Unendurable Quotes

The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without contradiction is only half a life; or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels. ~ Carl Jung

Mysteries make one dream of unendurable bewitchments, they have the fragrance of something quite, quite unspeakably beautiful. ~ Robert Walser

It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great. ~ Havelock Ellis

The stranger did not go to church, and indeed made no difference between Sunday and the irreligious days, even in costume. He worked, as Mrs. Hall thought, very fitfully. Some days he would come down early and be continuously busy. On others he would rise late, pace his room, fretting audibly for hours together, smoke, sleep in the armchair by the fire. Communication with the world beyond the village he had none. His temper continued very uncertain; for the most part his manner was that of a man suffering under almost unendurable provocation, and once or twice things were snapped, torn, crushed, or broken in spasmodic gusts of violence. He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity. His habit of talking to himself in a low voice grew steadily upon him, but though Mrs. Hall listened conscientiously she could make neither head nor tail of what she heard. ~ H.G.Wells

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable. ~ William James

For us, it was never about death. It was about life. Knowing that there was a way out, and that his suffering was not going to become unendurable, was the one thing that allowed Mr. Peterson to go on living, much longer than he would have otherwise wanted. It was the weeks leading up to our pact that were shrouded in darkness and despair; after its inception, life became a meaningful prospect once more. ~ Gavin Extence

Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was the second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. [ ... ] It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. [ ... ] He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. ~ David Foster Wallace

People more often kill those they love than those they hate. Possibly because only the people you love can really make life unendurable to you. ~ Agatha Christie

Lost in loneliness and pain. Black and unendurable, Thinking of you with every Corpuscle of my flesh, in Every instant of night And day. ~ Kenneth Rexroth

Some things just are. They can't be changed or undone or fixed.But people-people can heal. Even from events they believe are unendurable. ~ Margaret Peterson Haddix

Merger Evers/John F. Kennedy/Malcolm X/Martin Luther King/Robert Kennedy/Che Guevara/Patrice Lamumba/George Jackson/Cynthia Wesley/Addie Mae Collins/Denise McNair/Carole Robertson/Viola Liuzzo
It was a decade marked by death. Violent and inevitable. Funerals became engraved on the brain, intensifying the ephemeral nature of life. For many in the South it was a decade reminiscent of earlier times, when oak trees sighed over their burdens in the wind; Spanish moss draggled blood to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in mourners that they strutted, without noticing their feet, along the thin backs of benches: their piercing shouts of anguish and joy never interrupted by an inglorious fall. They shared rituals for the dead to be remembered. ~ Alice Walker

I envisaged a woman of the late nineteenth century marrying into this milieu, finding it unendurable and fleeing back with her child to the more ordinary hazards of London: of that child, given at her christening the ancient Roman name for the island, Sarnia, but reared in ignorance of her paternal background, discovering, after her mother's death, that she was an heiress, and being bidden back to claim her patrimony. Skulduggery followed naturally.
(On the writing of SARNIA) ~ Hilary Ford

We had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in Hannibal. He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends, half way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing - it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand it, and wouldn't she please shut him up.
The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this - 'Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child's noise would make you glad.' It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy's noise was not a trouble to me any more. ~ Mark Twain

I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead
indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can't sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed. ~ Yoko Ogawa

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!"
When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer. ~ Bertolt Brecht

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

What makes us leave what we love best?
What is it inside us that keeps erasing itself
When we need it most,
That sends us into uncertainty for its own sake
And holds us flush there
until we begin to love it
And have to begin again?
What is it within our own lives we decline to live
Whenever we find it,
making our days unendurable,
And nights almost visionless?
I still don't know yet, but I do it. ~ Charles Wright

We bear the unbearable. We endure the unendurable. We do what must be done until we ourselves are undone. ~ Rick Yancey

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends. ~ Alain De Botton

Things become quieter, but the cries do not cease. "What's up, Albert?" I ask. "A couple of columns over there got it in the neck." The cries continued. It is not men, they could not cry so terribly. "Wounded horses," says Kat. It's unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable. ~ Alan Moore

In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall ... ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable. ~ Mark Twain

Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured. ~ Lorrie Moore

You learned that if you're tired enough, you can sleep sitting up. That the unendurable is perfectly endurable if you just take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes ever ... ~ Allison Pearson

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable. ~ Cyril Connolly

My father used to say there's a fine line between death and sleep, and that both are ways to escape an unendurable pain.
But he never spoke of the choice you'd have to make to wake. ~ Axie Oh

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

Spanish moss draggled bloody to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in mourners that they strutted, without noticing their feet, along the thin backs of benches: their piercing shouts of anguish and joy never interrupted by an inglorious fall. ~ Alice Walker

Again she did not seem to hear, still looking into Cale's eyes. Then slowly, hopelessly, she dropped her gaze.
"I understand," she said.
It was that, of course, that pierced him as if she had stabbed him through the heart. To him it was the sound of lost faith and it was unendurable. He felt he'd become a kind of god in her eyes, and it was simply impossible to give up her adoration. ~ Paul Hoffman

Ushikawa preferred a world where smells and pain still existed, even if smells and pain were unendurable. ~ Haruki Murakami

And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart. ~ E.L. Doctorow

My love for these books, at its purest, is not really about Peeta or anything silly and girly. I love that a young woman character is fierce and strong but hum in ways I find believable, relatable. Katniss is clearly a heroine, but a heroine with issues. She intrigues me because she never seems to know her own strength. She isn't blandly insecure the way girls are often forced to be in fiction. She is brave but flawed. She is a heroine, but she is also a girl who loves two boys and can't choose which boy she loves more. She is not sure she is up to the task of leading a revolution, but she does her best, even as she doubts herself.

Katniss endures the unendurable. She is damaged and it shows. At times, it might seem like her suffering is gratuitous, but life often presents unendurable circumstances people manage to survive. Only the details differ. The Hunger Games trilogy is dark and brutal, but in the end, the books also offer hope - for a better world and a better people and, for one woman, a better life, a life she can share with a man who understands her strength and doesn't expect her to compromise that strength, a man who can hold her weak places and love her through the darkest of her memories, the worst of her damage. Of course I love the Hunger Games. The trilogy offers the tempered hope that everyone who survives something unendurable hungers for. ~ Roxane Gay

And the night smells like snow. Walking home for a moment you almost believe you could start again. And an intense love rushes to your heart, and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable ~ Franz Wright

You may discover that the very aspects which make it most unendurable are what gives New York its meaning. Its inconsistencies and anonymity, its seeming indifference to you and every other individual is really what makes it a safe haven for individuals everywhere (Maeve Brennan) ~ Elizabeth Winder

What appeared as unendurable hardship to soldiers of other nationalities produced a species of exhilaration in our lads, raised on a diet of Kipling and institutional porridge. Some ~ Steven Pressfield

Nothing seems to me to be rarer today then genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

And I did nothing, nothing but try to hide from the horror of dying." He stopped, for saying the truth aloud was unendurable. It was not shame that stopped him, but fear, the same fear. He knew now why this tranquil life in sea and sunlight on the rafts seemed to him like an after-life or a dream, unreal. It was because he knew in his heart that reality was empty: without life or warmth or color or sound: without meaning. There were no heights or depths. All this lovely play of form and light and color on the sea and in the eyes of men, was no more than that, a playing of illusions on the shallow void. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. ~ David Foster Wallace

The lesson in my friend's observation is that the line moves. What had once seemed unendurable to an aged parent, and still does to us, the adult children, changes. They come to tolerate the formerly intolerable and to surprise us with their forbearance. Diapers, it turned out, were not the end of the world. Nor was a wheelchair, despite initial resistance. Millimeter by millimeter the line was moving, as it would many times more. ~ Jane Gross

Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Life would go back to being unendurable, except-and this was the worst part-she would in fact endure it, it wouldn't kill her, she'd keep on living day after day after day, an endless loop of glorious sunrises and sunsets that Janie never got to see. ~ Liane Moriarty

Life would be unendurable without quarrels. A good quarrel is the salt of the earth; it's better than a variety show! ~ Ethel Lilian Voynich

It's not enough just to laugh at good fortune and say, 'Enough already.' You have to really mean it
that you have enough. And because you mean it, you take the surplus and you give it away. Similarly, when bad fortune comes, you bear it until it becomes unbearable
your family is hungry, or you can no longer function in your work. And then again you say, 'Enough already,' and you change something. You move; you change careers; you let your spouse make all the decisions. Something. You don't endure the unendurable. ~ Orson Scott Card

A vile and overbearing temper becomes sometimes, in one long accustomed to the exercise of power, unendurable to those who are subject to its humors. ~ Samuel Freeman Miller

They had never kissed, nor even touched, only passed by each other closely as they went into his office, a tiny cubicle off the library - they avoided the teachers' room. But after he said that that day, she lived with a kind of terror, and a longing that felt at times unendurable. But people endure things. ~ Elizabeth Strout

It's not the pain that's unendurable. It's the hopelessness. It's the hopelessness that makes you reckless. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Love is unendurable when it spoils. ~ Laura Thalassa

What is it that I especially find utterly unendurable? That I cannot cope with, that makes me choke and faint? Bad air! Bad air! The approach of some ill-constituted thing; that I have to smell the entrails of some ill-constituted soul! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The Pascal of our generation puts it this way: "We run away like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, our masters" - clicking, scrolling, tapping, liking, sharing . . . anything. "We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us." In fact, "we want to complexify our lives. We don't have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it."12 ~ Tony Reinke

Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be. ~ Brooks Atkinson

But he'd also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaughter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. What's real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn't quite gotten this before now, how it wasn't just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed. ~ David Foster Wallace

But as his wife - at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked - forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital - this would be unendurable. ~ Charlotte Bronte

The touch of his skin against hers was not a caress, but a wave of pain, it became pain by being wanted too much, by releasing in fulfillment all the past hours of desire and denial. It was an act of clenched teeth and hatred, it was the unendurable, the agony, an act of passion - the word born to mean sunering - it was the moment made of hatred, tension, pain - the moment that broke its own elements, inverted them, triumphed, swept into a denial of all suffering, into its antithesis, into ecstasy. ~ Ayn Rand

The most unendurable thing, to be sure, the really terrible thing, would be a life without habits, a life which continually required improvisation. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The bad thing about terrible misfortunes, the kind that tear us apart and appear to be unendurable, is that those who suffer them believe or almost demand that the world should end right there, and yet the world pays no heed and carries on regardless and even tugs at the sleeve of the person who suffered the misfortune, I mean, it won't just let them depart this world the way a disgruntled spectator might leave the theatre, unless the unfortunate person kills him or herself. ~ Javier Marias

It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars. ~ Marie Colvin

Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose. These are the last resources of an insulted and unendurable existence. ~ Herman Melville

I suspect we could have done the whole thing on acid ... except for some of the people; there were faces and bodies in that group who would have been absolutely unendurable on acid. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

It was not a mere man he was holding, but a giant; or a block of granite. The pull was unendurable. The pain unendurable. ~ James Ramsey Ullman

...a boy with an unspeakable past was a man with an unendurable future. He was good to look at, good to dance with, probably good to sleep with: but he was no longer good for love. ~ James Baldwin

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling. ~ David Foster Wallace

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick. ~ Annie Dillard

She was halfway to deep sleep when the door creaked, a noise loud enough to rouse her, yet soft enough to doubt her having heard anything. She lay motionless, listening but hearing only the wind outside, the clock, the sounds of an ancient building. Normal sounds, but still her skin prickled. Pressure built in her head. Her pulse beat in her ears. The feeling of pressure thickened, stealing over her, a sense of envelopment, a shift in perception. Not her pulse, but footsteps. Someone pacing. Ten steps toward the fireplace. Ten back to the foot of her bed. The susurration of fabric against fabric. Metal sliding along metal, a low ringing sound, and mixed with that a murmuring. She peered into the darkness but saw nothing. No moving shadows, no figure approaching her bed, just the inert shapes of furniture and the resulting shadows. The resonance in her head grew, half convincing her she heard footsteps and the low, regular sound of breathing. The murmuring began again, a breath, then a whisper.

My love.

Steps paced near, and she swore she could feel the air thicken. Pain lanced along her temple.

My heart.

Unendurable pressure. She tried to move, but couldn't. Her limbs were frozen, trapped in her nightmare. More footsteps. A breath on her cheek. Cold air wafted through the room.

My own.

A face flashed before her eyes. She tried to breathe and couldn't get air into her lungs. She screwed her eyes shut, but the fa ~ Carolyn Jewel

This blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy. ~ Djuna Barnes

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable. ~ H.L. Mencken

The grave is but the threshold of eternity. What a world were this, how unendurable its weight, If they whom death hath sundered, did not meet again! ~ Robert Southey

I am persuaded that we are all surrounded by an atmosphere - a separate, sensitive, distinct envelope extending some distance from our visible persons - and whenever my invisible atmosphere is invaded, it affects my whole nervous system. The proximity of any bodies but those I love best is unendurable to my body. ~ Fanny Kemble

I've been so unhappy for years, so unhappy . . . I don't understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive. ~ Iris Murdoch

he climbed desperately to escape the unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed bhole ~ H.P. Lovecraft

The world had it all backward: it wasn't sex that was dangerous, it was love. She'd lost people she loved. It was love that brought unendurable pain. ~ Michael Grant

The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keeps us going. ~ Molly Haskell

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We have resolved to endure the unendurable and suffer what is insufferable. ~ Hirohito

By itself," he said, "pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable - something that cannot be contemplated. ~ George Orwell

He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair have it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on, not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating buns. He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked their clean angles as if he had just cut them with a knife. The lit squares of the shop windows excited him as the young are excited by the lit stage of some promising pantomime. He happened to see in one shop which projected with a bulging bravery on to the pavement some square tins of potted meat, and it seemed like a hint of a hundred hilarious high teas in a hundred streets of the world. He was, perhaps, the happiest of all the children of men. For in that unendurable instant when he hung, half slipping, to the ball of St. Paul's, the whole universe had been destroyed and re-created. ~ G.K. Chesterton