Source: Billy Budd, the Sailor (1891), Ch. 24
Source: Selected Poems
“All men will come to me in due time, but theirs is the agony of awaiting.”
Source: A New Concept of the Universe (1953), p. 141
“we had such tremendous fun
and much agony together
for some years”
Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last
“On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”
Source: The Waves
Letter to Fanny McCullough (23 December 1862); Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler
1860s
Context: In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once.
Address to the 75th annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Chicago, Illinois (19 August 1974)
1970s
Remarks in the Senate on a resolution to amend Senate Rule 22 (cloture), Congressional Record (January 11, 1967), vol. 113, p. 182
1960s
Variant: the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
