Agony is not something that happens to you. To agonize is a choice.

— Alan Cohen

Agony's Plot zephyr skimmed across my creamy skin gently kissing where the sun had been....

— Muse

A life of hardship and personal suffering is unavoidable. A person must endure many humiliations of the mind and body, and expect persons whom they trusted to someday betray them. People inevitably witness the death of their loved ones. We also witness acts of depravity committed by criminals that lurk in every society and rouge acts of scandal committed by government officials in charge of the public welfare. A person must nonetheless resist personal discouragement, sadness, dejection, and despondency. I must reach an accord with pain, suffering, and anguish, or forevermore be tortured by reality while constantly seeking to escape from the inescapable agony of being.

— Kilroy J. Oldster

Amy! Never underestimate the rare tears of man.because that's always a sign that he has lost hope, out of options and more dangerously has nothing to lose...

— Sherif A. El-Mawardy

And he howled in agony, in a pain that would never cease as long as he lived. His tortured voice echoed in those mountains for a long, long time...

— Farrah Naseem

And I realize, so suddenly that it hurts, just how empty a creature can be, while still filled to the brim with drowning agony.

— D.R. Hedge

And the answer is: You are wrong. The Faeries are not gone. But they are no longer what they were. I watched it and did not help them, though I could have. I cheered. Furthermore, I cheered and I wept and I was glad. Perhaps I should not have been. Perhaps laughing at agony is a Fairy's game and I should not have moved my pieces on their board.

— Catherynne M. Valente

Anesthesia was discovered. Do you know what it means to relieve man of his pain and suffering? Anesthesia is the most humane of all of man's accomplishments, and what a merciful accomplishment it was. For this great discovery we are indebted to Dr. W. T. G. Morton. Do you know that the religionists opposed the use of anesthesia on the ground that God sent pain as a punishment for sin, and it was considered the greatest of sacrileges to use it—just think of it, a sin to relieve man of his misery! What a monstrous perversion! This one instance alone should convince you of the difference in believing in God or not. No believer in God would have spent his energies to discover anesthesia. He would have been in mortal fear of the wrath of his God for interfering with his 'divine plan,' of making man suffer for having eaten of the fruit of the 'Tree of Knowledge.' The very crux of the matter is in this one instance. Man seeks to relieve his fellow man from the suffering of disease and the pangs of mental agony. The believers in God are content that man's suffering is ordained, and therefore he accepts life and its trials and tribulations as a penance for living. The fear of the wrath of God has been a stumbling block to progress.

— Joseph Lewis

Anger... agony... so familiar emotions.

— Deyth Banger

Anna Petrov: Kola, my dearest, stay at home. Ivanov: My love, my unhappy darling, I beg you, don't stop me going out in the evenings. It's cruel and unjust on my part, but let me commit that injustice. It's an agony for me at home. As soon as the sun disappears, my spirit begins to be weighed down by depression. What depression! Don't ask why. I myself don't know. I swear by God's truth I don't know. Here I'm in anguish, I go to the Leaders and there it's still worse; I return from there and here it's depression again, and so all night... Simply despair!

— Anton Chekhov