Agony Quotes

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and to the young, it comes with bitterest agony because it takes them unawares. I have had experience enough to know what I say.

One often learns more from ten days of agony than ten years of contentment.

There is no greater agony than carrying the burden of an untold story.

Being ill like this combines shock – this time I will die – with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.

He had a theory, Walt did, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sics on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony.

It is difficult to not let the circumstances define you when everyone feels they know your personal struggles and agony.

This familiarity with a respected physician and my appreciation of his work, or the tragedy I experienced with the long, tormented agony and death of my mother might have influenced me in wanting to study medicine. It was not the case.

Religious life is an encounter with the living God. Sometimes that encounter is preceded by a kind of soul-searching agony that tries desperately not to hear, runs in the opposite direction, and frantically tries to reason itself out of answering the invitation.

I exist in agreement with all the weird chaos, destruction, and agony that is undoubtedly part of the texture of being alive.

Shakespeare had found language for the agony of living with one’s own mistakes. There were words for finding yourself isolated with your failures. Phrases for discovering that you were wrong, all, all wrong, wrong, wrong.

As for the stage fright, it never goes away. When I’m waiting in the wings to go on, it’s agony every single time but I stay focused and I know that once I’m on stage it’ll be fine; I’ll be in my happy little bubble.

My first husband Alec was a very good-looking man, but by the time he came out of the war, his sort of acting was no longer in demand – although he was a working-class boy, he was actually very good at suave handsome-men parts. I began to get successful when he was out of fashion; it was agony to watch him.

When your heart is broken, you feel like no freaking book in the world could help you because a book is not the person who you love, who doesn’t love you. However, books help, if only because they serve as something you can hold in your hand and throw across the room in agony.

Nine years old, I became the victim of war. I didn’t like that picture at all. I felt like, why he took my picture, when I was agony, naked, so ugly? I wished that picture wasn’t taken.

Since doing ‘Dating in the Dark’ and getting engaged, I’ve become the top agony aunt to all my friends. It’s brilliant.

When you’re not involved, other people’s unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it’s you, it ceases to be a comedy.

Watching people see your picture for the first time is such a public agony.

In the pain, the agony, and the heroic endeavors of life, we pass through a refiner’s fire, and the insignificant and the unimportant in our lives can melt away like dross and make our faith bright, intact, and strong.

I’m after joining the ‘This Morning’ family, so I’m going to be doing a bit of presenting. I’m going to be taking some phone calls, like an agony aunt type thing, I’m going to be taking on some challenges, they want me to do a skydive and drift a car and things.

Anyone who has to write an obituary for me one day will probably say, ‘She did absolute depths of agony really well.’ I’m not, however, an unhappy person.

Hospitals are often grim places: being stuck on a ward is excruciatingly boring, especially when you’re too ill to follow the plot of a book, and struggling to sleep through the guttural cries of people writhing in agony in adjacent beds.

The problem with my shoulders was something I inherited from my dad. The left one would pop out and then pop back in – absolute agony – during almost every game last season, so I had surgery to put it right last summer.

I was really embarrassed. And I asked why they took my picture when I was in such agony, and I’m the girl, in the moment that I was naked, burning, hopeless, crying – so ugly. And I asked why they took my picture at that that moment? I didn’t like it at all.

In 2001, my father finally succumbed to the bone cancer that had tortured him for seven years. His last weeks were a terrible, black icing on the cake, the agony, the slow twisting, thinning and snapping of his skeleton. Everything fell apart.

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.

The real reason why I don’t play in many big cash games is because I can’t stomach the thought of losing $100,000 or more in any given session. If I play three consecutive days at the Bellagio, I might win two days but lose big on the third. Really, who needs the agony of losing that much money? Not me.

If our society continues to support basic research on how living organisms function, it is likely that my great grandchildren will be spared the agony of losing family members to most types of cancer.

In course of time, religion came with its rites invoking the aid of good spirits which were even more powerful than the bad spirits, and thus for the time being tempered the agony of fears.

Terrorism thrives when the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ becomes so wide and when the ‘have nots’ reach the point of such desperation, pain, and agony that they have nothing to lose.

When people say there is a ‘reason’ for the depression, they insult the person who suffers, making it seem that those in agony are somehow at fault for not ‘cheering up.’ The fact is that those who suffer – and those who love them – are no more at fault for depression than a cancer patient is for a tumor.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

Not one has shown an iota of fear of death. They want to end this agony.

Our greatest hope comes from the knowledge that the Savior broke the bands of death. His victory came through His excruciating pain, suffering, and agony. He atoned for our sins if we repent.

Why does an iPhone cost only a couple hundred dollars? Because, as the stage performer Mike Daisey depicted in an arresting one-man show called ‘The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,’ Apple’s shiniest products are made by a shadowy company in China called Foxconn.

I choose to believe that we are addicted to the rush of being offended, the idea of it, rather than believing we have become a nation of emasculated children whose only defense against an abyss of emotional agony is a trigger warning.

Out of the agony and travail of economic America the Committee for Industrial Organization was born.

I love to get a massage but I’m quite a baby with it. I don’t like them too hard or anyone walking on me or anything. When it’s good, it’s the best thing ever. When it’s bad, it’s an hour of absolute agony.

Godly sorrow is a gift of the Spirit. It is a deep realization that our actions have offended our Father and our God. It is the sharp and keen awareness that our behavior caused the Savior, He who knew no sin, even the greatest of all, to endure agony and suffering.

Acting is happy agony.

By healing the internal issues that we can heal as a people, our children don’t have to suffer the same agony and pain that we put each other through.

Maybe ’13 Assassins’ is the mortal agony and death rattle of a Japanese film industry that has abandoned its creative talent.

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

But with my last film, Spider it was agony. The money was always disappearing, nobody got paid, it was very difficult – and it’s very distracting from the process of making the movie, of course. So I think things have been getting harder and harder.

I cannot give a single concert at which I do not play one piece after the other in an agony of terror because my memory threatens to fail me. This fear torments me for days beforehand.

I believe in joy, but I believe in the flip-side, agony.

I like a character that goes on a journey. A character that has had it all, lost it all, and is trying to get back to just being OK. I love the agony of defeat just as much as I love the thrill of victory.

I dread the promotion part of my job. It’s agony, especially compared to the private, at-home joy of writing. But being a grown-up means doing every part of the larger task.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights. Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves.

Does each of us need to suffer agony to understand how brutal our gridiron entertainment is? Surely, seeing is believing enough. So, what is football doing to us as a people? How do we explain an America that alone in the world so loves this savage sport?

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.

I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

It is women who bear the race in bloody agony. Suffering is a kind of horror. Blood is a kind of horror. Women are born with horror in their very bloodstream. It is a biological thing.

Many, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, try to provide family support while also maintaining a hard line about further fuelling terrorism and hostage-taking through ransom payments … Still, try telling that to a mother, or a father, or a husband or wife caught in the powerless agony of standing by.

People have quite a simple idea about ‘Anna Karenina.’ They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that.

The only time I’ve ever really felt envy is when I’ve watched people make music, which made my time living in the now-legendary Jazz Loft at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York a constant source of agony and ecstasy!

I think one of the things that is essential for happiness in life, or at least for non-sadness, is producing something. I guess that’s why I spend so much time and agony writing books. But working on carpentry is sort of like all the pleasure with none of the agony.

I love working if it’s with people who are capable of having a good time. People with a little bit of enjoyment of what they do. If it’s enormous pressure, and people feel that their lives are at stake, then it’s agony. So I try to pick projects where I feel like I’m going to avoid those traps.

Perhaps there is no agony worse than the tedium I experienced waiting for Something to Happen.

I got Osgood-Schlatter disease in my knees because my bones were growing quicker than my muscles, and it’s hard to get out on the training pitch; then, afterwards, you’re in agony every single time you play football.

During high school, I would purposely lose tennis and squash matches to escape the agony of anxiety that competitive situations would provoke in me.

Being depressed is not a beautiful tragedy – it’s hell and it’s agony. Posting photos of someone that you don’t have the consent for is illegal, and that’s a huge, huge issue. We need to be teaching consent, and that’s not just for photos.

Barack Obama winning the election had an instant impact on everything – race relations, national self-esteem, tolerance. It also had an instant affect on ‘Frost/Nixon.’ At a stroke, instead of being a piece that reminded people of the agony they were in, it became an uplifting message about the agony they had escaped.

We have been through this is biennial convulsion four or five different times over the past 10 or 12 years, and now it appears that we are going through this quiet agony all over again.

When a book comes out I wonder if one person will buy it. It’s agony. Of course it’s stupid, but it’s agony.

Every woman goes through a lot of agony before she decides in favour of her own happiness or that of her children.

What Must I Do to Be Saved? It is impossible to ask a more weighty Question! It is deplorable that we hear it asked with no more Frequency, with nor more Agony.

Stardom is just an uneasy seat on top of a tricky toboggan. Being a star is merely perching at the head of the downgrade. A competent featured player can last a lifetime. A star, a year or two. There’s all that agony of finding suitable stories, keeping in character, maintaining illusion.

I have written a raucous valentine to a poet’s dream and agony.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

Quite honestly, if we do manage to destroy the planet with our devil-may-care attitude to natural resources, I’d suggest we leave, as a dossier in our defence, the collected letters to agony aunts and uncles down the generations. It would certainly prove that we weren’t all bad!