109 Misery Quotes For Reflection

In life's ebb and flow, moments of hardship and sorrow can offer profound lessons and unexpected insights. While often uncomfortable, these periods of misery serve as chapters in our personal growth narratives. To honor this complex human experience, we’ve curated a collection of the top 109 Misery Quotes For Reflection. These quotes, sourced from a diverse array of thinkers, writers, and philosophers, aim to provide comfort, provoke thought, and ultimately, help you navigate the darker times with a renewed sense of understanding and resilience. Explore these timeless words and find solace in the shared human experience of adversity.

1. “The absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.” - Michel Houellebecq

2. “I am the most miserable person who ever lived," he said... "You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.” - Neil Gaiman

3. “There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.” - Victor Hugo

4. “Oftentimes. when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps.” - Lemony Snicket

5. “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.” - Boethius

6. “He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other.” - W. Somerset Maugham

7. “People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person's habitual misery.” - Graham Greene

8. “...But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice... I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.” - Charles Darwin

9. “I never realized that life could be as difficult for a beautiful woman as it is for a plain one,” he said.“Life can be difficult for everyone,” she replied.“Misery makes no distinction between prince and pauper.” - Patricia Grasso

10. “He is wretched indeed, who goes up and down in the world, without a God to take care of him, to be his guide and protector, and to bless him in his affairs [. . .] That unconverted men are without God shows that they are liable to all manner of evil [. . .] liable to the power of the devil, to the power of all manner of temptation [. . .] to be deceived and seduced into erroneous opinions [. . .] to embrace damnable doctrines [. . .] to be given up of God to judicial hardness of heart [. . .] to commit all manner of sin, and even the unpardonable sin itself. They cannot be sure they shall not commit that sin. They are liable to build up a false hope of heaven, and so to go hoping to hell [. . .] to die senseless and stupid, as many have died [. . .] to die in such a case as Saul and Judas did, fearless of hell. They have no security from it. They are liable to all manner of mischief, since they are without God. They cannot tell what shall befall them, nor when they are secure from anything. They are not safe one moment. Ten thousand fatal mischiefs may befall them, that may make them miserable forever. They, who have God for their God, are safe from all such evils. It is not possible that they should befall them. God is their covenant God, and they have his faithful promise to be their refuge.” - Jonathan Edwards

11. “I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

12. “Only you could be more important than what I wanted...what I needed. What I want and what I need is to be with you, and I know I'll never be strong enough to leave again.” - Stephenie Meyer

13. “There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.” - Raymond Carver

14. “I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our disposition and not on our circumstances.” - Martha Washington

15. “[F]or just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there's nothing else. It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.” - Lev Grossman

16. “With certainty, I can predict that there will never be a cure to cancer. The only hope for any of us is to concentrate on cause and prevent the misery.” - Richard Diaz

17. “A face on him as long as a hare's back leg.” - Myles na gCopaleen

18. “I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]” - William Matthews

19. “I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.” - C. S. Lewis

20. “Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

21. “And then there are always clever people about to promise you that everything will be all right if only you put yourself out a bit... And you get carried away, you suffer so much from the things that exist that you ask for what can't ever exist. Now look at me, I was well away dreaming like a fool and seeing visions of a nice friendly life on good terms with everybody, and off I went, up into the clouds. And when you fall back into the mud it hurts a lot. No! None of it was true, none of those things we thought we could see existed at all. All that was really there was still more misery-- oh yes! as much of that as you like-- and bullets into the bargain!” - Émile Zola

22. “Although you hadn't asked why, it had less to do with you not noticing than with you not wanting to hear the answer.” - Jodi Picoult

23. “As I railed on and on, I became increasingly energied and excited by my own misery and misanthropy until I reached a kind of orgasm of negativity.'... The Brits don't merely enjoy misery, they get off on it.” - Eric Weiner

24. “But then he returned and our life went on. Three days gone. A week. I measured the time in the faint waning of my consciousness of my misery, and wondered if this would one day be enough: simply not to be consciously miserable anymore.” - Sue Miller

25. “Should the king in exile pretend he is happy there?Should he not seek his own country?His miseries are his ally; they urge him on. Let them grow, if need be. But do not forsake the secret of life; do not despise those kingly desires. We abandon the most important journey of our lives when we abandon desire. We leave our hearts by the side of the road and head off in the direction of fitting in, getting by, being productive, what have you. Whatever we might gain – money, position, the approval of others, or just absence of the discontent self – it’s not worth it.” - John Eldredge

26. “I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.” - Christopher Hitchens

27. “Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could be absolutely certain that my love would never be returned: how much more simple life would be. One could plod through the Siberian salt mines of existence without being bothered about happiness. Unfortunately the happiness is there. There is always the chance (about eight hundred and fifty to one) that another heart will come to mine. I can't help hoping, and keeping faith, and loving beauty. Quite frequently I am not so miserable as it would be wise to be.” - T.H. White

28. “I would cling to unhappiness because it was a known, familiar state. When I was happier, it was because I knew I was on my way back to misery. I've never been convinced that happiness is the object of the game. I'm wary of happiness.” - Hugh Laurie

29. “Only one thing mattered: this was not a Horcrux. Dumbledore had weakened himself by drinking that horrible potion for nothing. Harry crumpled the parchment in his hand and his eyes burned with tears as behind him Fang began to howl.” - J.K. Rowling

30. “But somebody else had spoken Snape’s name, quite softly.“Severus . . .”The sound frightened Harry beyond anything he had experienced all evening. For the first time, Dumbledore was pleading.Snape gazed for a moment at Dumbledore, and there was revulsion and hatred etched in the harsh lines of his face.“Severus . . . please . . .”Snape raised his wand and pointed it directly at Dumbledore. “Avada Kedavra!”A jet of green light shot from the end of Snape’s wand and hit Dumbledore squarely in the chest. Harry’s scream of horror never left him; silent and unmoving, he was forced to watch as Dumbledore was blasted into the air. For a split second, he seemed to hang suspended beneath the shining skull, and then he fell slowly backward, like a great rag doll, over the battlements and out of sight.” - J.K. Rowling

31. “When we our betters see bearing our woes,We scarcely think our miseries our foes.” - William Shakespeare

32. “Black is the absence of all color. White is the presence of all colors. I suppose life must be one or the other. On the whole, though, I think I would prefer color to its absence. But then black does add depth and texture to color. Perhaps certain shades of gray are necessary to a complete palette. Even unrelieved black. Ah, a deep philosophical question. Is black necessary to life, even a happy life? Could we ever be happy if we did not at least occasionally experience misery?” - Mary Balogh

33. “The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.” - Bernard Shaw

34. “If there's one thing I've discovered, it's that stifling yourself will only lead to more misery. [...] I polluted all other happiness because I was afraid to let myself create and change. You have to have courage. Real courage to explore, to fail, and to pick yourself back up again.” - Siobhan Vivian

35. “And now I'm right back where I started. Sober and miserable.” - Alyson Noel

36. “One morning, about four o'clock, I was driving my car just about as fast as I could. I thought, 'Why am I out on the highway this time of night?' I was miserable, and it all came to me: 'I'm falling in love with somebody I have no right to fall in love with. I can't fall in love with this man, but it's just like a ring of fire.” - June Carter Cash

37. “Martin in particular concluded that man was born to live either in the convulsions of misery, or in the lethargy of boredom.” - Voltaire

38. “That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan- sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped tears for Jack and Rose and the passengers of the doomed ship. If there was electrical power, Mariam, Laila, and the children watched it too. A dozen times or more, they unearthed the TV from behind the tool-shed, late at night, with the lights out and quilts pinned over the windows.At the Kabul River, vendors moved into the parched riverbed. Soon, from the river's sunbaked hollows, it was possible to buy Titanic carpets, and Titanic cloth, from bolts arranged in wheelbarrows. There was Titanic deodorant, Titanic toothpaste, Titanic perfume, Titanic pakora, even Titanic burqas. A particularly persistent beggar began calling himself "Titanic Beggar.""Titanic City" was born.It's the song, they said.No, the sea. The luxury. The ship.It's the sex, they whispered.Leo, said Aziza sheepishly. It's all about Leo."Everybody wants Jack," Laila said to Mariam. "That's what it is. Everybody wants Jack to rescue them from disaster. But there is no Jack. Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead.” - Khaled Hosseini

39. “It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.” - Bram Stoker

40. “Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

41. “Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.” - Samuel Beckett

42. “Unpopular, lonely and loving, Elinor need not trouble, For if she were not so loving, She would not be so miserable.” - Stevie Smith

43. “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” - Andrew Schweitzer

44. “...to return to their 'native soil,' as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only to escape the horrors that terrify them.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

45. “Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.” - Leon Trotsky

46. “If no war in heaven, then defeat ain't misery.” - Toba Beta

47. “Money does not buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.” - Daniel Kahneman

48. “Misery is a scar on the soul, that if it begins in childhood, it lasts the whole lifetime. I understand that no two scars are alike, but I also ask myself; even if these scars are not alike, aren’t these things engraved on our souls signed by which we know each other?Aren’t we also alike?” - Bahaa Taher

49. “When you share your misery, it will not diminish. When you fail to share your joy, it diminishes. Share your problems only with the Divine, not with anyone else, as that will only increase the problems. Share your joy with everyone.Listen to others; yet do not listen. If your mind gets stuck in their problems, not only are they miserable, but you also become miserable.” - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

50. “Bored with the same type of misery over and over and over again.” - Greg Behrendt

51. “I have observed that the prosperity or misery of each people is in direct proportion to its liberties or its prejudices and, accordingly, to the sacrifices or the selfishness of its forefathers. -Juan Crisostomo Ibarra” - Jose Rizal

52. “When Annie's treatin, you best be eatin.” - Stephen King

53. “Né avec une âme habituelle, j'en ai demandé une autre à la musique : ce fut le début de malheurs inespérés.” - Emil Cioran

54. “If that type of bad God did exist, then we could go on living in good health. If we could push the responsibility for our misery onto God, then we would have that much more peace of mind, wouldn't we?” - Tatsuhiko Takimoto

55. “Man cannot cherish his existence any longer than life holds out charms to him: when he is wrought upon by painful sensations, or drawn by contrary impulsions, his natural tendency is deranged; he is under the necessity to follow a new route; this conducts him to his end, which it even displays to him as the most desirable good.” - Baron d'Holbach

56. “I don't reckon misery loves any damn thing at all.” - Bruce Machart

57. “Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.” - Emil Cioran

58. “You are young, and in love," said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.” - Neil Gaiman

59. “A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.” - Joseph Addison

60. “No one can usurp the heights...But those to whom the miseries of the worldAre misery, and will not let them rest.” - John Keats

61. “But all these were things he could not want, because they were things he could not have, and wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness.” - Cassandra Clare

62. “You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

63. “I looked at the woman crying over the doll and felt something else. I was sick of people acting against their own interests. Mooing about how to refinance the slaughterhouse. Putting skylights in the killing pen and pretending the bolt in the brain was a pathway to a better field. I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book, I thought.” - Vanessa Veselka

64. “The next day he woke up feeling like he'd been unshackled from his fat, like he'd been washed clean from his misery, and for a long time he couldn't remember why he felt this way, and then he said her name.” - Junot Diaz

65. “Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

66. “I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.” - Arthur Golden

67. “wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness” - Cassandra Clare

68. “It'd felt good to be part of an "us," with the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same miseries.” - Jennifer Brown

69. “The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.” - Nicole Krauss

70. “The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book is, because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.” - Stephen King

71. “If God gave you contentment then you would never pursue your life purpose. It is your restlessness that pushes you to take action, change your life and seek more of what you could possibly be.” - Shannon Alder

72. “All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.” - James Baldwin

73. “Evangeline's obliviousness was a reason to like her rather than not: I liked least those schoolfellows whose awareness of me invariably caused misery.” - Sonya Hartnett

74. “It's my opinion, with some people, just knowing they are alone, living inside of their own miserable, self hating, dysfunctional mind, with their own immature, insecure, self pitying self is its own revenge. Their existence is their karma.” - Colleen Truscott Fry

75. “The art of our necessities is strangeThat can make vile things precious.” - William Shakespeare

76. “There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.” - Dante Alighieri

77. “Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris.” - Christopher Marlowe

78. “I have a dream my life would be. So different from this hell I'm living. So different now from what it seem. Now life has killed the dream I dreamed."*Fantine” - Victor Hugo

79. “Maybe awful things is how God speaks to us, Vernon thought, trudging up the lightless tunnel. Maybe folks don’t trust in good things no more. Maybe awful things is all God’s got to remind us he’s alive. Maybe war is God come to life in men. Vernon pushed on toward the light of day. He stepped out onto the ledge and into the heat, and it felt like leaving a theater after the matinee had shown a sad film, the glare of sunshine after the darkness far too real to suffer.” - Alan Heathcock

80. “And then, a strangely comforting thought trickled through me—I had nothing, so I could do anything now. Anything I wanted. I had nothing left to lose.” - Rachel Ward

81. “متفرد بصبابتي، متفرد بكآبتي، متفرد بعنائي” - ابن الرومي

82. “ثاو على صخر أصم، وليت لي قلب كهذي الصخرة الصماء” - خليل مطران

83. “وأنت وإن أفردت في دار وحشةفأنا بدار الأنس في وحشة الفرد” - ابن الرومي

84. “And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.” - Douglas Adams

85. “No misery compares to staring at a clear night's sky with arms stretched toward a coveted star, wishing on what is forever out of reach.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

86. “Pain and suffering are inevitable in our lives, but misery is an option” - Chip Beck

87. “Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.” - Honoré de Balzac

88. “I'm tired of being responsible for other people's misery. I can't even put up with my own.” - Katja Millay

89. “Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.” - C.S. Lewis

90. “Hold it right there. The only agreement we ever had was that you intended to make me as miserable as possible, and I intended to courageously make the best of an intolerable situation like valiant Southern women have always done.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

91. “When that bastard calls back, you tell him he’s won this round. I’ll marry him. But I don’t take well to being blackmailed, and tell him I intend to spend the rest of my life making him miserable, got that?” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

92. “That’s what love is like: mother of the greatest bliss and stepmother of the most tragic misery.” - Stefanos Livos

93. “Rainy, gloomy, drab, sunless day.  There are times when hope seems entirely clouded over, when looking for the blessings in your circumstances feels like trying to catch a ray of sunshine from six feet under.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

94. “Lucrurile supreme trebuie să aibă o altă origine, una proprie lor, - ele nu ar putea lua naştere din această lume efemeră, înşelătoare, iluzorie şi mizeră, din această harababură de amăgiri şi pofte!” - Friedrich Nietzsche

95. “Thus God's work and His eyes are in the depths, but man's only in the height.” - Martin Luther

96. “Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race.” - Victor Hugo

97. “I repeat, whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all.” - Victor Hugo

98. “You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.” - Albert Camus

99. “If peace comes from seeing the whole,then misery stems from a loss of perspective.We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe.Our vigilance becomes: Which defines our day—the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening?It is the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery. In truth, we begin taking nothing for granted, grateful that we have enough to eat, that we are well enough to eat. But somehow, through the living of our days, our focus narrows like a camera that shutters down, cropping out the horizon, and one day we’re miffed at a diner because the eggs are runny or the hash isn’t seasoned just the way we like.When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we’re up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first.In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.” - Mark Nepo

100. “Moisture falls from the sky, cleansing the world and sustaining precious life. But it's the gloom—the cold, dark air—that receives notice. We fail to see the miracle of raindrops through our own tears.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

101. “Abandoned.The word alone sends shudders down a sensitive spine, troubling the thoughts of pained souls as their hurt swells in ripples. It is a sentence of undesired solitude often pronounced on the innocent, the trusting—administered without warning or satisfactory cause. One day the moon is yours, or so you believe. The next, his countenance transforms from Jekyll to Hyde with no intention of ever turning back, and you are left trampled upon in a deserted street, concealed by dirty fog that squelches all illumination or any hope for future rays of light. It is the worst of mysteries why a beast considered noble would forsake his duty, exhibiting a heart of stone. And all who once looked on him, now turn down their eyes and suffer, beguiled. Some poisons have no antidote, but are slow, silent, torturous ends that curl up the broken body swept into a cold, dark corner. There she is left to drown in her tears—a dying heart.Abandoned.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

102. “Just resign yourself to the fact that you're going to be miserable so you can finally be happy. (It's a sound theory if you think about it hard enough.)” - Richelle E. Goodrich

103. “I felt so weak and unhappy that I buried my face in the ground: I could not bear the strain of seeing around me the things of the earth. I felt convinced that every movement and every thought was forced, and that one had to be on one's guard against them.” - Franz Kafka

104. “He was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St John it was perfect blessedness.” - George MacDonald

105. “What is the point of roaming the world when it's the same misery everywhere?” - Elif Shafak

106. “Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.” - Toni Morrison

107. “In misery it is great comfort to have a companion.” - John Lyly

108. “The need for gain, and advantage over others, is one of the chief driving forces behind all human misery.” - Bryant McGill

109. “The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.” - Steven Pressfield