Distressing Quotes (page 6)
I hear a new tone when acquaintances ask how I am, a tone I have not before noticed and find increasing distressing, even humiliating: these acquaintances seem as they ask impatient, half concerned, half querulous, as if no longer interested in the answer. As if all too aware that the answer will be a complaint. I determine to speak, if asked how I am, only positively. I frame the cheerful response. What I believe to be the cheerful response as I frame it emerges, as I hear it, more in the...
Joan Didion
The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success: All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.
Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small...
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Lines. I die but when the grave shall press. The heart so long endeared to thee. When earthy cares no more distress. And earthy joys are nought to me. Weep not, but think that I have past. Before thee o'er the sea of gloom. Have anchored safe and rest at last. Where tears and mouring can not come.'Tis I should weep to leave thee here. On that dark ocean sailing drear. With storms around and fears before. And no kind light to point the shore. But long or short though life may be'Tis nothing to...
Emily Bronte
When it shall be said in any country in the world my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness: When these things can be said, there may that country boast its Constitution and its Government
Thomas Paine
In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said:"'From far, from eve and morning, And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me. Blew hither: here am I'George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and...
E. M. Forster