Anguish Quotes

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“It is a grave injustice to a child or adult to insist that they stop crying. One can comfort a person who is crying which enables him to relax and makes further crying unnecessary; but to humiliate a crying child is to increase his pain, and augment his rigidity. We stop other people from crying because we cannot stand the sounds and movements of their bodies. It threatens our own rigidity. It induces similar feelings in ourselves which we dare not express and it evokes a resonance in our own bodies which we resist.”
― Alexander Lowen, The Voice of the Body

“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.”
― William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

“The — the prophecy . . . the prediction . . . Trelawney . . .”
“Ah, yes. How much did you relay to Lord Voldemort?”
“Everything — everything I heard! That is why — it is for that reason — he thinks it means Lily Evans!”
“The prophecy did not refer to a woman. It spoke of a boy born at the end of July —”
“You know what I mean! He thinks it means her son, he is going to hunt her down — kill them all —”
“If she means so much to you, surely Lord Voldemort will spare her? Could you not ask for mercy for the mother, in exchange for the son?”
“I have — I have asked him —”
“You disgust me.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“At the edge of the field Silva and Stefan witnessed heartrending images in greyscale as thousands of desperate refugees streamed down the road in leaden shades of melancholy.  This somber line of tired and dirty humans moved so close together that they jostled each other with each step; their random movements reminded Silva of corks bobbing in a slow moving stream.  They watched them pass from the side of the road, but eventually fell-in, trudging along with the suffering others, feeling safer in numbers, hoping for a destination worth finding.”
― John Payton Foden, Magenta

“...our souls may be consumed by shadows, but that doesn't mean we have to behave as monsters.”
― Emm Cole, The Short Life of Sparrows

“The thought of her gave me such a continual anguish that I could no more forget her than an aching tooth. It was involuntary, hopeless, compulsive. For years she had been the first thing I remembered when I woke up, the last thing that drifted through my mind as I went to sleep, and during the day she came to me obtrusively, obsessively, always with a painful shock.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Pessimism is not a prescription to escape the hornets’ nests of our anguish but a wrong tool to construct reliable steppingstones for the future. (''Happiness is blowing in the wind'')”
― Erik Pevernagie

“No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity.
- Through the Gates of the Silver Key”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

“I cry even harder, thinking of how it could have been, of how I thought it would be. For the first time, I want to give up, to die, because suddenly everything is too much and there is no solution in sight.”
― B.A. Paris, Behind Closed Doors

“We are sometimes dragged into a pit of unhappiness by someone else’s opinion that we do not look happy.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The problem with bearing fanatical witness to this kind of human depravity is that ambiguity and contradiction easily overwhelm the nuance required for understanding.  There seems to me that no logic applies to our time of terror, as if it were a dream.  There was no lapse of incoherence; none of it was incomprehensible; our shared pain was not sensible then and unexplainable afterwards.  It was actually all too real all the time, and we were simply trying to navigate an uncertain passage through it in search of safety.”
― John Payton Foden, Magenta

“This world’s anguish is no different
from the love we insist on holding back.”
― Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love

“He turned away; he threw himself on his face on the sofa. 'Oh, Jane! my hope - my love - my life!' broke in anguish from his lips.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“Stefan with his camera at the ready photographed a church and mosque and synagogue reduced to a cross and a crescent and a star, solitary monuments to what people once believed.  They silently passed the broken Olympic Stadium, now a graveyard without glory for the decomposing dead.”
― John Payton Foden, Magenta

“He opened his palm and saw that the watch remained. Still there. Still real.
Varen looked up at the figure that stood atop the fountain.
With a howl of rage, he made it burst apart.
He fell to his knees amid the wreckage and floating dust.
Crumpling into himself, he released a choking sob, knowing that he, too, belonged to the ruin.”
― Kelly Creagh, Enshadowed

“But whichever form it took it brought with it, in those moments of bitter anguish, such a desperate surge of hope that it was almost untouchable, and flitted away like a golden butterfly into the bright blue sky - beautiful, unreachable and completely transistent.”
― Tabitha Suzuma, A Note of Madness

“The world has long ceased to be the author of your anguish.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

“O all you host of heaven!O Earth! waht else?
And shall i couple hell? O Fie! Hold, hold, my heart
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memmory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter; yes, by heaven!”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“You think that the mental anguish you are experiencing is a permanent condition, but for the vast majority of people it is only a temporary state.

(But what if I’m special? What if I’m in the minority?)”
― Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

“What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day - very much such a sweetness as this - I struck my first whale - a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty - forty - forty years ago! - ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without - oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command! - when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before - and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare - fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul - when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts - away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow - wife? wife? - rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey - more a demon than a man! - aye, aye! what a forty years' fool - fool - old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God! - crack my heart! - stave my brain! - mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! - lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!”
― Herman Melville

“You're just setting yourself up for pain and anguish if you do something like that."

But pain and anguish were everywhere anyway. Might as well put them to good use.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, There Is No Long Distance Now

“No" she jerked back, stared up at him.
Her eyes were like thunderclouds. He'd never seen them like that. Shock and fear filled them. Her face was paper white. Her body shuddering.
"Don't you leave me!" She gripped his shirt and tried to shake him, tears falling from her eyes. "Don't you leave Noah."
His head lowered. He touched her lips with his and knew this woman held the best part of him. The memories of the husband he had been, the man he had been. He couldn't destroy that. He refuse to.
He pushed her to Jordan slowly, loath to let her go. To release her. Knowing that releasing her was the only way to save the memories she held.
"Don't you leave me!" She screamed the order, eyes blazing, her lips trembling as tears fell and hysteria threatened to overwhelm her. "If you leave me, Noah Blake, if you don't come back when this is over, don't bother coming back at all.
He touched her cheek. Ran his thumb over her lips. "You are the best part of me," he whispered. "Always remember that, Sabella. The very best part of me."
Before she could grab him, hold him to her, he pulled away, grabbed one of the rifles Mike had set on the table across the room. And left.”
― Lora Leigh, Wild Card”
― Lora Leigh, Wild Card

“But it's hard to explain, Mitch.
Now that I'm suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer than I ever did before..
..I feel their anguish as if it were my own.
I don't know any of these people.
But - how can I put this? - I'm almost... drawn to them.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“Letting myself fall wasn't easy. It wasn't hard either. It was a calling that I had to honour. I did honour. I took a plunge into my dark abyss. I faced my grief, my fear, my sadness, my loneliness, my anguish, myself. (Page 78)”
― Neena Verma, A Mother's Cry... A Mother's Celebration

“Wretched therefore as you may think it, I feel it no source of anguish to be associated with the blind, the afflicted, the infirm, and the mourners; since I may this hope that I am more immediately under the favour and protection of my dread Father”
― John Milton, Second Defense of the People of England

“Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“He suffers from akathisia. Although he knows he wouldn't go through with it, he frequently finds himself consumed by thoughts of suicide. He explained that it essentially comes with it; it's that simple. He thought that being overwhelmed and stretched too thin rendered him ineffective for himself and others. He claims it is the source of his most profound suffering and anguish, no matter how it appears on the surface. He conquers akathisia. As a result, he claims victory at every moment of his waking life.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Porcelain Utopia