Top 109 Agonizing Quotes & Sayings

There is nothing more alluring to man than freedom of conscience, but neither is there anything more agonizing.

Since reading 'Sophie's Choice,' I have been haunted by the agonizing idea of choosing between two children.

There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.

I don't live in New York or California. I'm in the grocery store, at the park with my kids, and I'm a normal person. I'm feeding my chickens and agonizing about my next book!

In how large a proportion of creatures is existence composed of one ruling passion, the most agonizing of all sensations--fear.

You can spend your time agonizing or organizing.

The searching for our selves is the most agonizing, isn't it? - and yet the most stimulating - and one simply cannot escape it.

I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession.

The pain of loss, moreover, however agonizing, however haunting in memory, quiets imperceptibly into acceptance as the currents of active living and of fresh emotions flow over it.

In the end, we all have to decide what we're willing to give up for payback. We all have parents or grandparents or children who will need us. Agonizing decisions sometimes. You have to weigh the memories and debt against what's being taken from you.

My whole life is a movie. It's just that there are no dissolves. I have to live every agonizing moment of it. My life needs editing.

One agonizing journey down the gauntlet of youth is enough for any man.

You can't blame anyone else, ... , no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.

Instead of agonizing about the things you can't change, why don't you try working on the things you can change

The endless, agonizing recycling of what might have been, soon followed by a litany of rationalizations and self-deceptions as you struggle to reconcile the void between the person you want to be and the person you fear you are.

The Soul unto itself Is an imperial friend, - Or the most agonizing Spy - An Enemy - could send -

...life is in Fate's hands now. You made your choice to stay... it's too late to change that, so stop agonizing over it.... You're making my scales itch. Saphira, from "Eragon

Even in the inevitable moments when all seems hopeless, men know that without hope they cannot really live, and in agonizing desperation they cry for the bread of hope.

I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

When the lives of the unborn are snuffed out, they often feel pain, pain that is long and agonizing.

I think after orbiting for a while and looking at the surface, I think the natural tendency is to want to experience it, to go down there and touch it. I started thinking about the Apollo astronauts who orbited the moon and didn't land - that must have been agonizing!

Derision is never so agonizing as when it pounces on the wanderings of misguided sensibility.

Prayer in its highest form is agonizing soul sweat.

The miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Shun security, I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isnt agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.

As you get older, you're not afraid of doubt. Doubt isn't running the show. You take out all the self-agonizing.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

Never before had a woman put such agonizing poetry on canvas as Frida did

I still have in my memory, almost agonizing impressions of a serious illness which I had when I was about eight years old. Those about me called it scarlet fever, and its very name seemed to have a diabolical quality.

The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented.

Theater people are always pining and agonizing because they're afraid that they'll be forgotten. And in America they're quite right. They will be.

It's the quintessential Greek sport: harmonious, competitive, agonizing, nautical, and above all, intelligent. It combines Odysseus's brains and brawn and love of the sea with the tactical precision of the Spartan pikeman.

I think people sleepwalk through their lives, and for me, I wanted to embrace everything. And that meant the agonizing pain and the transcendence, and you can't have one without the other.

As actors, we're always asked to portray and react to these extreme circumstances, otherwise it's not interesting. They are agonizing things to think about.

Many billions of years will elapse before the smallest, youngest stars complete their nuclear burning and shrink into white dwarfs. But with slow, agonizing finality perpetual night will surely fall.

I used to cry on planes. I don't anymore. It probably took almost a hundred agonizing flights to get there. Now, when I take off, a smile quivers on the corner of my lips.

Basically, I suffer from a genetic condition that causes my corneas to tear all the time. If it's happened to you even once, you know how agonizing it can be - for me, it was happening on a daily basis.

It was not surprising ....that [my father] should seldom have long seasons of agonizing prayer such as some have experienced, for His closeness to God was not limited to special seasons, but was a continuous and uninterrupted service.

No image, however accomplished, could have captured the agonizing poignancy of that moment. It was a moment to be lived, not framed, analysed or reduced in any way.

I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

There's still such chaos in me. Still so little firmly outlined. Just like my face: a formless mass that only takes on shape through the expression of the moment. The searching for our selves is the most agonizing

I know firsthand how agonizing waiting can be.

We have substituted organizing for agonizing and equipment for endowment.

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.

There is not so agonizing a feeling in the whole catalogue of human suffering as the first conviction that the heart of the being whom we most tenderly love is estranged from us.

Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.

To go through the agonizing process of learning how to walk again and write again and speak again makes you much more empathetic to people.

In grief, words are a poor consolation - silence and agonizing tears are all that is left the sufferer.

I am now about to make the great adventure. I cannot endure this agonizing pain any longer. It is all over my body. Neither can I face the impending blindness. I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.

The reason so many people do not pray is because of its cost. The cost is not so much in the sweat of agonizing supplication as in the daily fidelity to the life of prayer.

Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.

Parents should not agonize over anything a child does or fails to do if the child is perfectly capable of agonizing over it himself.

'Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. 'Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.'

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

The truth is that to enjoy acting one must be an exhibitionist at heart, one must revel in those exposures of the emotions which would be agonizing to a shy or reserved person. All the great actors have been and are exhibitionists.

I've lost seven friends to smoking-related lung cancer. Each death was a long, agonizing experience.

Abortion opponents say women seek abortions in haste and confusion. Pro-choicers reply: Abortion is the most difficult, agonizing decision a woman ever makes.