "Offering myself all trussed up like a Christmas turkey to a serial killer who likes to torture people isn't too smart.

  Christine Feehan

  Smart, Fall, Boys

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• Expect to feel pleasure. Knowledge is sexy. Expect to feel pain. Knowledge is torture.

  Jeff Noon

  Sexy, Pain, Pleasure

  Jeff Noon (2012). “Vurt”, p.80, Pan Macmillan

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• Clarinet n. An instrument of torture operated by a person with cotton in his ears. There are two instruments worse than a clarinet – two clarinets.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Two, Ears, Cotton

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• Extreme torture is mute, and so we sat silent, petrified, like columns of marble buried under the sand of an earthquake. Neither wished to listen to the other because our heart-threads had become weak and even breathing would have broken them.

  Khalil Gibran

  Heart, Breathing, Earthquakes

  Khalil Gibran (2007). “Kahlil Gibran: Masterpieces”

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• - Might it console you to know that I expect nothing but torture from her return? That I regard you as a bird of paradise? She shook her head. - That my admiration for you is painfully strong? - I want Van – she cried – and not intangible admiration. - Intangible? You goose. You my gauge it, you may brush it once very lightly with the knuckles of you gloved hand. I said knuckles. I said once. That will do. I can't kiss you. Not even your burning face. Good-bye, pet. Tell Edmond to take a nap after he returns. I shall need him at two in the morning.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Morning, Strong, Kissing

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• Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.

  Dalai Lama

  Inspirational, Country, Peace

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• It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.

  George Orwell

  Pain, Struggle, Fighting

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison “The Complete Works of George Orwell: Nineteen eighty-four”

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• It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.

  Theodor Adorno

  Lying, Thinking, Ideas

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• Human beings can withstand a week without water, two weeks without food, many years of homelessness, but not loneliness. It is the worst of all tortures, the worst of all sufferings.

  Paulo Coelho

  Loneliness, Years, Two

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• Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Self, Greek, Soul

  Jonathan Franzen (2001). “The Corrections: A Novel”, p.312, Macmillan

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• What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.

  Karl A. Menninger

  Teacher, Appreciation, Retirement

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• Man is capable of greatness, love, nobility, compassion. Yet never forget that his capacity for evil is infinite. It is a sad truth, boy, that if you sit now and think of the worst tortures that could ever be inflicted on another human being, they will already have been practiced somewhere. If there is one sound that follows the march of humanity, it is the scream.

  David Gemmell

  Boys, Greatness, Men

  David Gemmell (2011). “Bloodstone”, p.150, Del Rey

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• It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she did. But I think she did not. I think that in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella.

  Charles Dickens

  Boys, Thinking, Years

  Charles Dickens (2009). “The Complete Works of Charles Dickens: Great Expectations”, p.343, Cosimo, Inc.

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• It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus.

  Roland Barthes

  Moving, Heart, Men

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• Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

  Thomas Mann

  Fate, Achievement, Triumph

  Thomas Mann (1961). “Stories of a lifetime”

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• Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Self, Thirst, Humans

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