Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot.

Aimee Bender

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

Aldous Huxley

If you film a scene in a wide shot, especially a disturbing, distressing moment, I do feel like that helps you feel as though you're the room with these people, instead of cutting it up and getting close - which you wouldn't be doing if you were actually in a room with these people.

Alex Karpovsky

When I was in my late teens, a couple of friends passed away suddenly. This was quite distressing, but after a while, as tends to happen when one is once or twice removed from grief, I stopped thinking about them all the time.

Ayobami Adebayo

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

Barbara W. Tuchman

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.

Bill Bryson

The way the elderly are treated, and in some cases warehoused and medicated, rather than nurtured and listened to, is distressing.

Bill Nighy

My mother, who died aged 82, had Alzheimer's. Losing your memory is bad enough, but everything shuts down. You can't remember how to eat or go to the toilet. It's a terrible disease and so distressing to watch it take over someone you love.

Bonnie Tyler

Most women I know love the idea of fashion, but the practicalities that go with it are just distressing.

Caitlin Moran

I was in my senior year of high school when I read 'Notes From Underground' by Dostoyevsky, and it was an exhilarating discovery. I hadn't known up until that moment that fiction could be like that. Fiction could say these things, could be unseemly, could be unsettling and distressing in that particular way, that immediate and urgent way.

Claire Messud

Reading was my hobby, my sport and my activity of choice. It was the prime pleasure of my days, an unfailing escape from whatever realities were distressing me, and the only source of pride I knew, other vanities lying beyond my grasp. I couldn't do anything else well, but I could do words.

Cynthia Voigt

Thanks to aid, a distressing number of African leaders care little about what their citizens want or need - after all it's the reverse of the Boston tea-party - no representation without taxation.

Dambisa Moyo

If your emotional abilities aren't in hand, if you don't have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.

Daniel Goleman

When I say manage emotions, I only mean the really distressing, incapacitating emotions. Feeling emotions is what makes life rich. You need your passions.

Daniel Goleman

I think the smartest thing for people to do to manage very distressing emotions is to take a medication if it helps, but don't do only that. You also need to train your mind.

Daniel Goleman

That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.

Elliott Carter

Writing for children, you do bear a responsibility to not include overt or graphic adult content that they are not ready for and don't need, or to address adult concepts or themes from an oblique angle or a child's limited viewpoint, with appropriate context, without being graphic or distressing.

Garth Nix

The long and distressing controversy over capital punishment is very unfair to anyone meditating murder.

Geoffrey Fisher

It's distressing to see anyone in the community struggle to access public transport - whether they're elderly, customers with a disability or families with prams.

Gladys Berejiklian

It's estimated that across Africa 100 elephants are killed for their tusks every day. It takes nothing more than simple math to get to what that adds up to in a year, and it's a distressing figure.

Graydon Carter