Ordeal Quotes

1. "Week after week we were reduced to starting the same letter over again and copying out the same appeals, so that after a certain time words which had at first been torn bleeding from our hearts became void of sense. We copied them down mechanically, trying by means of these dead words to give some idea of our ordeal. And in the end, the conventional call of a telegram seemed to us preferable to this sterile, obstinate monologue and this arid conversation with a blank wall."
Author: Albert Camus

2. "She adapted herself to the split-second rhythm of the New Yorker going to and from work. Getting to the office was a nervous ordeal. If she arrived one minute before nine, she was a free person. If she arrived one minute after, she worried because that made her the logical scapegoat of the boss if he happened to be in a bad mood that day."
Author: Betty Smith

3. "As mortal humans we are born with a death sentence anyway, so what difference does a little poison make? Why not take a chance you will survive the ordeal and make something significant of your life?..." p330"
Author: Brian Herbert

4. "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."
Author: Brigham Young

5. "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 playYour first game of fotball, then, like a satelliteWrenched from its orbit, go drifting awayBehind a scatter of boys. I can seeYou walking away from me towards the schoolwith the pathos of a half-fledged thing set freeInto a wilderness, the gait of oneWho finds no path where the path should be.That hesitant figure, eddying awayLike a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,Has something I never quite grasp to conveyAbout nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorchingOrdeals which fire one's irresolute clay.I had worse partings, but none that soGnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughlySaying what God alone could perfectly show-How selfhood begins with a walking away,And love proved in the letting go."
Author: C. Day Lewis

6. "Two distinctive traits especially identify beyond a doubt a strong and dominant character. One trait is contempt for external circumstances, when one is convinced that men ought to respect, to desire, and to pursue only what is moral and right, that men should be subject to nothing, not to another man, not to some disturbing passion, not to Fortune. The second trait, when your character has the disposition I outlined just now, is to perform the kind of services that are significant and most beneficial; but they should also be services that are a severe challenge, that are filled with ordeals, and that endanger not only your life but also the many comforts that make life attractive.Of these two traits, all the glory, magnificence, and the advantage, too, let us not forget, are in the second, while the drive and the discipline that make men great are in the former."
Author: Cicero

7. "Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling."
Author: Damon Albarn

8. "They turn nature into an achievement course, a series of ordeals and obstacles they can conquer. They go into nature to behave unnaturally. In nature animals flee cold and seek warmth and comfort. But Bobo naturalists flee comfort and seek cold and deprivation."
Author: David Brooks

9. "Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?"
Author: Emil Cioran

10. "America stands before the world as an impetuous void, a fatality without substance. Nothing prepared her for hegemony; yet she tends toward it, not without a certain hesitation. Unlike the other nations which have had to pass through a whole series of humiliations and defeats, she has known till now only the sterility of an uninterrupted good fortune. If, in the future, everything should continue to go as well, her appearance on the scene will have been an accident without influence. Those who preside over her destiny, those who take her interests to heart, should prepare her for bad times; in order to cease being a superficial monster, she requires an ordeal of major scope. Perhaps she is not far from one now. Having lived, hitherto, outside hell, she is preparing to descend into it. If she seeks a destiny for herself, she will find it only on the ruins of all that was her raison d'être."
Author: Emil Cioran

11. "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."
Author: Emil Cioran

12. "Praying, we usually ask too much. I know I do. Sometimes we even demand. I think I am learning to ask enough for the moment--not for the whole year, utterly veiled in mystery; not even for the week, the month ahead; but just for today.Jesus said it all when He told us to pray: 'Give us this day our daily bread.'That bread is not only material, it is spiritual; in asking for it, we ask for a sufficiency of strength, courage, hope and light. Enough courage for the step ahead--not for the further miles. Enough strength for the immediate task or ordeal. Enough material gain to enable us to meet our daily obligations. Enough light to see the path--right before our feet."
Author: Faith Baldwin

13. "Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don't be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

14. "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."
Author: G.K. Chesterton

15. "For most people, chemotherapy is no longer the chamber of horrors we often conceive it to be. Yes, it is an ordeal for some people, but it wasn't for me, nor for most of the patients I got to know during my four months of periodic visits to the chemo suite."
Author: Geraldine Brooks

16. "A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal."
Author: Howard Barker

17. "I remember what love was like before There were complex emotional and biological factors at work. We had elaborate tests to pass, connections to forge, ups and downs and tears and whirlwinds. It was an ordeal, an exercise in agony, but it was alive. The new love is simpler. Easier. But small."
Author: Isaac Marion

18. "These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try."
Author: Jacques Derrida

19. "NOOOO!" On the screen, a woman's eyes bugged almost out of her head, and I tried not to scream.Tried not to scream in exasperation, I mean. The serial killer was right in front of her, wide open! Clearly, instead of weeping like a moron, she could be lunging forward and administering a swift uppercut to the chin. Then this entire pointless ordeal would be over with, and I could go home."
Author: James Patterson

20. "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."
Author: John Berryman

21. "Preparation:allows you to prevent . . .the intensity of the ordeal."
Author: John Talmage Mathis

22. "Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)"
Author: Joseph Campbell

23. "For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that's not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?—Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants."
Author: Junot Díaz

24. "Fiji had experienced the ordeal of two military coups."
Author: Kamisese Mara

25. "Right now I was standing in the cold of the night, queuing for admittance outside club Ozone – unknowingly waiting for my traumatic ordeal to begin."
Author: Kirsty Moseley

26. "The rest of dinner was an ordeal. When Adam looked at Signora Docci, he saw Professor Leonard; when he looked at Antonella, he saw himself kissing her in the garden; and when he looked at Harry, he found himself wondering if one of them had been adopted."
Author: Mark Mills

27. "Speaking up for America has become a lonely ordeal."
Author: Maurice Saatchi

28. "Never marry who doesn't love you,If you do it, your ordeal will turn into hell."
Author: Miguel Ángel Sáez

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

30. "Every obnoxious circumstances in one's life is always a lesson to learn from.Whatever the ordeal you are passing through now, take them as a school that you will one day graduate from."
Author: Osunsakin Adewale

31. "As he walked along, consciously enjoying the early coolness of the morning, he turned and looked behind him. People often do this and are usually surprised to find that there is some reason for turning around. Sometimes there is no apparent reason and they wonder why they did it. ("Ordeal By Water")"
Author: P.C. Wren

32. "Fear that comes from personal experience is far more real than fear based on someone else's ordeal."
Author: Peg Kehret

33. "The ordeal is part of the commitment"Esquire Interview 10/10"
Author: Philip Roth

34. "The Men of the Ordeal do not march to save the World, Proyas--at least not first and foremost. They march to save their wives and children. Their tribes and their nations. If they learn that the world, their world, slips into ruin behind them, that their wives and daughters may perish for want of their shields, their swords, the Host of Hosts would melt about the edges, then collapse."
Author: R. Scott Bakker

35. "The ordeal is not that truth does not win; it is that it wins in the end."
Author: Raheel Farooq

36. "How is it that, once victory took form and the horrible spectacle of the extermination camps was revealed, we could have shamelessly broken the promises given to the peoples in those years of ordeal?"
Author: Rene Cassin

37. "Severing our young and fragile friendship was a sad ordeal, but sadder still was the fact that this friend found it so difficult to respond to my immediate need, unlike a dreamed boy who always afforded me easy comfort. I couldn't understand what was so hard about reaching out to hug someone. But judging by Gregory's uncomfortable conduct I had to assume it was an honest trial."
Author: Richelle E. Goodrich

38. "High school wasn't a trial by fire or some ordeal that had to be survived. It was all a big joke. You just had to provide the laugh track."
Author: Scott Westerfeld

39. "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"
Author: Stephenie Meyer

40. "Bears?" Epaphroditus wrinkled his nose. "Everyone knows Prometheus was tormented by vultures. Every day they tore out his entrails, and every night he was miraculously healed, so that the ordeal was endlessly repeated."Martial laughed. "The trainer who can induce vultures to attack on command will be able to name any price! I suspect we'll see a lot of bears today."
Author: Steven Saylor

41. "Well, at least I can spare myself the ordeal of a whole battery of personality tests. My personality is poor; that much is clear."
Author: Susan Juby

42. "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."
Author: Sylvia Plath

43. "Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is."
Author: Tahar Ben Jelloun

44. "In older myths, the dark road leads downward into the Underworld, where Persephone is carried off by Hades, much against her will, while Ishtar descends of her own accord to beat at the gates of Hell. This road of darkness lies to the West, according to Native American myth, and each of us must travel it at some point in our lives. The western road is one of trials, ordeals, disasters and abrupt life changes — yet a road to be honored, nevertheless, as the road on which wisdom is gained. James Hillman, whose theory of 'archetypal psychology' draws extensively on Greco–Roman myth, echoes this belief when he argues that darkness is vital at certain periods of life, questioning our modern tendency to equate mental health with happiness. It is in the Underworld, he reminds us, that seeds germinate and prepare for spring. Myths of descent and rebirth connect the soul's cycles to those of nature."
Author: Terri Windling

45. "Churchmen sought to introduce rational trial procedures and sophisticated legal principles in place of the superstition-based trial by ordeal that had characterized the Germanic legal order."
Author: Thomas E. Woods Jr.

46. "For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one's holdings and legitimize one's greed. But both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion."
Author: Tom Robbins

47. "Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition."
Author: Trinh T. Minh Ha

48. "I wept like a child. It was not because I was overcome at having survived my ordeal, though I was. Nor was it the presence of my brothers and sisters, though that too was very moving. I was weeping because ....fill in the blank with whatever/whoever helped you survive... had left me so unceremoniously."
Author: Yann Martel

49. "I awoke once during the night. I pushed the canopy aside and looked out. The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark. The sea lay quietly, bathed in a shy, light-footed light, a dancing play of black and silver that extended without limits all about me. The volume of things was confounding- the volume of air above me, the volume of water around and beneath me. I was half-moved, half-terrified... For the first time I noticed- as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next- that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right."
Author: Yann Martel

50. "The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start."
Author: Zane Grey

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