Harrowing Quotes

#1. Sin in the Second City is a masterful history lesson, a harrowing biography, and - best of all - a superfun read. The Everleigh story closely follows the turns of American history like a little sister. I can't recommend this book loudly enough.

Darin Strauss

#2. When I was seventeen, I worked as a counsellor at a co-ed sleep-away camp for eight weeks. I loved it but it could be harrowing - it was far too much responsibility for someone my age.

Harlan Coben

#3. I should like to make films that are not lowering to the spirit. A new building can be very harrowing, I should like to give people a chance to whistle.

Jacques Tati

#4. The harrowing of the soul can be like the harrowing of the soil; to increase the yield, things are turned upside down.

Neal A. Maxwell

#5. For Nautzera there was no present, only the clamour of a harrowing past and the threat of a corresponding future. For Nautzera, the present had receded to a point, had become the precarious fulcrum whereby history leveraged destiny. A mere formality.

R. Scott Bakker

#6. They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they'd had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.

Donna Tartt

#7. Never try to live decently, boy - not unless you're willing to open your life to tragedy and sadness. Live like a beast, and no event, no matter how harrowing, will ever be able to move you.

James Luceno

#8. Do it. Go there. Take it away, permanently. Deliver the fear. Force the task. Remove all hope. Demand the sacrifice. Enact defeat. Wreck everything. Great endings are built of great climaxes: enormous feats, worst fears, tremendous losses, harrowing sacrifices, utter destruction.

Donald Maass

#9. I remembered looking up in the sky to see the contrail of a jet overhead. I thought how the harrowing journey that took Marie's family four months across the plains would take a little more than two hours in a plane.

Mike Ericksen

#10. Because no matter what had happened in the past, in this harrowing present, everybody needed everybody.

Blake Crouch

#11. Cracking the Ice scores the literary equivalent of a hat-trick: funny, harrowing and finally, heartfelt. This book is a winner.

Gregory Neri

#12. It is a cold and harrowing morning in the life of a man the day he wakes up, looks at himself in the mirror, and finally realizes that he is not, never has been, nor will ever be George Clooney.

Ted Heller

#13. From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.

Albert Camus

#14. Is that all there is? they must be thinking. Shouldn't it be less ordinary, more sordid, more epic, more truly harrowing, this flesh wound of your? Tell us more! Couldn't we please crank up the pain?

Margaret Atwood

#15. We will, at some point, reflect back at our rampant acceptance of speciesism with profound regret. Our journey to understanding that all demonstrations of life possess equal value is a slow and harrowing one.

Ian Somerhalder

#16. I went to Cal Arts and AFI, and I worked on 'Bonfire Of The Vanities.' I got this grant from the Academy to be Brian De Palma's apprentice director. And it was such a harrowing, disillusioning, awful experience.

Douglas Rushkoff

#17. I'm doing stand-up comedy. I'm working on a one-woman show about how I don't like my baby. There is a period of time where a baby is born where the next 3 months is harrowing. A lot of people say it's the most wonderful time, but for me it was harrowing.

Mary Lynn Rajskub

#18. Personally, I had a close friend with cystic fibrosis. I won't ever forget how he handled himself. In the face of extreme challenges and very harrowing circumstances, he maintained a positive outlook and was just very dignified, even in his suffering.

Max Carver

#19. You are my country, Desdemona ... My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining.

Connie Brockway

#20. The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances.

Andrew Solomon

#21. A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone

Emily Dickinson

#22. You are certainly wrong to compare suicide ... with great accomplishments, since it cannot be considered as anything but a weakness. After all, it is easier to die than to endure a harrowing life with fortitude.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#23. World's most widely read books. In the years that followed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anchee Min, and Dith Pran shared their harrowing memories of the communist nightmares in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia.

Steven Pinker

#24. In the harrowing aftermath of Haiti's earthquake, one of the greatest needs became desperately clear: safe water.

Marcus Samuelsson

#25. In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

Susan Sontag

#26. Sometimes [the expression] old age has a kind of harrowing beauty. But elderly - ugh!

Dodie Smith

#27. Grateful people learn to celebrate even amid life's hard and harrowing memories because they know that pruning is no mere punishment, but preparation.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

#28. In the tradition of Black Hawk Down, Malcolm MacPherson vividly brings to life this harrowing story of courage, pathos, and war at its grittiest. For military history buffs, or those interested in the front lines of the war on terror, Roberts Ridge is a must read.

Jay Winik

#29. What harrowing is after sowing, the same is meditation after hearing
it hides the word.

Matthew Henry

#30. Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind, as harrowing and planting those of the earth.

Margaret Fuller

#31. It's really fine that you found a good archivist to do the basically difficult and at times harrowing work of cleaning out old papers. I hope you keep her digging into all the old boxes as long as there is ONE left.

Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

#32. I myself have seen the floating ships
And nothing will ever be the same
The shouts,
The harrowing voices within the house.
I stand apart with an army:
My mind is graven with ships.

Hilda Doolittle

#33. It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise

Barbara Kingsolver

#34. Life's harrowing echo only to be faded into exiled loneliness

Munia Khan

#35. Well, I stopped drinking. That was actually a big deal. I didn't go through any harrowing rock-bottom experience. I just made a decision to stop drinking.

Josh Radnor

#36. Walt Whitman, who worked as a nurse in the hospital wards, that the harrowing experience made one's "little cares and difficulties" disappear "into nothing.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#37. There is an extent of riches, as well as an extreme of poverty, which, by harrowing the circles of a man's acquaintance, lessens his opportunities of general knowledge.

Howard Zinn

#38. There is also present in every human being, in everyone's biography-although sometimes harrowing cases of systematic neglect, present in the matter of absence, so if longing for that which never was there then too, deeply suspect, should have been.

Paul Ricoeur

#39. They are always very lax about putting restrictions on violence for children's movies, which I think is much more harrowing than sexuality for children.

Philip Kaufman

#40. A haunting, harrowing punch to the heart, Among the Missing is flat-out brilliant. About the secrets we keep, the lives we are desperate to live, and the chances we miss, it's a psychological dazzler. Truly, one of my favorite books of this year-or any year.

Caroline Leavitt

#41. I have much to say about the pain I've felt and seen inside of prison. It has been an eye-opening and harrowing experience.

Lane Garrison

#42. When they ran out of cadre men they gave me my very own platoon and said, 'Here are 63 men, try to keep as many of them alive as you possibly can.' That was one of the more harrowing experiences of my life.

David Eddings

#43. Travel writing is harrowing. You are in paradise, more or less, having to prove it is paradise. It is hard to have a good time trying to figure out a way to say you are having a good time, whether you are having it or not, even in paradise.

Padgett Powell

#44. There is an expression here on Capitol Hill," Issa told me. "'Don't ever get between a member and a camera.'" That can be particularly harrowing in the case of Issa, who had purchased a T-shirt for Bardella that said: "It's all about me.

Mark Leibovich

#45. Some events are so harrowing, they either shape who we become or we move past them. They either break us entirely, or we pick up the pieces and put ourselves back together, altered but not shattered.

Rachel Thompson

#46. Secret of life is to go through something harrowing that doesnt kill you ... and to love one woman for the rest of your life.

Garrison Keillor

#47. I know about the sweet home. I went to school with 'em boys, what became Lynyrd Skynyrd; I knew Allen Collins, the skinny girl-beautiful guitarist. I put Allen Collins in every travel piece I do. Travel writing is harrowing, going to Bermuda with a banjo on my knee.

Padgett Powell

#48. Strange and harrowing must be his story; frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course, and wrecked it
thus!

Mary Shelley

#49. Of all the agonies in life, that which is most poignant and harrowing
that which for the time annihilates reason, and leaves our whole organization one lacerated, mangled heart
is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love.

Bill Vaughan

#50. I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.

Sara Sheridan

#51. Let's start at the very end: The postscript of Stephen King's 'On Writing' contains some of the most harrowing pages he has ever written. It's here that King describes the traffic accident that nearly killed him in June 1999.

Gary Krist

#52. It deals with that most terrible and harrowing experience in life - trying to remember an address which somebody told you but you didn't write down.

Douglas Adams

#53. Happy are those who dwell apart from the harrowing tumults of public life!

Dorothea Dix

#54. Being an executive doesn't require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrowing schedules.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb

#55. There is nothing more harrowing than a deadly hush with the feel of a great noise around it

Jessie Douglas Kerruish

#56. Jesmyn Ward returns to the world of her first two books, but here in the mode of non-fiction. A clear-eyed witness to the harrowing stories of 'men we reaped,' she quickens the dead and brings them, vividly alive again. An eloquent, grief-steeped account.

Nicholas Delbanco

#57. Michael Winter's fiction is a lot like hearing him talk about his life ... harrowing in an after-the-fact hilarious way. Full of wonder and mystery. A hangover you wouldn't miss for the world.

Michael Crummey