“It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.”
Source: Back When We Were Grownups
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Anne Tyler 22
American novelist 1941Related quotes
Source: Darkly Dreaming Dexter
“Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning.”
Bk. I, l. 210-214.
Aurora Leigh http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html (1857)
Context: Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love–'
'Love, my child, love, love!'–(then he had done with grief)
'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone,
And none was left to love in all the world.
Source: Hibatullah Akhundzada (2021) cited in: " Taliban leader issues decree saying women are not property http://www.uniindia.com/~/taliban-leader-issues-decree-saying-women-are-not-property/World/news/2582615.html" in United News of India, 3 December 2021.
Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 13 (p. 136)
Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
Variant: For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.
Source: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
Context: People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
As quoted in "Some day my plinth will come" by Lynn Barber in The Guardian (27 May 2001) http://observer.guardian.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,497037,00.html
“b>Over us human beings there hangs an awful sword of justice.</b”
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Four: The Beauty of the Heavens