These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.
The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.
Before I had a kid, I was off in some kind of cosmic state all of the time, and thinking about the world beyond, thinking about intellectual stuff. And then, after I had a kid, just the whole process of giving birth is just so earthy and grounding and insane and it's all just an intense physical ordeal.
All intelligent beings who are crowned with crowns of glory, immortality, and eternal lives must pass through every ordeal appointed for intelligent beings to pass through, to gain their glory and exaltation. Every calamity that can come upon mortal beings will be suffered. . . to prepare them to enjoy the presence of the Lord. . . . Every trial and experience you have passed through is necessary for your salvation.
Throughout the ordeal, I learned that getting mad was easier than being sad. Anger was something I could control. I could settle into an easy rhythm of blame and hate. Focus my energy on something than the ache in my heart.
Human character is never found "to enter into its glory," except through the ordeal of affliction. Its force cannot come forth without the offer of resistance, nor can the grandeur of its free will declare itself, except in the battle of fierce temptation.
Attitude is the difference between ordeal and adventure
We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man.
I'm grateful this ordeal is over, and I'm so looking forward to getting back to the job I love.
The difficulty, the ordeal, is to start.
Sick in my soul I tried to face the ordeal of seeking forgiveness. From whom? What God, what Christ? They were myths I once believed and now they were beliefs I felt were myths.
Fiji had experienced the ordeal of two military coups.
Racing should never be an ordeal, rather an enjoyable and life-enhancing experience.
Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.
There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.
It took me ten years to write The Night Journal, so that was a big ordeal.
Going out is such a hassle. The singles club scene where you sit down, talk, get to know each other, hang out-it's such a big ordeal.
The main thing I don't like about myself is an absurd level of self-consciousness that makes any sort of social encounter an ordeal for me.
The difference between an adventure and an ordeal is attitude.
She goes through the vale of death alone, each time a babe is born. As it is the right neither of man nor the state to coerce her into this ordeal, so it is her right to decide whether she will endure it.
