“Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.”
The Awakening (1899)
Source: The Awakening, and Selected Stories
Context: The years that are gone seem like dreams -if one might go on sleeping and dreaming- but to wake up and find -oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all ones life.
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Kate Chopin 49
American author 1850–1904Related quotes
“For it would be better to die once and for all than to suffer pain for all one's life.”
κρεῖσσον γὰρ εἰσάπαξ θανεῖν
ἢ τὰς ἁπάσας ἡμέρας πάσχειν κακῶς.
Variant translation by John Stuart Blackie (1850):
"Life and life's sorrows? Once to die is better
Than thus to drag sick life."
Source: Prometheus Bound, lines 750–751
“All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape.”
Victor Frankenstein of Justine Moritz in Ch. 8
Frankenstein (1818)
Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, by Simon Reynolds (1988)
Love and relationships
Act 1, sc. 5
No Exit (1944)
“The illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages.”
As quoted in The American Conflict, A History of the Great Rebellion (1864).
1860s