Agony Aunt Quotes

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You will come across people who always affirm by everything you say, but at the hour of need, they simply disappear! Stay away from such people or simply don't fall for their promises.
K.Hari Kumar
Mary wondered how many years Aunt Patience had kept that knowledge to herself in an agony of silence. No one would ever know how greatly she had suffered. Wherever she should go in the future, the pain of that knowledge would go with her. It could never leave her alone.
Daphne du Maurier (Jamaica Inn)
How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth. You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity. I shall remember how you thrust me back—roughly and violently thrust me back—into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day; though I was in agony; though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, ‘Have mercy! Have mercy, Aunt Reed!’ And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me—knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions, this exact tale. People think you a good woman, but you are bad, hard-hearted. You are deceitful!
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
We’ve only just found each other! You cannot condemn me to live without you! Would you really go so soon, and leave me? Never to return, or if you did, only after an agony of waiting you should wish on no man! And how should I greet thee, after long years? With silence, and tears! My heart will break, yet brokenly live on!” “Stop quoting yourself!” Emily snapped. “You were! You were going to trap me here in Glass Town all for yourself! You’d steal my father and my aunt and my home away! You would make this whole beautiful world into a cage to hold me fast.” “No, Ellis—Emily! I would love you! I would be your husband!” “I’m ten!” “So?” shouted Lord Byron desperately. “I’m eleven! Emily, my darling, don’t be so dramatic.
Catherynne M. Valente (The Glass Town Game)
I am glad you are no relation of mine: I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.” “How dare you affirm that, Jane Eyre?” “How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth. You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity. I shall remember how you thrust me back—roughly and violently thrust me back—into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day; though I was in agony; though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, ‘Have mercy! Have mercy, Aunt Reed!’ And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me—knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions, this exact tale. People think you a good woman, but you are bad, hard-hearted. You are deceitful!
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
...the letters begin to cross vast spaces in slow sailing ships and everything becomes still more protracted and verbose, and there seems no end to the space and the leisure of those early nineteenth century days, and faiths are lost and the life of Hedley Vicars revives them; aunts catch cold but recover; cousins marry; there is the Irish famine and the Indian Mutiny, and both sisters remain, to their great, but silent grief, for in those days there were things that women hid like pearls in their breasts, without children to come after them. Louisa, dumped down in Ireland with Lord Waterford at the hunt all day, was often very lonely; but she stuck to her post, visited the poor, spoke words of comfort (‘I am sorry indeed to hear of Anthony Thompson's loss of mind, or rather of memory; if, however, he can understand sufficiently to trust solely in our Saviour, he has enough’) and sketched and sketched. Thousands of notebooks were filled with pen and ink drawings of an evening, and then the carpenter stretched sheets for her and she designed frescoes for schoolrooms, had live sheep into her bedroom, draped gamekeepers in blankets, painted Holy Families in abundance, until the great Watts exclaimed that here was Titian's peer and Raphael's master! At that Lady Waterford laughed (she had a generous, benignant sense of humour); and said that she was nothing but a sketcher; had scarcely had a lesson in her life—witness her angel's wings, scandalously unfinished. Moreover, there was her father's house for ever falling into the sea; she must shore it up; must entertain her friends; must fill her days with all sorts of charities, till her Lord came home from hunting, and then, at midnight often, she would sketch him with his knightly face half hidden in a bowl of soup, sitting with her notebook under a lamp beside him. Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and she would wave to him and think, each time, what if this should be the last? And so it was one morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran down-stairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, Mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where she had grasped it in her agony.
Virginia Woolf
I'm in sore straits, Jeeves.' 'I am sorry to hear that, sir.' 'You'll be sorrier when I explain further. Have you ever seen a garrison besieged by howling savages, with their ammunition down to the last box of cartridges, the water supply giving our and the United States Marines nowhere in sight?' 'Not to my recollection, sir.' 'Well, my position is roughly that of such a garrison, except that compared with me they're sitting pretty. Compared with me they haven't a thing to worry about.' 'You fill me with alarm, sir.' 'I bet I do, and I haven't even started yet. I will begin by saying that Miss Cook, to whom I'm engaged, is a lady for whom I have the utmost esteem and respect, but on certain matters we do not... what's the expression?' 'See eye to eye, sir?' 'That's right. And unfortunately those matters are the what-d'you-call-it of my whole policy. What is it that policies have?' 'I think the word for which you are groping, sir, may possibly be cornerstone.' 'Thank you, Jeeves. She disapproves of a variety of things which are the cornerstone of my policy. Marriage with her must inevitably mean that I shall have to cast them from my life, for she has a will of iron and will have no difficulty in making her husband jump through hoops and snap sugar off his nose. You get what I mean?' 'I do, sir. A very colourful image.' 'Cocktails, for instance, will be barred. She says they are bad for the liver. Have you noticed, by the way, how frightfully lax everything's getting now? In Queen Victoria's day a girl would never have dreamed of mentioning livers in mixed company.' 'Very true, sir. Tempora mutanter, nos et mutamur in illis.' 'That, however, is not the worst.' 'You horrify me, sir.' 'At a pinch I could do without cocktails. It would be agony, but we Woosters can rough it. But she says I must give up smoking.' 'This was indeed the most unkindest cut of all, sir.' 'Give up smoking, Jeeves!' 'Yes, sir. You will notice that I am shuddering.
P.G. Wodehouse (Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (Jeeves, #15))
I wanted to inflict exquisite agonies upon Aunt Patience; and had I been informed that a few weeks later, I would serve her the deepest cut imaginable, I am not certain that I would not have smiled. Morbidity
Lyndsay Faye (Jane Steele)
I. G.’s sufferings were positively transient compared to Hannah Allen’s. As a teenager in the 1650s, Allen went through a period of despair in which she was convinced she was damned. She found a more even keel when she married, but when her husband died in 1664, her spiritual agonies returned worse than ever. She considered suicide, repeatedly harmed herself, and once crawled into a roof void in order to starve to death (her resolve broke after three days). In the end the fog gradually lifted, which she ascribed to God’s mercy, her family’s love and the passage of time. What matters for us is that during her struggles, her family repeatedly tried to persuade her of God’s mercy, but she would have none of it. Once she heard a thunderclap, and told her aunt it was a message from God that she was damned. Surely not, said the aunt: God would not send a miracle to convince someone of their damnation. ‘We do not read of such a thing in all the Scripture.’ But Allen would not be reasoned with. ‘My Answer was, “Therefore my condition is unparalleled; there was never such a one [as me] since God made any Creature, either Angels or Men, nor never will be to the end of the world.”’ She begged friends not to pray for her, since ‘it would but sink me the deeper into Hell’. At first she worried that she had committed the ‘unpardonable sin’ mentioned in the Gospels, but soon she concluded that that sin was for amateurs and she had committed even worse: My Sins are so great, that if all the Sins of all the Devils and Damned in Hell, and all the Reprobates on Earth were comprehended in one man, mine are greater. There is no word comes so near the comprehension of the dreadfulness of my Condition; as that, I am the Monster of the Creation.
Alec Ryrie (Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt)
I think it improper to talk about evil all during a meal. It spoils the digestion." "Oh, but come," the Witch said, "is it only in youth that we can have the nerve to as, ourselves such serious questions?' "Well, I stick with my suggestion," said Avaric. "Evil isn't doing bad things, it's feeling bad about them afterward. There's no absolute value to behavior. First of all -" "Institutional inertia," claimed the Witch. "But whatever is the great attraction of absolute power anyway?" "That's why I say it's merely an affliction of the psyche, like vanity or greed," said a copper magnate. "And we all know vanity and greed can produce some pretty astounding results in human affairs, not all of them reprehensible." "It's an absence of good, that's all," said his paramour, an agony aunt for the Shiz informer. "The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace." "Pigspittle," said Avaric. "Evil is an early or primitive stage of moral development. All children are fiends by nature. The criminals among us are only those who didn't progress..." "I think it's a presence, not an absence," said an artist. "Evil's an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It's an other. It's not us." "Not even me?" said the Witch, playing the part more vigorously than she expected. "A self-confessed murderer?" "Oh go on with you," said the artist, "we all of us show ourselves in our best light. That's just normal vanity." "Evil isn't a thing, it's not a person, it's an attribute like beauty..." "It's a power, like wind..." "It's an infection..." "It's metaphysical, essentially: the corruptibility of creation -" "Blame it on the Unnamed God, then." "But did the Unnamed God create evil intentionally, or was it just a mistake in creation?" "it's not of air and eternity, evil isn't; it's of earth; it's physical, a disjointedness between our bodies and our souls. Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing on another pain, no more no less -" "I like pain, if I'm wearing calfskin chaps and have my wrists tied behind me -" "No, you're all wrong, our childhood religion had it right: Evil is moral at its heart - the selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend no to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience -" "Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.
Gregory Maguire (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years, #1))
I closed my eyes. “Gratitude is an excellent emotion. But it’s not a shield that holds off bullshit indefinitely.” I sounded like an agony aunt column in a teen magazine, telling women not to settle for less. “You just need to teach him.
Lauren Forsythe (The Fixer Upper)
I don’t think the Library could’ve come to life if it hadn’t found an accepting climate, a moral willingness to latch on to . . . We’ll skip over the widespread tendency of many citizens to confide their worries in newspaper agony aunts and talk radio hosts . . . It’s certain that from those media, things passed into a slimy subsoil, a drainage basin where anyone could tip anything they wanted, all the gunk they kept inside themselves. Have you ever seen something spawned from a garbage dump?” “To be honest, no, I haven’t,” I replied. “But isn’t it possible that the Library did reach one of its goals? To bring people closer together?” “Oh, it reached goals! Quite a lot of goals!” he said with a dash of sarcasm. “But certainly not the goals you’re talking about! Even those infamous contributions, those dialogues across the ether that were later purged by the Library, helped break that cycle of loneliness in which our citizens were confined. Or rather they helped to furnish the illusion of a relationship with the outside world: a dismal cop-out nourished and centralized by a scornful power bent only on keeping people in their state of continuous isolation. The inventors of the Library knew their trade well!
Giorgio De Maria (The Twenty Days of Turin)
He said as much to us, but Lizzy overheard him speak to our aunt of the problems he was having at the warehouse.
L.L. Diamond (Agony and Hope)
My aunts did not share in the housework, but they contributed greatly to all of the village gossip. They had fake faces, showing Mama kindness and calling her ate, “big sister,” but once they were alone, I heard the snide remarks they shot like an arrow in her direction. They had no shame. On that day of our deepest sorrow, the two of them snorted, elbowing each other while Mama writhed in agony on the floor,
Tess Uriza Holthe (When the Elephants Dance)
Ann Landers, the legendary agony aunt, laid out this shift in black and white: ‘At age 20, we worry about what others think of us. At age 40, we don’t care what they think of us. At age 60, we discover they haven’t been thinking of us at all.
Carl Honoré (Bolder)
Ali. You’re a great guy,” I attempt to reason. “You’re good-looking, sorted. A cool job, a great house. I know you have some regrets with your wife. But, you’ll find a good man soon, someone who loves you. I know it.” Someone who deserves to be with Ali. Jaysus. I sound like a bloody agony aunt albeit not a very eloquent one. He struggles to smile. “Is that your way of letting me down gently?” Fuck, the stupid fuck. “No, I don’t get to let you down. You understand? You book me, I’ll come, but I am not what you want long term.” I don’t even mind losing a client. I have enough regulars now. It bothers me to think I won’t get to spend time with him every week but what the fuck is someone like Ali doing with me? We finish our drinks in silence, an awkwardness growing between us. He gets the bill. When we are in the car, he gives me two hundred pounds. “I think I’ll drive you home.” His voice is low and uncertain. Fine. I direct him to a few doors down from my bedsit near the Arsenal football ground in North London. I am not prepared to reveal where I live, not even to Ali. He kisses me softly on the lips. With unshed tears in his eyes once again, he gazes at me, and touches my hair. “Thank you for everything, Liam. Goodbye
A. Zukowski (Liam for Hire (London Stories, #2))