Top 75 Agony Quotes

The entrepreneurial life is one of challenge, work, dedication, perseverance, exhilaration, agony, accomplishment, failure, sacrifice, control, powerlessness… but ultimately, extraordinary satisfaction.

Placing ‘amicable’ and ‘separation‘ together creates an oxymoron – we don’t usually decide to end a partnership until the very sight of our soon-to-be ex fills us with disgust, misery, agony or a combination of all three.

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.

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.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I’m a working writer; this is my job. So it matters to me that it’s good. I sweat over every word. I don’t just vomit this stuff up. It’s agony. The only thing that comes close is childbirth, except it’s like being in labor for eighteen months.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Politics is agony and ecstasy. The highs are amazing. The lows are excruciating.

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.

I have become this country‘s agony aunt as I am doling out relationship tips through various publications. I spotlight the problems and give solutions. It’s wonderful to know that so many people respond, it’s a responsibility.

I descend from both Philadelphia Quakers and Carolina colonists whose families were separated by the Revolutionary War. That helped give me insight into the agony of Patriots who, until the British government denied their claims, had always, like Ben Franklin himself, thought of themselves as free-born Englishmen.

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.

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.

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

I think ‘American Sniper’ is anti-war. It demonstrates the agony of the decision-making that goes on.

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.

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.

As to those who hoard gold and silver and spend it not in God’s path, give them, then, the tidings of a painful agony: on a day when these things shall be heated in hell-fire, and their foreheads, and their sides, and their backs shall be branded therewith.

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.

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.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

My goal would be to find a big, fat subject that would occupy me to the end of my life, and when I finish it, I’ll die. What’s agony is starting; I hate starting them. I just want to keep writing now and end when it ends.

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

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.

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.

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

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.

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.

If you love a character that gets killed, it’s agony.

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.

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.

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.

You know, my mom, who inspired me to be a novelist, I remember her reading ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy,’ about Michelangelo, and saying, ‘No mother would want that for her child, no matter how great the artist.’ I have my share of demons, but I am a gregarious sort.

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.

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.

The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite; no incident occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food.

I don’t reread my books after they’re published, because it’s agony.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

First of all, do any of you here think it’s a crime to help a suffering human end his agony? Any of you think it is? Say so right now. Well, then, what are we doing here?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 don’t think any human being who has a heart and soul would support efforts to profit off of people’s agony and pain if they’re trying to depart a country and fearing for their lives.

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

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.

Endometriosis is notoriously difficult to diagnose because the symptoms are perverse. A woman with mild endometriosis can be in an agony for days every month (or every day for every month); women with the severe kind can have hardly any pain at all, like me.

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.

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.

Acting is happy 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.

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

Writing is agony. I hate it.

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.

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