โ
Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.
โ
โ
Mae West
โ
I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about the toothache an about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
โ
โ
C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)
โ
I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it.
โ
โ
Mark Twain
โ
I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.
โ
โ
Milan Kundera (Immortality)
โ
I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
โ
โ
Milan Kundera (Immortality)
โ
The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
โ
โ
George Bernard Shaw
โ
I hear the word "tolerance" -- that some people are trying to teach people to be tolerant of gays. I'm not satisfied with that word. I am gay, and I am not seeking to be "tolerated." One tolerates a toothache, rush-hour traffic, an annoying neighbor with a cluttered yard. I am not a negative to be tolerated.
โ
โ
Chely Wright (Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer)
โ
Well I donโt know about you, but when I recall childhood pain, I donโt recall the pains of toothache, a thrashed backside, broken bones, stubbed toes, gashed knees or twisted ankles โ I recall the pains of loneliness, boredom, abandonment, humiliation, rejection and fear. Those are the pains on which I might and, still sometimes do, dwell, and those pains, almost without exception, were inflicted on me by other children and by myself.
โ
โ
Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot (Memoir, #1))
โ
A personโs toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on oneโs neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa. Think of that the next time you start a conversation.
โ
โ
Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends & Influence People)
โ
Then they gave me a loaf of bread and told me to walk through the forest and give some to anyone who asked. I did exactly what they told me, and the second beggar-woman was a fairy in disguise, but instead of saying that whenever I spoke, diamonds and roses would drop from my mouth, she said that since I was so kind, I would never have any problems with my teeth.โ
โReally? Did it work?โ
โWell, I havenโt had a toothache since I met her.โ
โIโd much rather have good teeth than have diamonds and roses drop out of my mouth whenever I said something
โ
โ
Patricia C. Wrede (Dealing with Dragons (Enchanted Forest Chronicles, #1))
โ
The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
โ
โ
G.K. Chesterton
โ
I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe!
โ
โ
Lawrence Durrell (Balthazar (The Alexandria Quartet, #2))
โ
What chest?โ I said, because everyone knows if you ignore persistent, throbbing pain then it goes away. Like toothache. And small children. And overdrafts.
โ
โ
Jodi Taylor (A Trail Through Time (The Chronicles of St Mary's, #4))
โ
Nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.
โ
โ
George Orwell
โ
Oh fuck. Itโs like period pain in my head. Itโs toothache of the brain.
โ
โ
Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y)
โ
You remind me of someone with a bad toothache who's hitting herself in the head with a hammer to distract herself from the pain in her mouth.
โ
โ
Susan Elizabeth Phillips (Fancy Pants (Wynette, Texas, #1))
โ
More than a catbird hates a cat,
Or a criminal hates a clue,
Or the Axis hates the United States,
That's how much I love you.
I love you more than a duck can swim,
And more than a grapefruit squirts,
I love you more than a gin rummy is a bore,
And more than a toothache hurts.
As a shipwrecked sailor hates the sea,
Or a juggler hates a shove,
As a hostess detests unexpected guests,
That's how much you I love.
I love you more than a wasp can sting,
And more than the subway jerks,
I love you as much as a beggar needs a crutch,
And more than a hangnail irks.
I swear to you by the stars above,
And below, if such there be,
As the High Court loathes perjurious oathes,
That's how you're loved by me.
โ
โ
Ogden Nash
โ
Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth.
โ
โ
Milan Kundera (Farewell Waltz)
โ
She's as funny as a toothache
โ
โ
Erma Bombeck
โ
My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache.
โ
โ
Alice Munro (Lives of Girls and Women)
โ
Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and it will be gone. Illusions, however, even when dead, continue to rot and stink within us. We cannot escape their taste and smell. We carry them around with us all the time.
โ
โ
Julian Barnes (The Noise of Time)
โ
I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive.
โ
โ
Milan Kundera (Immortality)
โ
Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestryโฆeach one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlingsโ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thiefโs laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.
Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web.
It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept...
..I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
โ
โ
China Miรฉville (Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1))
โ
Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Vanโs arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individualโs life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower," or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral "thing" might look or even actually become "real" or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid "fog." When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with "ruined towers" and "broken bridges.
โ
โ
Vladimir Nabokov (Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle)
โ
It seemed terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of Blackness.
โ
โ
Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1))
โ
I deserve my lollipop and I deserve my toothache.
โ
โ
Khayri R.R. Woulfe
โ
The acts of daily forbearance, the headache, or toothache, or heavy cold; the tiresome peculiarities of husband or wife, the broken glass...all of these sufferings, small as they are, if accepted lovingly, are most pleasing to God's Goodness.
โ
โ
Francis de Sales
โ
There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
โ
โ
H.L. Mencken
โ
What marriage doesn't involve uncountable accretions, a language of gestures, a sense of recognition sharp as a toothache? Unhappy, sure. What couple isn't unhappy, at least part of the time? But how can the divorce rate be, as they say, skyrocketing? How miserable would you have to get to be able to bear the actual separation, to go off and live your life so utterly unrecognized?
โ
โ
Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall)
โ
You say that love is nonsense.... I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
โ
โ
Henry Adams
โ
For there was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently.
โ
โ
William Shakespeare
โ
I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant it's probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves, it's the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick.
โ
โ
David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)
โ
His head pounded with such intensity, he feared it would explode. It was hard for him to control himself around her. It was in his nature to crave her blood, and the craving was like a toothache that wouldn't stop throbbing.
โ
โ
Angela Snyder (Vampire Next Door)
โ
The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.
โ
โ
Emil M. Cioran (Tears and Saints)
โ
Guilt is the toothache of the soul.
โ
โ
Tommy Cotton (Just Went Out for Milk)
โ
You get my idea. Nothing of "artistic" literature about it, just straight medicine, a universal panacea, a fetish in a sense: if you have a toothache go to your dentist and ask him if he is Dada.
โ
โ
Marcel Duchamp
โ
Gravelip, a young, slight footman with a pocked nose and large ears, obediently gave a smile like toothache. He seemed less than delighted to have outpaced his friends in the ugliness race.
โ
โ
Frances Hardinge (Fly Trap)
โ
It was not so much a feeling of being insulted, but an overwhelming pain for the people of my native land. We were not treated by our own government as proper human beings, and consequently some outsiders did not regard us as the same kind of humans as themselves. I thought of the old observation that Chinese lives were cheap, and one Englishman's amazement that his Chinese servant should find a toothache unbearable.
โ
โ
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
โ
So you are tired of your life, young man! All the more reason have you to live. Anyone can die. A murderer has moral force enough to jeer at his hangman. It is very easy to draw the last breath. It can be accomplished successfully by a child or a warrior. One pang of far less anguish than the toothache, and all is over. There is nothing heroic about it, I assure you! It is as common as going to bed; it is almost prosy. Life is heroism, if you like; but death is a mere cessation of business. And to make a rapid and rude exit off the stage before the prompter gives the sign is always, to say the least of it, ungraceful. Act the part out, no matter how bad the play. What say you?
โ
โ
Marie Corelli (A Romance of Two Worlds)
โ
Mrs Hendred did not like the people around her to be unhappy. Even the sight of a housemaid crying with the pain of the toothache made her feel low, for misery had no place in her comfortable existence; and when it obtruded itself on her notice it dimmed the warm sunshine in which she basked, and quite ruined her belief in a world where everyone was contented, and affluent, and cheerful.
โ
โ
Georgette Heyer (Venetia)
โ
And before you know it, the object disappears, arguments evaporate; no culprit is discovered, the offense ceases to be an offense and becomes a matter of fate, like the toothache which cannot be blamed on anyone, and the only thing that's left is, once again, to bang the wall as hard as you can.
โ
โ
Fyodor Dostoevsky
โ
I felt as I did once when Rose had very bad toothache - that it was callous of me to be so separate from the pain, that just being sorry for suffering people isn't enough.
โ
โ
Dodie Smith
โ
He falls on her lap and lies there quivering like a toothache
โ
โ
Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1))
โ
Telling a person with toothache that there are others with greater toothache than their own was no help at all.
โ
โ
Alexander McCall Smith (44 Scotland Street (44 Scotland Street, #1))
โ
A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.
โ
โ
T.S. Eliot
โ
Love was like a toothache.
โ
โ
Eiji Yoshikawa (Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era)
โ
I'm very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic' refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson.
"Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson?
No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.
โ
โ
Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently, #1))
โ
Despair, grief, and depression are not things that people can simply stop, any more than someone can will an end to a toothache or the pain of withdrawal. Acutely suicidal people have lost all sense of having power over their pain. To tell them to magically acquire will power is like asking a crippled person to race against a champion. It does not help them do the thing in question; it just makes them feel worse.
โ
โ
David L. Conroy (Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain)
โ
I pray thee, peace. I will be flesh and blood,
For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods
And made a push at chance and sufferance.
โ
โ
William Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing)
โ
I couldn't blame him for not believing me because it wasn't exactly true. The truth is that you /do/ care. Of course you do. And it hurts to hear people say those things about you. But the hurt changes, over time. At first, it's sharp and hot, like a fiery dagger stabbing you in the heart, but when you've heard the same insults over and over and over, the pain changes. It becomes a dull, throbbing ache -- like a toothache. A sort of background pain that you can ignore for a few minutes at a time, except when you're lying in bed at night, trying to sleep. That's when it really gets to you.
โ
โ
Cat Clarke (The Pants Project)
โ
I was going to be sweet. So damn sweet she'd get a toothache.
โ
โ
Lola Stark (Conflicted Love (Needle's Kiss, #2))
โ
the cure for a toothache was to slap the other side of your face.
โ
โ
Jim Shepard (The Book of Aron)
โ
One can forget even a raging toothache on Haystacks
โ
โ
Alfred Wainwright
โ
...one of our great spiritual guides, Theophan the Recluse, says: 'The awareness of God shall be with you as clearly as a toothache.
โ
โ
Anthony Bloom (Beginning to Pray)
โ
It hasnโt been easy, loving him; itโs like a dull throb, constant and persistent as a toothache, and thereโs no real cure for it.
โ
โ
Jennifer E. Smith (Windfall)
โ
My brother-in-lawโmay my life be as long as his was short!โhas died of the toothache. Of course, his health wasnโt too good before that.
โ
โ
Sholom Aleichem (The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor's Son)
โ
And then she cries some more, and finally she finds sleep, as one always eventually finds sleep, after toothache and after childbirth, after a fight and after a rare joy.
โ
โ
Hans Fallada (Little Man, What Now?)
โ
When weโre having a toothache, we know that not having a toothache is a wonderful thing. Yet when we donโt have a toothache, weโre still not happy. A non-toothache is very pleasant.
โ
โ
Thich Nhat Hanh (Making Space: Creating a Home Meditation Practice)
โ
When you have a toothache, you call your dentist and ask for an emergency appointment to relieve your pain. You know deeply at that point that not having a toothache is happiness. Yet later, when you donโt have a toothache, you forget and do not treasure your non-toothache.
โ
โ
Thich Nhat Hanh (Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life)
โ
Guilt, Ameline discovered, was a terrible, unruly think, like toothache - dull nagging, persistent, never far from attention. Just when you got used to its rumbling, ruminating presence, it would lash out, stike you down, stio you dead in your tracks. The worst thing was, it was entirely unpredicatable.
โ
โ
Lesley Lokko (Bitter Chocolate)
โ
The flatness was stultifying. She wouldnโt say this aloud because in light of other worries it seemed self-indulgent, but Willa missed mountains. Missed them hard, with the psychic equivalent of a toothache.
โ
โ
Barbara Kingsolver (Unsheltered)
โ
Few things are more difficult in this world for a young man than the securing of an introduction to the right girl under just the right conditions. When he is looking his best he is presented to her in the midst of a crowd, and is swept away after a rapid hand-shake. When there is no crowd he has toothache, or the sun has just begun to make his nose peel. Thousands of young lives have been saddened in this manner.
โ
โ
P.G. Wodehouse
โ
Animals are sad as a rule," she went on. "And when a man is sadโI don't mean because he has a toothache or has lost some money, but because he sees, for once in a way, how it all is with life and everything, and is sad in earnestโhe always looks a little like an animal. He looks not only sad, but more right and more beautiful than usual. That's how it is, and that's how you looked, Steppenwolf, when I saw you for the first time.
โ
โ
Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf)
โ
they says he was not good for you.i said"whenever i suffer from stomach ache i eat noodles.when i have toothache i eat chocolates.when i have throat pain,i drink pretty cold icy drink.it is also not good for me,but i am alive
โ
โ
urooj bukhari
โ
If we believed that those agencies were appointed by a benevolent Providence as the means of accomplishing wise purposes which could not be compassed if they did not exist, then everything done by mankind which tends to chain up these natural agencies or to restrict their mischievous operation, from draining a pestilential marsh down to curing the toothache, or putting up an umbrella, ought to be accounted impious ; which assuredly nobody does account them, notwithstanding an undercurrent of sentiment setting in that direction which is occasionally perceptible.
โ
โ
John Stuart Mill (Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of Religion, Theism)
โ
Philosophy is said to console a man under disappointment, although Shakespeare asserts that it is no remedy for a toothache; so Mr Easy turned philosopher, the very best profession a man can take up who is fit for nothing else.
โ
โ
Frederick Marryat (Mr. Midshipman Easy)
โ
Iโve never been in love, not until her, and I never want to be againโit hurts. Love hurts in the way a toothache hurts: you canโt ignore it, and itโs always there throbbing and aching, reminding you ... of what? I think desperately. What is it reminding you of? That youโre human. That you have weakness. That your weakness is another person.
โ
โ
Tarryn Fisher (F*ck Marriage)
โ
That is how I felt, watching the musicians play. I couldnโt stand it. The everyday lack of my music was like a toothache I had grown used to. I could live with it. But having what I wanted dangled in front of me was more than I could bear.
โ
โ
Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1))
โ
ู
ูู
ุง ูุงูุช ููุชู ุ ูุฅู ุชุณูุณ ุงูุฃุณูุงู ููุฌุนู
โ
โ
ุฃููุณ ู
ูุตูุฑ (ูุงููุง)
โ
One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped - it was his only hope now - that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying , would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely.
โ
โ
Julian Barnes
โ
Whether we are considering a toothache, a tumor, a relational bind, a technical problem, crime, or the economy, most individuals and most social systems, irrespective of their culture, gender, or ethnic background, will โnaturallyโ choose or revert to chronic conditions of bearable pain rather than face the temporarily more intense anguish of acute conditions that are the gateway to becoming free.
โ
โ
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
โ
we are always personally under an agitating pressure and cloud of anxiety.โ And Olmsted himself had grown increasingly susceptible to illness. He was sixty-eight years old and partly lame from a decades-old carriage accident that had left one leg an inch shorter than the other. He was prone to lengthy bouts of depression. His teeth hurt. He had chronic insomnia and facial neuralgia. A mysterious roaring in his ears at times made it difficult for him to attend to conversation. He was still full of creative steam, still constantly on the move, but overnight train journeys invariably laid him low. Even in his own bed his nights often became sleepless horrors laced with toothache.
โ
โ
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
โ
Lovecraft says he knows about tentacles
but that motherfucker never bedded a girl from
West Chester
and survived
She was a toothache
that one
and she tasted like crack
the best thing about her
was if I was ever hungry
I could always make a meal out of whatever
was making rest at the corners of her mouth
I can't remember her name
as is the case with most of them
then again I can't remember
how many donuts I ate this morning
or how many beers I'll drink tonight,
tomorrow
โ
โ
Dave Matthes (Wanderlust and the Whiskey Bottle Parallel: Poems and Stories)
โ
You could buy individual boxes of detergent and fabric softener, even bleach, and there was nothing that made me grind my teeth with pleasure more than a real thing shrunken down small. The first time my dad showed me a toothache kit from a box of equipment from the Korean War and I saw the tiny cotton balls (the size of very small ball bearings), I nearly swooned. "Let me hold one of those," I said, almost mad at him. He gave it to me with a tiny pair of tweezers. I let it float in my palm a moment and then made him take it back. Miniaturization was a gift from God, no doubt about it, and there it was, right in a vending machine in the place we used to do our laundry.
โ
โ
Haven Kimmel (She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana)
โ
All of lifeโs unpleasant experiences โ when we make fools of ourselves, act thoughtlessly, or lapse in our observance of some virtue โ should be regarded as mere external accidents which canโt affect the substance of our soul. We should see them as toothaches or calluses of life, as things that bother us but remain outside us (even though theyโre ours), or that only our organic existence need consider and our vital functions worry about.
When we achieve this attitude, which in essence is that of the mystics, weโre protected not only from the world but also from ourselves, for weโve conquered what is foreign in us, contrary and external to us, and therefore our enemy.
Horace said* that the just man will remain undaunted, even if the world crumbles all around him. Although the image is absurd, the point is valid. Even if what we pretend to be (because we coexist with others) crumbles around us, we should remain undaunted โ not because weโre just, but because weโre ourselves, and to be ourselves means having nothing to do with external things that crumble, even if they crumble right on top of what for them we are.
For superior men, life should, life should be a dream that spurns confrontations.
โ
โ
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
โ
I am telling this story as if it were mine.
I am harvesting this splinter.
This embarrassing toothache.
I am dragging my fatherโs temper out of storage by the wrist.
โ
โ
Sierra DeMulder
โ
HA, HA, HA! Next youโll be finding pleasure in a toothache!โ you will exclaim, laughing. โAnd why not? There is also pleasure in a toothache,โ I will answer. I had a toothache for a whole month; I know there is. Here, of course, one does not remain silently angry, one moans; but these are not straightforward moans, they are crafty moans, and the craftiness is the whole point.
โ
โ
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)
โ
The refugee card was and continues to be an insult to remind us of the little that refugees get in comparison with what they have really lost. Would a bag of flour compensate for the farmland they once had? Would a bag of sugar make up for the bitter misery those people have always felt after losing their sweet homes to dwell in refugee camps? Would the two bottles of oil make them forget their olive trees, which had been mercilessly uprooted as they themselves were? Or maybe it is simply a declaration that they are temporary refugees who once had the land which, as long as this card is still in their hands, would still be waiting for them to return. Only a shot of sharp pain brought me back to the present.
โ
โ
Refaat Alareer (Gaza Writes Back)
โ
The one good thing about pain is that while you can remember it, you can't recreate it; you can't truly think it into recurring. You can rate it in retrospectโa toothache vs. banging your funny boneโbut it doesn't work the way words or music do. You can hear things in your head, voices, music, over and over. You can close your eyes and visualize a place. But pain, the experience of it, either is or isn't. You are in pain, or you arenโt.
โ
โ
Seth Kaufman (The King of Pain: A Novel With Stories)
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There are thousands of good reasons why magic doesnโt rule the world. Theyโre called witches and wizards, Magrat reflected, as she followed the other two back to the road. It was probably some wonderful organization on the part of Nature to protect itself. It saw to it that everyone with any magical talent was about as ready to cooperate as a she-bear with toothache, so all that dangerous power was safely dissipated as random bickering and rivalry.
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Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters (Discworld, #6))
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That night when I went to bed, I laid there in the dark and pictured a clothesline full of somebody's else's troubles. I knew for sure there were a lot of them I'd rather pluck off of that line than mine. I imagined what the other troubles might be. There would probably be toothaches and failed math tests. Lost cats and ugly hair. Cheating boyfriends and broken-down cars. But none of those could hold a candle to my troubles, weighing down that clothesline like a sack full of bricks.
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Barbara O'Connor (Wish)
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Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks that happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wiser course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.
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George Orwell (All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays)
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But there are still plenty of people who will tell you that the most evil thing about Karl Marx was what he said about religion. He said it was the opium of the lower classes, as though he thought religion was bad for people, and he wanted to get rid of it. But when Marx said that, back in the 1840s, his use of the word โopiumโ wasnโt simply metaphorical. Back then real opium was the only painkiller available, for toothaches or cancer of the throat, or whatever. He himself had used it. As a sincere friend of the downtrodden, he was saying he was glad they had something which could ease their pain at least a little bit, which was religion. He liked religion for doing that, and certainly didnโt want to abolish it. OK? He might have said today as I say tonight, โReligion can be Tylenol for a lot of unhappy people, and Iโm so glad it works.
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Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Armageddon in Retrospect)
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On his way back through the plane Richard had seen women crying-- three women, four women. And he realized that there always were these women on planes, crying, with makeup in meltdown, folded over in the window seat or candidly hideous in the aisle, clutching Kleenex. Before, if he assumed anything, he assumed they were crying about boyfriends or husbands (partings or sunderings), or crying (who cared?) from toothache or curse pains or fear of flying. But now he was forty, and he knew.
Women on planes were crying because someone they love or loved is dead or dying. Every plane has them.
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Martin Amis (The Information)
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This is the way it ought to be!" said the Little Russian, returning. "Because, mark you, mother dear, a new heart is coming into existence, a new heart is growing up in life. All hearts are smitten in the conflict of interests, all are consumed with a blind greed, eaten up with envy, stricken, wounded, and dripping with filth, falsehood, and cowardice. All people are sick; they are afraid to live; they wander about as in a mist. Everyone feels only his own toothache. But lo, and behold! Here is a Man coming and illuminating life with the light of reason, and he shouts: 'Oh, ho! you straying roaches! It's time, high time, for you to understand that all your interests are one, that everyone has the need to live, everyone has the desire to grow!' The Man who shouts this is alone, and therefore he cries aloud; he needs comrades, he feels dreary in his loneliness, dreary and cold. And at his call the stanch hearts unite into one great, strong heart, deep and sensitive as a silver bell not yet cast. And hark! This bell rings forth the message: 'Men of all countries, unite into one family! Love is the mother of life, not hate!' My brothers! I hear this message sounding through the world!
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Maxim Gorky (Mother)
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What odd things really, when one collects them all together, one DOES remember out of one's life. One remembers happy occasions, one remembers- very vividly, I think- fear. Oddly enough pain and unhappiness are hard to recapture. I do not mean exactly that I do not remember them- I can, but without FEELING them. Where they are concerned I am in the first stage. I say, 'There was Agatha being terribly unhappy. There was Agatha having toothache.' But I don't FEEL the unhappiness or the toothache. On the other hand, one day the sudden smell of lime trees brings the past back, and suddenly I remember a day spent near the lime trees, the pleasure with which I threw myself down on the ground, the smell of hot grass, and the suddenly lovely feeling of summer; a cedar tree nearby and the river beyond...The feeling of being at one with life. It comes back in that moment. Not only a remembered thing of the mind but the feeling itself as well.
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Agatha Christie (Agatha Christie: An Autobiography)
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You look into it , the object flies off into air , your reasons evaporate , the criminal is not to be found , the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom , something like the toothache , for which no one is to blame , and consequently there is only the same outlet left again โ that is , to beat the wall as hard as you can . So you give it up with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause . And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings , blindly , without reflection , without a primary cause , repelling consciousness at least for a time ; hate or love , if only not to sit with your hands folded . The day after tomorrow , at the latest , you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself . Result : a soap - bubble and inertia . Oh , gentlemen , do you know , perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man , only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything .
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)
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Just as the god Jupiter defended Rome and Huitzilopochtli protected the Aztec Empire, so every Christian kingdom had its own patron saint who helped it overcome difficulties and win wars. England was protected by St George, Scotland by St Andrew, Hungary by St Stephen, and France had St Martin. Cities and towns, professions, and even diseases โ each had their own saint. The city of Milan had St Ambrose, while St Mark watched over Venice. St Florian protected chimney cleaners, whereas St Mathew lent a hand to tax collectors in distress. If you suffered from headaches you had to pray to St Agathius, but if from toothaches, then St Apollonia was a much better audience.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead)
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The term โholisticโ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson. โLet me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson? โNo, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.
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Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently #1))
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Well O. the thing's sick. It's even sicker than 4. Was it 4? The one you said that Loach inspired, where you'd supposedly just that very day dropped out of Jesuit seminary after umpteen years of disciplined celibacy because of carno-spiritual yearnings you hadn't even been quite in touch with as carno-spiritual in nature until you just now this very moment laid eyes on the Subject? With the breviary and rented collar?โ
'That was 4, yes. 4's pretty much of a gynecopia also, but within a kind of narrower demographic psychological range of potential Subjects. Notice I never said 4 was no-miss.โ
'Well you must be a very proud young man. This is even sicker. The fake ring and fictional spouse. It's like you're inventing somebody you love just to seduce somebody else into helping you betray her. What's it like. It's like suborning somebody into helping you desecrate a tomb they don't know is empty.โ
'This is what I get for passing down priceless fruits of hard experience to somebody who still thinks it's exciting to shave.โ
'I ought to go. I have a blackhead I have to see to.โ
'You haven't asked why I called right back. Why I'm calling during high-toll hours.โ
'Plus I feel some kind of toothache starting, and it's the weekend, and I want to see Schacht before Mrs. Clarke's confectionery day in the sun tomorrow. Plus I'm naked.
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David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
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You're conversant with reality only in theory. And why is it you despise suffering, why don't you ever feel surprise? There's a very simple reason. The vanity of vanities, externals, internals, despising life, suffering and death, the meaning of existence, true happiness...it's the philosophy best suited to a typical lackadaisical Russian. Say you see a peasant beating his wife. Why meddle? Let him beat away, they're both going to die anyway sooner or later. Besides, that peasant is degrading himself with his blows, not the person he's hitting. Getting drunk is stupid, it's not respectable, but you die if you drink and you die if you don't. A peasant woman comes along with toothache. So what? Pain is just the impression of feeling pain, besides which no one one can get through life without sickness and we are all going to die. So let that woman clear out and leave me to my meditations and vodka.
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Anton Chekhov (Ward No. 6 and Other Stories)
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One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation. As it spreads, it banishes all awareness of physical discomfort โ youthโs toothache as well as the neuralgia of old age. The beauty of it is that, while completely intelligible (as if it were connected with a known gland or led to an expected climax), it has neither source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened, an auroral wind has blown, every exposed nerve has tingled. Presently all dissolves: the familiar worries are back and the eyebrow redescribes its arc
of pain; but the artist knows he is ready.
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Vladimir Nabokov
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Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you cry, with a laugh.
We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all!
"Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more. Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown, end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure. As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache.
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Notes from Underground)
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When you eagerly give your life in submission to the Lord, He takes over and everything begins to unfold, and from there on He begins to empower and change you. C. S. Lewis has a marvelous illustration of this: When I was a child I often had a toothache, and I knew that if I went to my mother she would give me something which would deaden the pain for that night and let me get sleep. But I did not go to my motherโat least, not till the pain became very bad. And the reason I did not go was this. I did not doubt she would give me the aspirin; but I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to the dentist next morning. I could not get what I wanted out of her without getting something more, which I did not want. I wanted immediate relief from pain; but I could not get it without having my teeth set permanently right. And I knew those dentists; I knew they started fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth which had not yet begun to ache. They would not let sleeping dogs lie.3 Our Lord is like that dentist. If you give Him one problem to fix, Heโll fix them all. Thatโs why He warned people to count the cost before becoming Christians. He will make you perfectโnothing less. That process begins the moment you trust Him and continues until the moment you arrive in heaven and are instantly glorified. When you put yourself in His hands, thatโs what youโre in for, whatever it takes.
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John F. MacArthur Jr. (Hard to Believe: The High Cost and Infinite Value of Following Jesus)
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Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.
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G.K. Chesterton (The Defendant)
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Yet, we are not Skinner's rats. Even Skinner's rats were not Skinner's rats: the patterns of addictive behavior displayed by rats in the Skinner Box were only displayed by rats in isolation, outside of their normal sociable habitat. For human beings, addictions have subjective meanings, as does depression. Marcus Gilroy-Ware's study of social media suggests that what we encounter in our feeds is hedonic stimulation, various moods and sources of arousal- from outrage porn to food porn to porn- which enable us to manage our emotions. In addition that, however, it's also true that we can become attached to the miseries of online life, a state of perpetual outrage and antagonism. There is a sense in which our online avatar resembles a 'virtual tooth' in the sense described by the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. In the grip of a toothache, a common reflex is to make a fist so tight that the fingernails bite into the skin. This 'confuses' and 'bisects' the pain by creating a 'virtual center of excitation,' a virtual tooth that seems to draw blood and nervous energy away from the real center of pain.
If we are in pain, this suggests, self-harming can be a way of displacing it so that it appears lessened- event though the pain hasn't really been reduced, and we still have a toothache. So if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us- or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image- that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others. The global rise in depression- currently the world's most widespread illness, having risen some 18 per cent since 2005- is worsened for many people by the social industry. There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn't invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.
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Richard Seymour (The Twittering Machine)
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And in many other cities which for him were all identical - hotel, taxi. a hall in a cafe or club. These cities, these regular rows of blurry lamps marching past and suddenly advancing and encircling a stone horse in a square, were as much a habitual and unnecessary integument as the wooden pieces and the black and white board, and he accepted this external life as something inevitable but completely uninteresting. Similarly, in his way of dressing and in the manner of his everyday life, he was prompted by extremely dim motives, stopping to think about nothing, rarely changing his linens, automatically winding his watch at night, shaving with the same safety blade until it ceased to cut altogether, and feeding haphazardly and plainly. From some kind of melancholy inertia he continued to order at dinner the same mineral water, which effervesced slightly in the sinuses and evoked a tickling sensation in the corner of his eyes, like tears for the vanished Valentinov. Only rarely did he notice his own existence, when for example lack of breath - the revenge of a heavy body - forced him to halt with open mouth on a staircase, or when he had a toothache, or when at a late hour during his chess cogitations an outstretched hand shaking a matchbox failed to evoke in it the rattle of matches, and the cigarette that seemed to have been thrust unnoticed into his mouth by someone else suddenly grew and asserted itself, solid, soulless, and static, and his whole life became concentrated in the single desire to smoke, although goodness knows how many cigarettes had already been unconsciously consumed, In general, life around him was so opaque and demanded so little effort of him that it sometimes seemed someone - a mysterious, invisible manager - continued to take him from tournament to tournament; but occasionally there were odd moments, such quietness all around, and when you looked out into the corridor - shoes, shoes, shoes, standing at all the door, and in your ears the roar of loneliness.
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Vladimir Nabokov (The Luzhin Defense)
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โฆ and one day, after Mahlke had learned to swim, we were lying in the grass, in the Schlagball field. I ought to have gone to the dentist, but they wouldn't let me because I was hard to replace on the team. My tooth was howling. A cat sauntered diagonally across the field and no one threw anything at it. A few of the boys were chewing or plucking at blades of grass. The cat belonged to the caretaker and was black. Hotten Sonntag rubbed his bat with a woolen stocking. My tooth marked time. The tournament had been going on for two hours. We had lost hands down and were waiting for the return game. It was a young cat, but no kitten. In the stadium, handball goals were being made thick and fast on both sides. My tooth kept saying one word, over and over again. On the cinder track the sprinters were practicing starts or limbering up. The cat meandered about. A trimotored plane crept across the sky, slow and loud, but couldn't drown out my tooth. Through the stalks of grass the caretaker's black cat showed a white bib. Mahlke was asleep. The wind was from the east, and the crematorium between the United Cemeteries and the Engineering School was operating. Mr. Mallenbrandt, the gym teacher, blew his whistle: Change sides. The cat practiced. Mahlke was asleep or seemed to be. I was next to him with my toothache. Still practicing, the cat came closer. Mahlke's Adam's apple attracted attention because it was large, always in motion, and threw a shadow. Between me and Mahlke the caretaker's black cat tensed for a leap. We formed a triangle. My tooth was silent and stopped marking time: for Mahlke's Adam's apple had become the cat's mouse. It was so young a cat, and Mahlke's whatsis was so active โ in any case the cat leaped at Mahlke's throat; or one of us caught the cat and held it up to Mahlke's neck; or I, with or without my toothache, seized the cat and showed it Mahlke's mouse: and Joachim Mahlke let out a yell, but suffered only slight scratches.
And now it is up to me, who called your mouse to the attention of this cat and all cats, to write. Even if we were both invented, I should have to write. Over and over again the fellow who invented us because it's his business to invent people obliges me to take your Adam's apple in my hand and carry it to the spot that saw it win or lose.
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Gรผnter Grass (Cat and Mouse)
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There was a boy at our school. He was the most extraordinary lad I ever came across. I believe he really liked study. He used to get into awful rows for sitting up in bed and reading Greek; and as for French irregular verbs, there was simply no keeping him away from them. He was full of weird and unnatural notions about being a credit to his parents and an honour to the school; and he yearned to win prizes, and grow up and be a clever man, and had all those sort of weak-minded ideas. I never knew such a strange creature, yet harmless, mind you, as the babe unborn.
Well, that boy used to get ill about twice a week, so that he couldnโt go to school. There never was such a boy to get ill. If there was any known disease going within ten miles of him, he had it, and had it badly. He would โtake bronchitis in the dog-days, and have hayfever at Christmas. After a six weeksโ period of drought, he would be stricken down with rheumatic fever; and he would go out in a November fog and come home with a sunstroke.
They put him under laughing-gas one year, poor lad, and drew all his teeth, and gave him a false set, because he suffered so terribly with toothache; and then it turned to neuralgia and ear-ache. He was never without a cold, except once for nine weeks while he had scarlet fever; and he always had chilblains.
He had to stop in bed when he was ill, and eat chicken and custards and hot-house grapes; and he would lie there and sob, because they wouldnโt let him do Latin exercises, and took his German grammar away from him.
And we other boys, who would have sacrificed ten terms of our school life for the sake of being ill for a day, and had no desire whatever to give our parents any excuse for being stuck-up about us, couldnโt catch so much as a stiff neck. We fooled about in draughts, and it did us good, and freshened us up; and we took things to make us sick, and they made us fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we could think of seemed to make us ill until the holidays began. Then, on the breaking-up day, we caught colds, and whooping cough, and all kinds of disorders, which lasted till the term recommenced; when, in spite of everything we could manoeuvre to the contrary, we would get suddenly well again, and be better than ever.
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Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat)