All 17 Uses of
agony
in
The Scarlet Letter
- Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length; for haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.†
Chpt 2
- And would that I might endure his agony as well as mine!†
Chpt 3 *
- It now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day.†
Chpt 4
- From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture.†
Chpt 5
- But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she felt an eye—a human eye—upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to give a momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared.†
Chpt 5
- Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees, and cried out with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but which made utterance for itself betwixt speech and a groan—"O Father in Heaven—if Thou art still my Father—what is this being which I have brought into the world?"†
Chpt 6
- It was meant, doubtless, the mother herself hath told us, for a retribution, too; a torture to be felt at many an unthought-of moment; a pang, a sting, an ever-recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled joy!†
Chpt 8
- Meanwhile, nevertheless, it was sad to think of the perchance mortal agony through which he must struggle towards his triumph.†
Chpt 9
- To make himself the one trusted friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse, the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of sinful thoughts, expelled in vain!†
Chpt 11
- Would he arouse him with a throb of agony?†
Chpt 11
- It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured him.†
Chpt 11
- This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.†
Chpt 12
- I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!†
Chpt 17
- Here he had studied and written; here gone through fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here striven to pray; here borne a hundred thousand agonies!†
Chpt 20
- Such a spiritual seer might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude through several miserable years as a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into a kind of triumph.†
Chpt 21
- "Hester Prynne," cried he, with a piercing earnestness, "in the name of Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this last moment, to do what—for my own heavy sin and miserable agony—I withheld myself from doing seven years ago, come hither now, and twine thy strength about me!†
Chpt 23
- Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost for ever!†
Chpt 23
Definition:
-
(agony) intense feelings of suffering -- can be from mental or physical pain