Smite deeper! Smite yet once more! Pierce through and rend my heart! What mean'th this torture With dull, indented arrows? Why look'st thou hither, Of human pain not weary, With mischief-loving, godly flash-glances? Not murder wilt thou, But torture, torture? For why--ME torture, Thou mischief-loving, unfamiliar God?--英文原著 · 《Thus Spake Zarathustra》
Theologians used racks and thumbscrews just as they used thimbles and three-legged stools, because everybody else used them. Christianity no more created the mediaeval tortures than it did the Chinese tortures; it inherited them from any empire as heathen as the Chinese.英文原著 · 《A Miscellany of Men》
Would you believe it? I was teaching Grisha just now: once this was a joy to me, now it is a torture. What have I to strive and toil for? Why to have children? What's so awful is that all at once my heart's turned, and instead of love and tenderness, I have nothing but hatred for him; yes, hatred. I could kill him and...'
`Darling Dolly, I understand, but don't torture yourself You are so insulted, so excited, that you look at many things mistakenly.'
Dolly grew calmer, and for two minutes both were silent. `What's to be done? Think for me, Anna, help me.英文原著 · 《ANNA KARENINA》
"'Hello, you little fat father!' the devil said to the priest. 'What made you lie so to those poor, misled people? What tortures of hell did you depict? Don't you know they are already suffering the tortures of hell in their earthly lives? Don't you know that you and the authorities of the State are my representatives on earth? It is you that make them suffer the pains of hell with which you threaten them. Don't you know this? Well, then, come with me!'英文原著 · 《Anarchism and Other Essays》
"You do not know what it is," he wrote, "to spend a whole day holding one's head and squeezing one's brains to find a word. Ideas flow with you freely and continually, like a stream. With me they come like trickling water, and it is only by a huge work of art that I can get a waterfall. Ah, I have had some experience of the terrible torture of style!" No, George Sand certainly had no experience of this kind, and she could not even conceive of such torture. It amazed her to hear of such painful labour, for, personally, she let the wind play on her "old harp" just as it listed.英文原著 · 《George Sand》
It will be very difficult, my friend;--why did not you yourself do it? Most true, "those actual Voltaire-Friedrich LETTERS of the time are a resource, and pretty much the sole one: Letters a good few, still extant; which all HAD their bit of meaning; and have it still, if well tortured till they give it out, or give some glimmer of it out:"--but you have not tortured them; you have left it to me, if I would! As I assuredly will not (never fear, reader!)-- except in the thriftiest degree.英文原著 · 《History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 16》
The sight of me is torture for her, which is torture for me.美剧 · 《Downton Abbey》
I've realized. that you need all this, to put people in impossible positions, to dominate with your will, to torture.美剧 · 《Billions》
But if I say the kid was tortured and it was the guard's fault-- Then I fight those cases off as if they were against me personally.美剧 · 《Billions》
But when they're captured, what breaks them, in places like Gitmo, isn't overt torture, it's a sense of disenfranchisement and purposelessness.美剧 · 《Billions》