#miser

change isn't easy, Micky. Changing the way you live means changing how you think. Changing how you think means changing what you believe in life. That's hard sweetie. When we make our own misery, we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable ↗

— Dean Koontz

#change

Hold it right there. The only agreement we ever had was that you intended to make me as miserable as possible, and I intended to courageously make the best of an intolerable situation like valiant Southern women have always done. ↗

— Susan Elizabeth Phillips

#courage #misery #southern-women #courage

But somebody else had spoken Snape’s name, quite softly. “Severus . . .” The sound frightened Harry beyond anything he had experienced all evening. For the first time, Dumbledore was pleading. Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there was revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face. “Severus . . . please . . .” Snape raised his wand and pointed it directly at Dumbledore. “Avada Kedavra!” A jet of green light shot from the end of Snape’s wand and hit Dumbledore squarely in the chest. Harry’s scream of horror never left him; silent and unmoving, he was forced to watch as Dumbledore was blasted into the air. For a split second, he seemed to hang suspended beneath the shining skull, and then he fell slowly backward, like a great rag doll, over the battlements and out of sight. ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#death #dumbledore #killing-curse #misery #pain

Only one thing mattered: this was not a Horcrux. Dumbledore had weakened himself by drinking that horrible potion for nothing. Harry crumpled the parchment in his hand and his eyes burned with tears as behind him Fang began to howl. ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#dumbledore #fang #horcrux #misery #death

The scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#les-miserables #death

You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history. ↗

— Albert Camus

#happiness #history #misery #death

Love is responsible for nearly every kind of insanity in the world though greed, vanity, and pure meanness contribute their portion to general misery. ↗

— P.N. Elrod

#insanity #life #love #meanness #misery

I have a dream my life would be. So different from this hell I'm living. So different now from what it seem. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed." *Fantine ↗

— Victor Hugo

#life #misery #musical #dreams

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"] ↗

— William Matthews

#poetry #teenagers #experience

The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#experiences #loneliness #misery #experience