#misery

wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#clockwork-prince #infernal-devices #madness #misery #tessa-gray

That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan- sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped tears for Jack and Rose and the passengers of the doomed ship. If there was electrical power, Mariam, Laila, and the children watched it too. A dozen times or more, they unearthed the TV from behind the tool-shed, late at night, with the lights out and quilts pinned over the windows. At the Kabul River, vendors moved into the parched riverbed. Soon, from the river's sunbaked hollows, it was possible to buy Titanic carpets, and Titanic cloth, from bolts arranged in wheelbarrows. There was Titanic deodorant, Titanic toothpaste, Titanic perfume, Titanic pakora, even Titanic burqas. A particularly persistent beggar began calling himself "Titanic Beggar." "Titanic City" was born. It's the song, they said. No, the sea. The luxury. The ship. It's the sex, they whispered. Leo, said Aziza sheepishly. It's all about Leo. "Everybody wants Jack," Laila said to Mariam. "That's what it is. Everybody wants Jack to rescue them from disaster. But there is no Jack. Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead. ↗

— Khaled Hosseini

#misery #war #heroism

It'd felt good to be part of an "us," with the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same miseries. ↗

— Jennifer Brown

#teen-romance #teenage-love #us #love

Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery. ↗

— Daniel Kahneman

#misery #money #money

I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition. ↗

— Martha Washington

#am #cheerful #circumstance #determined #disposition

The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute. ↗

— Rebecca Harding Davis

#armies #camped #destruction #entered #every

I simply can't build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery and death... I think... peace and tranquillity will return again. ↗

— Anne Frank

#again #build #confusion #death #foundation

Between his eyes, there were four lines, the marks of such misery as children should never feel. He spoke with that wonderful whisky voice that so many Spanish children have, and he was a tough and entire little boy. ↗

— Martha Gellhorn

#boy #children #entire #eyes #feel

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. ↗

— C. S. Lewis

#day #each #endless #every #fact

It would be stupid tameness, and unaccountable folly, for whole nations to suffer one unreasonable, ambitious and cruel man, to wanton and riot in their misery. ↗

— Jonathan Mayhew

#cruel #folly #man #misery #nations