Ordeals Quotes

Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell-their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive presence, its brooding permanence. ~ William Boyd

When most people think about the future, they dream up ways that they might live happier lives. But notice this phenomenon. When people remember the crucial events that formed them, they don't usually talk about happiness. It is usually the ordeals that seem most significant. Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering. ~ David Brooks

Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it. ~ Amartya Sen

There are all kinds of ways to challenge ourselves. Some people do it by climbing a mountain or scuba diving. The most profound and challenging ordeals is to drink Ayahuasca. It is in a way the ultimate adventure. ~ Graham Hancock

Thus, his ambition led him not to relieve his patients' madness, but to exasperate it - to let it breathe with a life of its own. And this he did in certain ways that wholly eradicated what human attributes remained in these people. But sometimes that peculiar magic he saw in their eyes would seem to fade, and then he would institute his 'proper treatment,' which consisted of putting them through a battery of hellish ordeals intended to loosen their attachment to the world of humanity and to project them further into the realm of the 'silent, staring universe' where the insanity of the infinite might work a rather paradoxical cure. The result was something as pathetic as a puppet and as exalted as the stars, something at once dead and never dying, a thing utterly without destiny and thus imperishable, forever consigned to that abysmal vacuity which is the essence of all that is immortal. ~ Thomas Ligotti

My run is so weird. That's what I'm most nervous about in this whole ordeal. I'm most nervous about everybody making fun of the way I run. I do, like, karate hands. Instead of running with my hands closed together like a normal person. It's like I'm trying to be aerodynamic or something, so my hands are straight like razors. Karate hands. ~ Jennifer Lawrence

Obviously, the anti-ERA people are tickled about my ordeal because it proves that the ERA breaks up families. When they point out that feminism is a dangerous thing, I just say marriage is pretty precarious too. ~ Sonia Johnson

I think this is something we all can relate to: experiences that may start out as good ideas until suddenly, they become ordeals, no longer adventures, no matter the attitude. ~ Tania Aebi

P.C. Hodgell said - That which can be destroyed by the truth should be. Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say - If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Attitude is the difference between ordeal and adventure ~ Bob Bitchin

Three things have helped me successfully go through the ordeals of life
an understanding husband, a good analyst and millions of dollars. ~ Mary Tyler Moore

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. ~ John Berryman

Five M4s plus a SAW would be a normal load-out for a standard six-man fire team. But for this job, it was way too light. If I'd had my way, every man on the squad would have been carrying a machine gun. Lacking that, I wanted at least one more heavy weapon. And at the moment, the only other guy in the barracks who had a SAW was Gregory, who was sitting near the west door. "Hey, Greg, we need an assault gunner," said Raz, who'd read my thoughts. "You up for this?" "Honestly? No," replied Gregory, who seemed to be in a state of shock from the ordeals he had already endured. "I don't know if I can do it." Then Jones stepped over to Gregory. ~ Clinton Romesha

Fauvism was our ordeal by fire ... colours became charges of dynamite. They were expected to charge light ... The great merit of this method was to free the picture from all imitative and conventional contact. ~ Andre Derain

Books that recount ordeals are precious because an ordeal is what we most fear, and the stories that tell us how to survive them reassure us about what a human being is capable of, as we survive our own lives every day, our own mysterious journeys. ~ Ramona Koval

Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am. ~ Dean Koontz

Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well. ~ Sophocles

The perturbations, anxieties, depravations, deaths, exceptions in the physical or moral order, spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations fostered by the will, torments, destruction, confusion, tears, insatiabilities, servitudes, delving imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the chemical singularities of the mysterious vulture which lies in wait for the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious & abortive experiences, the darkness of the mailed bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the inoculation of deep stupor, funeral orations, desires, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors, strange inquietudes which the reader would prefer not to experience , cants, nervous disorders, bleeding ordeals that drive logic at bay, exaggerations, the absence of sincerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the lugubrious, childbirths worse than murders, passions, romancers at the Courts of Assize, tragedies,-odes, melodramas, extremes forever presented, reason hissed at with impunity, odor of hens steeped in water, nausea, frogs, devilfish, sharks, simoon of the deserts, that which is somnambulistic, squint-eyed, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulistic, viscous, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anemic, one-eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino, pederast, phenomena of the aquarium, & the bearded woman, hours surfeited with gloomy discouragement, fantasies, acrimonies, monsters, demoral ~ Comte De Lautreamont

In those moments, which were eternal I assure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride. I know that your condition differs from mine, and therefore you have no means by which to fully comprehend my ordeals just as I cannot fully comprehend yours. But I do acknowledge that both our conditions are unendurable, despite the doctor's second-hand platitude that nothing in this world is unendurable. I've even come to believe that the world itself, by its very nature, is unendurable. It's only our responses to this fact that deviate: mine being predominately a response of passive terror approaching absolute panic; yours being predominantly a response of gruesome obsessions that you fear you might act upon. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed and now they were beliefs I felt were myths. ~ John Fante

A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness, of which our public and political life is now so productive, that I lose the awareness of something better, and feel the despair of having come to the dead end of possibility. ~ Wendell Berry

I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was. ~ Sylvia Plath

All armies have expendable items. That is, a part or unit, the destruction of which will not be fatal to the whole. In some ordeals, a man might consider his finger expendable, but not his hand; or, in extremity, his arm but not his heart. There are expendable items which may be lost or destroyed in the field, either in peace or in war, without their owner being required to replace them. A rifle is so expendable or a cartridge belt. So are men.

Men are the most expendable of all. ~ Robert Leckie

If there is a conflict between the easy drift of prosperity and the ordeal of peace, the ordeal of peace comes first. ~ Norman Cousins

Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-
A sunny day with the leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of fotball, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.
I had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show-
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love proved in the letting go. ~ Cecil Day-Lewis

Unlike Champions, Godmothers don't have to keep undergoing ridiculous ordeals every time one turns around. Our idea of besting a dragon is not to chop it into bits, but to get it to sit down to tea. ~ Mercedes Lackey

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business. ~ John Berryman

We could hardly believe that after so many ordeals, after all the trials of modern skepticism, there was still so much left in our souls to destroy. ~ Alexander Herzen

Such ordeals always strike one with their strangeness, their digression from the normal flow of events, and often provoke a universal protest: "Why me?" Be sure that this is not a question but an outcry. The person who screams it has been instilled with an astonishing suspicion that he, in fact, has been the perfect subject for a very specific "weird," a tailor-made fate, and that a prior engagement, in all its weirdness, was fulfilled at the appointed time and place. ~ Thomas Ligotti

But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell. ~ Iris Murdoch

Live on in your blessings, your destiny's been won. But ours calls us on from one ordeal to the next. ~ Virgil

Though White had fled from the world of school, he never escaped the models it had given him on how to conduct his life. At school you had to pass tests and ordeals to prove you were brave. You tested your bravery in the playing fields, and through the beatings by masters and prefects. And there were the ceremonies of cruelty of the boys themselves: the initiations and ordeals that were the price of entrance into the school, and later into boys' secret societies ~ Helen Macdonald

The ordeal is part of the commitment
Esquire Interview 10/10 ~ Philip Roth

The older we grow, the greater become the ordeals. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Shouldn't we suppose that many of our most painful ordeals will look quite different a million years from now, as we recall them on the New Earth? What if one day we discover that God has wasted nothing in our life on Earth? What if we see that every agony was part of giving birth to an eternal joy? ~ Randy Alcorn

Holding on to hope when everything is dark, is the greatest test of faith ~ Yasmin Mogahed

But the examinations are the chief bugbears of my college life. Although I have faced them many times and cast them down and made them bite the dust, yet they rise again and menace me with pale looks, until like Bob Acres I feel my courage oozing out at my finger ends. The days before these ordeals take place are spent in cramming your mind with mystic formula and indigestible dates - unpalatable diets, until you wish that books and science and you were buried in the depths of the sea.

At last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favoured being indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to call to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often that your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you at a pinch. ~ Helen Keller

You've had many ordeals in the past. During these ordeals, life seemed unbearable. You may have collapsed from the exhaustion of hopelessness and curled into a fetal position. Regardless of how difficult this new ordeal may be, as with the others, this too will be overcome. It will make you stronger. ~ John-Talmage Mathis

Mr. Campion felt that among the ordeals by fire and by water there should now be numbered the ordeal by dinner at Socrates Close. ~ Margery Allingham

We encounter many bumps, bends, and forks in the road of life that leads to the eternities. There is so much teaching and correction as we travel on that road ...
President Brigham Young offered the profound insight that at least some of our suffering has a purpose when he said: All intelligent beings who are crowned with crowns of glory, immortality, and eternal lives must pass through every ordeal appointed for intelligent beings to pass through, to gain their glory and exaltation ... Every trial and experience you have passed through is necessary for your salvation. ~ James E. Faust

The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution, and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources, there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction. ~ Christian De Duve

Rallick will kill you," Murillio said levelly.

"Nonsense." Kruppe placed the mask over his face. "How will the lad ever recognize Kruppe?"

Murillio studied the man's round body, the faded red waistcoat, gathered cuffs, and the short oily curls atop his head. "Never mind." He sighed.

"Excellent," Kruppe said. "Now, please accept these two masks, gifts from your friend Kruppe. A trip is saved, and Baruk need not wait any longer for a secret message that must not be mentioned." He replaced his mask in its box, then spun round to study the eastern skyline. "Off to yon alchemist's abode, then. Good evening, friend - "

"Wait a minute," Murillio said, grasping Kruppe's arm and turning him round. "Have you seen Coll?"

"Why, of course. The man sleeps a deep, recovering sleep from his ordeals.'Twas healed magically, Sulty said. By some stranger, yet. Coll himself was brought in by yet a second stranger, who found a third stranger, who in turn brought a fifth stranger in the company of the stranger who healed Coll. And so it goes, friend Murillio. Strange doings, indeed. Now, Kruppe must be off. Goodbye, friend - "

"Not yet," Murillio snarled. He glanced around. The street was still empty. He leaned close. "I've worked some things out, Kruppe. Circle Breaker contacting me put everything into order in my mind. I know who you are."

"Aaai!" Kruppe cried, withdrawing. "I'll not deny it, then! It's true, Murillio, K ~ Steven Erikson

Racing should never be an ordeal, rather an enjoyable and life-enhancing experience. ~ Bruce Fordyce

Anxiety prepares the organism badly for an ordeal which even under more favorable circumstances would not be an easy thing to bear. ~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

The ordeals at the airport, she said, had made her feel helpless and pathetic and lost. The strange way they spoke. Her diminishing supply of money. The cab rides through the mountains. The rain and heat. And the edge, the dark edge, the inwrought mood or tone, the ominous logic of the place. It was all dreamlike, a nightmare of isolation and constraint. She had to get off the island. ~ Anonymous

The question in crisis or ordeal is not: Are you going to be an extremist? The question is: What kind of extremist are you going to be? ~ Lillian Smith

If utopia was illusion hypostasized, communism, going still further, will be illusion decreed, imposed: a challenge to the omnipresence of evil, an obligatory optimism. A man will find it hard to accommodate himself to it if he lives, by dint of ordeals and experiments, in the intoxication of disappointment and if, like the author of Genesis, he is reluctant to identify the Age of Gold with the future, with becoming. Not that he scorns the fanatics of "infinite progress" and their efforts to make justice prevail here on earth; but he knows, to his misery, that justice is a material impossibility, a grandiose meaninglessness, the only ideal about which we can declare quite certainly that it will never be realized, and against which nature and society seem to have mobilized all their laws. ~ Emil Cioran

There's a reason they call childbirth labor. Making a healthy baby takes effort: It requires foresight and self-denial and courage. It's expensive and demanding and tiring. You have to learn new things, change many habits, possibly deal with complicated medical situations, make difficult decisions, and undergo stressful ordeals. I had a wisdom tooth pulled without Novocaine while I was pregnant - it hurt a lot and seemed to go on forever. The kindness of the very young dental assistant, holding back my hair as I spat blood into a bowl, will stay with me for the rest of my life. Pregnant women do such things, and much harder things, all the time. For example, they give birth, which is somewhere on the scale between painful and excruciating. Or they have a cesarean, as I did, which is major surgery. None of this is without risk of death or damage or trauma, including psychological trauma. To force girls and women to undergo all this against their will is to annihilate their humanity. When they undertake it by choice, we should all be grateful. ~ Katha Pollitt

Throughout the ordeal, I learned that getting mad was easier than being sad. Anger was something I could control. I could settle into an easy rhythm of blame and hate. Focus my energy on something than the ache in my heart. ~ Emily Giffin

For a driver to be driven by somebody else is an ordeal, for there are only three types of drivers: the too fast, the timid and oneself. ~ Virginia Graham

Angels are those beings who have been on an earth like this, and have passed through the same ordeals that we are now passing through. They have kept their first estate far enough to preserve themselves in the Priesthood. They did not so violate the law of the Priesthood and condemn themselves to the sin against the Holy Ghost as to be finally lost. They are not crowned with the celestial ones. They are persons who have lived upon an earth, but did not magnify the Priesthood in that high degree that many others have done who have become Gods, even the sons of God. ~ Brigham Young

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Rites–of–passage stories…were cherished in pre–literate societies not only for their entertainment value, but also as mythic tools to prepare young men and women for life's ordeals. A wealth of such stories can be found marking each major transition in the human life cycle: puberty, marriage, childbirth, menopause, death. Other rites–of–passage, less predictable but equally transformative, include times of sudden change and calamity such as illness and injury, the loss of one's home, the death of a loved one, etc. These are the times when we wake, like Dante, to find ourselves in a deep, dark wood - an image that in Jungian psychology represents an inward journey. Rites–of–passage tales point to the hidden roads that lead out of the dark again - and remind us that at the end of the journey we're not the same person as when we started. Ascending from the Netherworld (that grey landscape of illness, grief, depression, or despair), we are 'twice–born' in our return to life, carrying seeds - new wisdom, ideas, creativity and fecundity of spirit. ~ Terri Windling

The first psychoanalytic patients were people who, by definition, did not fit in, people speaking the wrong language, a language of bizarre physical symptoms, a language very unlike the language of science, and for which science suggested itself as the great explainer. These people were suffering, in Freud's view...from the ordeals of intimacy. ~ Adam Phillips

God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing. Short of that, I'd like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so some young man or woman, somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals, might be inspired or comforted. Or warned. Some young entrepreneur, maybe, some athlete or painter or novelist, might press on.
It's all the same drive. The same dream.
It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I'd tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I'd tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don't know what that means, seek it. If you're following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you've ever felt.
I'd like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bull's-eye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bull's-eye. It's not one man's opinion; it's a law of nature. ~ Phil Knight

Be grateful for all ordeals, they are the shortest way to the Divine. ~ The Mother

There is a universal element in man which he can assert by so acting as if the purpose of the Universe were also his purpose. It is the function of the supreme ordeals of life to develop in men this power, to give to their life this distinction, this height of dignity, these vast horizons. ~ Felix Adler

A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist. ~ Tahir Shah

Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is. ~ Tahar Ben Jelloun

The crowning insult [of abortion] is that this ordeal is represented to her as some kind of a privilege.Her sad and onerous duty is garbed in the rhetoric of a civil right. ~ Germaine Greer

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one. ~ Joseph Campbell

Well, I think they're all basically the same story. Every culture in the world has them. When you strip it down and analyze it, it's the young man or girl who goes through a trial or ordeal and hits a very low ebb but manages to get guidance from a Merlin type figure. ~ Liam Neeson

I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied,
and helped others to defy, radical Islam's war against women.
Her memoir contains important and properly complex reflections
about the ravages of theocracy, about thoughtfulness, and about the
ordeals of freedom-as well as a stirring account of the pleasures and
deepening of consciousness that result from an encounter with great
literature and with an inspired teacher. ~ Susan Sontag

If you try to convert someone, it will never be to
effect his salvation but to make him suffer like yourself,
to be sure he is exposed to the same ordeals and
endures them with the same impatience. You keep
watch, you pray, you agonize-provided he does too,
sighing, groaning, beset by the same tortures that are
racking you. Intolerance is the work of ravaged souls
whose faith comes down to a more or less deliberate
torment they would like to see generalized, instituted.
The happiness of others never having been a motive
or principle of action, it is invoked only to appease
conscience or to parade noble excuses: whenever we
determine upon an action, the impulse leading to it
and forcing us to complete it is almost always inadmissible.
No one saves anyone; for we save only ourselves,
and do so all the better if we disguise as
convictions the misery we want to share, to lavish on
others. However glamorous its appearances, proselytism
nonetheless derives from a suspect generosity,
worse in its effects than a patent aggression. No one
is willing to endure alone the discipline he may even
have assented to, nor the yoke he has shouldered.
Vindication reverberates beneath the missionary's
bonhomie, the apostle's joy. We convert not to liberate
but to enchain.
Once someone is shackled by a certainty, he envies
your vague opinions, your resistance to dogmas ~ Emil M. Cioran

Let your strength from the past
provide proof of your abilities to ...
conquer the difficulties of the present. ~ John-Talmage Mathis

The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you. ~ Muriel Barbery

The protagonist of folktale is always, and intensely, a young person moving through ordeals into adult life ... and this is why there are no wicked stepchildren in the tales. ~ Jill Paton Walsh

The Enlightenment, finally, invented progressive 'history' as an inner-worldly purgatory in order to develop the conditions of possibility of a perfected 'society'. This provided the required setting for the aggressive social theology of the Modern Age to drive out the political theology of the imperial eras. What was the Enlightenment in its deep structure if not an attempt to translate the ancient rhyme on learning and suffering - mathein pathein - into a collective and species-wide phenomenon? Was its aim not to persuade the many to expose themselves to transitional ordeals that would precede the great optimization of all things? ~ Peter Sloterdijk

My last night as Isabella Swan. Tomorrow night, I would be Bella Cullen. Though the whole marriage ordeal was a thorn in my side, I had to admit that I liked the sound of that.
- bella swan ~ Stephenie Meyer

I believe there is a theory that men and women emerge finer and stronger after suffering, and that to advance in this or any world we must endure ordeal by fire. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Unfortunately, confusing and crazy ordeals are often the only way to get to the bottom of incomprehensible things. ~ K.A. Reynolds

Nothing, in truth, can ever replace a lost companion. Old comrades cannot be manufactured. There is nothing that can equal the treasure of so many shared memories, so many bad times endured together, so many quarrels, reconciliations, heartfelt impulses. Friendships like that cannot be reconstructed. If you plant an oak, you will hope in vain to sit soon under its shade.
For such is life. We grow rich as we plant through the early years, but then come the years when time undoes our work and cuts down our trees. One by one our comrades deprive us of their shade, and within our mourning we always feel now the secret grief of growing old.
If I search among my memories for those whose taste is lasting, if I write the balance sheet of the moments that truly counted, I surely find those that no fortune could have bought me. You cannot buy the friendship of a companion bound to you forever by ordeals endured together. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

Both Elizabeth [Smart] and Ruby [Jessop] were fourteen when they were kidnapped, raped and "kept captive by polygamous fanatics." The main difference in the girls' respective ordeals ... is that "Elizabeth was brainwashed for nine months," while Ruby had been brainwashed by polygamist fanatics "since birth." Despite the similarity of their plights, Elizabeth's abusers were jailed and charged with sexual assault, aggravated burglary, and aggravated kidnapping, while Ruby ... "was returned to her abusers, no real investigation was done, no charges brought against anyone" involved. ~ Jon Krakauer

As ordeals and duels gave way to confession as a proof of guilt, judicial torture was actually increasing in France. ~ Eric Jager

At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome. ~ Huston Smith

Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" and "Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?" ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Writing is often a perilous journey. Low self-esteem or confusion about goals may be the Shadows that chill our work, an editor or one's own judgemental side may be the Threshold Guardians that block our way. Accidents, computer problems, and difficulties with time and discipline may torment us and taunt like Tricksters. Unrealistic dreams of success or distractions may be the Shapeshifters who tempt, confuse, and dazzle us. Deadlines, editorial decisions, or the struggle to sell our work may be the Tests and Ordeals from which we seem to die but are Resurrected to write again. ~ Christopher Vogler