Prolonged Agony Quotes

It was a curious effect of pain that time became infinite, every instant of agony prolonged to the ultimate.

Love is nothing but the prolonged agony of waiting for it to end. The fear of losing the ones we love makes us do selfish and foolish and cruel things. The only freedom is freedom from love, and once your love is gone, it can be perfect, crystallized in your memory forever.

In the past, it was known as a "massive stroke," and you simply died. But improved resuscitation techniques have now prolonged and refined the agony.

However wretched I may feel, I want to prolong the agony as long as possible. All my patients are like that. And so are those who are morally diseased..

I have a strong urge to lie down and pretend this is not happening—like the old couple in Titanic.

In the past it was known as a 'massive stroke' and you simply died. But improved resuscitation techniques have now prolonged and refined the agony. You survive, but you survive with what is so aptly known as 'locked-in syndrome'.

This is not (as you have charged) to paint religion with a broad brush. I am very quick to distinguish gradations of bad ideas; some clearly have no consequences at all (or at least not yet); some put civilization itself in peril. The problem with dogmatism, however, is that one can never quite predict how terrible its costs will be. To use one of my favorite examples, consider the Christian dogma that human life begins at the moment of conception: On its face, this belief seems likely to only improve our world. After all, it is the very quintessence of a life-affirming doctrine. Enter embryonic stem-cell research. Suddenly, this “life begins at the moment of conception” business becomes the chief impediment to medical progress. Who would have thought that such an innocuous idea could unnecessarily prolong the agony of tens of millions of people? This is the problem with dogmatism, no matter how seemingly benign: it is unresponsive to reality. Dogmatism is a failure of cognition (as well as a commitment to such failure); it is the state of being closed to new evidence and new arguments. And this frame of mind is rightly despised in every area of culture, on every subject, except where it goes by the name of “religious faith.” In this guise, parading its most grotesque faults as virtues, it is granted a special dispensation, even in the pages of Nature.

We deceive ourselves if we believe we can hold on to old models as ideologies whimper off to a shallow grave in prolonged agony of people, institutions and cultures.

Love is nothing but the prolonged agony of waiting for it to end. The fear of losing the ones we love makes us do selfish and foolish and cruel things. The only freedom is freedom from love, and once your love is gone, it can be perfect, crystallized in your memory forever.

However wretched I may feel, I want to prolong the agony as long as possible.

Central Bank stimulus: easy money, a false cure that never solves the root causes, only suppresses symptoms, prolonging the agony.

Paul’s handwriting and held a few to the light. But why read them? It would only prolong the agony.

I believe that I know and share the many sorrows and sad circumstances that a human being can experience, but I do not cling to them, I do not prolong such moments of agony. They pass through me, like life itself, as a broad, eternal stream, they become part of that stream, and life continues. And as a result all my strength is preserved, does not become tagged onto futile sorrow or rebelliousness.

With all of us nursing you— Must you still prolong the agony of life? While I, having lost my hold on the tremendous Faith, Having divested myself of purity and suchlike humble items, Now walk in the sombre bluish world of the Asura. --- Silent Wail

Mrs. Linde: One must live, Doctor Rank. Rank: Yes, the general opinion seems to be that it is necessary. Nora: Look here, Doctor Rank - you know you want to live. Rank: Certainly. However wretched I may feel, I want to prolong the agony as long as possible.

I think there is also a confusion. We don’t really want grief, in its first agonies, to be prolonged: nobody could. But we want something else of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom with the thing itself. I wrote the other night that bereavement

After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race's agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages' sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?

I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pinpoint nucleus of being

Nora: Look here, Doctor Rank--you know you want to live. Rank: Certainly. However wretched I may feel, I want to prolong the agony as long as possible. All my patients are like that. And so are those who are morally diseased; one of them, and a bad case too, is at this very moment with Helmer-- Mrs. Linde: [sadly] Ah!

There were no houses, no palace, no constructions of any sort; it was rather an immense sea, though the waters were invisible and the shore had disappeared. In this city, seated far from all things, sad last dream lost among the shadows, while the day faded and sobbing rose gently in the perspective of a strange horizon, Anne, like something which could not be represented, no longer a human being but simply a being, marvelously a being, among the mayflies and the falling suns, with the agonizing atoms, doomed species, wounded illnesses, ascended the course of waters where obscure origins floundered. She alas had no means of knowing where she arrived, but when the prolonged echoes of this enormous night were melting together into a dreary and vague unconsciousness, searching and wailing a wail which was like the tragic destruction of something nonliving, empty entities awoke and, like monsters constantly exchanging their absence of shape for other absences of shape and taming silence by terrible reminiscences of silence, they went out in a mysterious agony.

Man doesn't realize his real purpose on earth so long as he rolls in comforts. It is absolutely true that adversity teaches a man a bitter lesson, toughens his fiber and moulds his character. In other words, an altogether new man is born out of adversity which helpfully destroys one's ego and makes one humble and selfless. Prolonged suffering opens the eyes to hate the things for which one craved before unduly, leading eventually even to a state of resignation. It then dawns on us that continued yearnings brings us intense agony. But the stoic mind is least perturbed by the vicissitudes of life. It is well within our efforts to conquer grief. It's simple. Develop an attitude of detachment even while remaining in the thick of terrestrial pleasures.

If love doesn’t work out, being married simply makes it much harder to disentangle two lives and prolongs the agony of a dysfunctional union. Love either works or it doesn’t – and marriage doesn’t help matters one iota either way. It is completely reasonable to suppose that the mature, modern and logical move is to sidestep marriage entirely, along with the obvious nonsense of a wedding.

Maybe the prolonged “festival of cruelty” going on in our literature and movies is an attempt to get rid of repressed anger by expressing it, acting it out symbolically. Kick everybody’s ass all the time! Torture the torturer! Describe every agony! Blow up everything over and over! Does this orgy of simulated or “virtual” violence relieve anger, or increase the leaden inward load of fear and pain that causes it? For me, the latter; it makes me sick and scares me. Anger that targets everything and everybody indiscriminately is the futile, infantile, psychotic rage of the man with an automatic rifle shooting preschoolers. I can’t see it as a way of life, even pretended life. You hear the anger in my tone? Anger indulged rouses anger. Yet anger suppressed breeds anger. What is the way to use anger to fuel something other than hurt, to direct it away from hatred, vengefulness, self-righteousness, and make it serve creation and compassion?

There, in my murder theater, young Roman gladiators offered up their lives for my amusement; and all the deaths that took place there not only had to overflow with blood but also had to be performed with all due ceremony. I delighted in all forms of capital punishment and all implements of execution. But I would allow no torture devices nor gallows, as they would not have provided a spectacle of outpouring blood. Nor did I like explosive weapons, such as pistols or guns. So far as possible I chose primitive and savage weapons—arrows, daggers, spears. And in order to prolong the agony, it was the belly that must be aimed at. The sacrificial victim must send up longdrawn- out, mournful, pathetic cries, making the hearer feel the unutterable loneliness of existence. Thereupon my joy of life, blazing up from some secret place deep within me, would finally give its own shout of exultation, answering the victim cry for cry. Was this not exactly similar to the joy ancient man found in the hunt?

It was the virtually angelic faces of the white children, all of them dressed in their Sunday clothes, as they posed, grinning and smiling, in a semicircle around Rubin Stacy’s dangling corpse. In that horrid indifference to human suffering lay the legacy of yet another generation of white children, who, in turn, would without conscience prolong the agony of an entire other race. “I could see my dead body lying in some place where they let white kids out of Sunday School to come and look at me, and rejoice,” Marshall said of the dream.

Miss Duday is absolutely right,” I told them. “I don’t mean that what she said is right—that I don’t know about—but she was right in saying that if you try to hold out and cover up you’ll just prolong the agony. It’ll all come out, don’t think it won’t, the bad with the good, and the quicker the better.” I looked at the president. “It wouldn’t hurt a bit, Mr. Brucker, if you followed Miss Duday’s example. Where does everybody stand, the way you see it? For instance, this conference you were having. Whose idea was it? What were you talking about? What were you saying?

Moses threw the spent cigarette butt to the ground. It bounced once then lay still. A lazy wisp of smoke drifted towards the reaching shadows. He pushed himself to his feet and brushed flakes of grit from the seat of his jeans. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he moved away from the pipe and began to negotiate a route down the alley. A rivulet of cans, wrappers and remnants of kebabs dotted the ground like flotsam; the waste of nights past, discarded by the nameless, faceless masses marking their territories with futile gestures. Oh, sure, the trash was still emptied these days – there were still garbage men around, but it just delayed the inevitable, prolonging the agony of a tired and dying world.

we deceive ourselves if we believe we can hold on to old models as "ideologies whimper off to a shallow grave in prolonged agony of people, institutions and cultures.

... au fur et à mesure que le progrès se développe, il faut payer de plus en plus cher des avantages de plus en plus minces. Si au début l'avion réduit la traversée de l'Atlantique de six jours à douze heures et le passage de l'hélice au réacteur à sept heures, pour un investissement bien plus lourd, Concorde ne la réduit (formalités et trajet jusqu'à l'aérodrome compris) que de sept à cinq heures. Si ce développement continue, on peut imaginer un Super-Concorde qui fera gagner cinq minutes en mobilisant toutes les ressources de la nation. De même pour le progrès par excellence, celui de la médecine. Au début il sauve à relativement peu de frais des millions de jeunes ou d'adultes de la variole puis de la tuberculose ; mais, poussé trop loin au prix d'un outillage qui ruine les hôpitaux, il ne sert plus qu'à prolonger l'agonie des mourants.

We read of Christians bound in chains of red-hot iron, while the stench of their half-consumed flesh rose in a suffocating cloud to heaven; of others who were torn to the very bone by, shells or hooks of iron; of holy virgins given over to the lust of the gladiator or to the mercies of the pander; of two hundred and twenty-seven converts sent on one occasion to the mines, each with the sinews of one leg severed by a red-hot iron, and with an eye scooped from its socket; of fires so slow that the victims writhed for hours in their agonies; of bodies torn limb from limb, or sprinkled with burning lead; of mingled salt and vinegar poured over the flesh that was bleeding from the rack; of tortures prolonged and varied through entire days.

Plague = Global Capitalism: a Darwinian force that cannot be stopped; it seeps into every nation, discarding the weak, selecting the strong. Orchid = Central Bank stimulus: easy money, a false cure that never solves the root causes, only suppresses symptoms, prolonging the agony. Current outbreak = Like another Global Financial Crisis: uncontainable, incurable, irreversible. Inevitable.

There was a pause, and she looked over at him, surprised that he stopped barking out orders long enough to draw a breath. “Don’t go,” he whispered. “Please don’t go, Kate.” The plea was so soft she barely heard it, but it sliced her to shreds. If Nurse Ackerman hadn’t been standing a few feet away, Kate would have wept. Instead, she swallowed hard so that the tears wouldn’t leak into her voice. “Hold it together, McDonough,” she said softly. Never had she seen a man keep a volcanic flood of emotion so tightly locked inside, yet any attempt to comfort him would merely prolong their agony. Trevor knew exactly what he needed to do to keep her with him. And it broke her heart to know he never would.

Father Pernin explained, “Things went well enough with me during the first three or four hours of this prolonged bath, owing in part, I suppose, to my being continually in motion, either throwing water on my own head or on that of my neighbors.  It was not so, however, with some of those who were standing near me, for their teeth were chattering and their limbs convulsively trembling. Reaction was setting in and the cold penetrating through their frames. Dreading that so long a sojourn in the water might be followed by severe cramps, perhaps death, I endeavored to ascend the bank a short distance, so as to ascertain the temperature, but my shoulders were scarcely out of the river, when a voice called to me: ‘Father, beware, you are on fire!’” The few who sought the warmth of the water closer to shore, where the fire heated the shallow depths, paid a high price, for the air there was filled with hot, poisonous gases that burned their lungs and their eyes.  By 11:00 p.m., the entire village was on fire, and no one was able to make any effort to stop the conflagration. In fact, the heat was so high that the water in bottoms of deep wells boiled until they were dry, sometimes killing the people who had sought refuge in their once cool depths, while others who had hidden in root cellars and basements found themselves in red-hot ovens instead.  Bodies in such places would not be found, replaced instead by skeletal remains curled in their final throes of agony.  Some people were last seen diving into a damp, underground culver to escape the flames, but those looking for them later would find only a pile of ashes.

I don’t believe in prolonging agonies,” said Oser. “Rather than watch you enspell the rest of my fleet man by man—while I still possess a fleet to offer—I understand the Dendarii Mercenaries are looking for recruits.” It

Starvation was a prolonged agony. The grain was gone, the wild herbs had all been eaten, even the bark had been stripped from the trees, and bird droppings, rats, and cotton batting were used to fill stomachs. In the kaolin clay fields,22 starving people chewed on the clay as they dug it. The corpses of the dead, famine victims seeking refuge from other villages, even one’s own family members, became food for the desperate.

It was the virtually angelic faces of the white children, all of them dressed in their Sunday clothes, as they posed, grinning and smiling, in a semicircle around Rubin Stacy’s dangling corpse. In that horrid indifference to human suffering lay the legacy of yet another generation of white children, who, in turn, would without conscience prolong the agony of an entire other race.

Vasily screamed. The gut-wrenching sound bounced off the walls behind us. It wasn’t a short burst of pain like the previous one. It went on and on. Warbling. The sound you would make if someone was carving out your eyeballs with a blunt knife. It climbed octave after octave to a soul-shattering soprano of prolonged agony—which, in the end, turned one-eighty into a crescendo of blistering rage.

Barre feels like exercise the way Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony.

But the endurance that barre builds is possibly more psychological than physical. What it’s really good at is getting you in shape for a hyper-accelerated capitalist life. It prepares you less for a half marathon than for a twelve-hour workday, or a week alone with a kid and no childcare, or an evening commute on an underfunded train. Barre feels like exercise the way Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony.

When the moment comes when your ship vanishes beneath your feet, far out at sea with no hope of rescue, what will you preference be? Will you look for the swimmer’s fate, a prolonged struggle against the inevitable, with the agony of exhaustion as your sole companion or will you wish for a quick end?

In its intention I amwell convinced that [the Eastern Penitentiary; solitary confinement] is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing. I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony that this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers...

He could no longer prolong the sweet agony.

Hayy had already realized that while He transcends all privations, every attribute of perfection can be applied to the Necessarily Existent. He also knew that what in him had allowed him to apprehend this Being was un- like bodies and would not decay as they did. From this he saw that, leaving the body at death, anyone with an identity like his own, capable of aware- ness such as he possessed, must undergo one of these three fates: If, while in command of the body, he has not known the Necessarily Existent, never confronted Him or heard of Him, then on leaving the body he will neither long for this Being nor mourn His loss. His bodily powers will go to ruin with the body, and thus make no more demands or miss the ob- jects of their cravings now that they are gone. This is the fate of all dumb animals—even those of human form. If, while in charge of the body, he has encountered this Being and learned of His goodness but turned away to follow his own passions, until death overtook [96] him in the midst of such a life, depriving him of the experience he has learned to long for, he will endure prolonged agony and infinite pain, either escaping the torture at last, after an immense struggle, to witness once again what he yearned for, or remaining forever in torment, depending on which direction he tended toward in his bodily life. If he knows the Necessarily Existent be- fore departing the body, and turns to Him with his whole being, fastens his thoughts on His goodness, beauty, and majesty, never turning away until death overtakes him, turned toward Him in the midst of actual experience, then on leaving the body, he will live on in infinite joy, bliss, and delight, happiness unbroken because his experience of the Neces- sarily Existent will be unbroken and no longer marred by the demands of the bodily powers for sensory things—which alongside this ecstasy are encumbrances, irritants and evils.

Of all the lynching photos Marshall had seen, though, it was the image of Rubin Stacy strung up by his neck on a Florida pine tree that haunted him most when he traveled at night into the South. It wasn’t the indentation of the rope that had cut into the flesh below the dead man’s chin, or even the bullet holes riddling his body, that caused Marshall, drenched now in sweat, to stir in his sleep. It was the virtually angelic faces of the white children, all of them dressed in their Sunday clothes, as they posed, grinning and smiling, in a semicircle around Rubin Stacy’s dangling corpse. In that horrid indifference to human suffering lay the legacy of yet another generation of white children, who, in turn, would without conscience prolong the agony of an entire other race.

mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony.

Oh, I don’t know about you, but I really hate chase scenes. It’s all just chase, chase, chase, up the staircase, down the staircase, bang, bang, bang, “over this way,” “No—that way,” under the desk, over the chair, and you know that either they’re going to get caught, or they’re not. So why prolong the agony? I’ll just flat out tell you. They made it to an old laundry chute.

Without any supplementary body support, the victim would die from muscular spasms and asphyxia in a very short time, certainly within two or three hours. . . . In order to prolong the agony, Roman executioners devised two instruments that would keep the victim alive on the cross for extended periods of time. One, known as a sedile, was a small seat attached to the front of the cross, about halfway down. This device provided some support for the victim’s body. . . . Both Erenaeus and Justin Martyr describe the cross of Jesus as having five extremities rather than four; the fifth was probably the sedile. To increase the victim’s suffering, the sedile was pointed, thus inflicting horrible pain.