The irony is that the people we tend to vote for actually look down on voters and voting. That's just idiotic, right? That's like a snake eating its own tail! A wolf in a trap gnawing off its own head to escape!
Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die.
Working moms commonly testify that they feel guilty when they are away from their children and guilty when they are not at their jobs. Devoted fathers certainly miss their children deeply, but it does not seem to be with the same gnawing, primal anxiety that often afflicts women.
I've realised I need a gnawing, nagging, anxious doubt when I wake at 4 A.M.
In the same way, there is some creature gnawing away inside of me, urging me to do things in different ways.
Guilt upon the conscience, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, as that does which at last eats out the very heart and substance of the metal.
By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.
I don't have any gnawing guilt over contributing to any unhappiness suffered by my husbands. They were as much to blame as I was.
I'm not one to sit and wallow - I would rather figure out a way around so I can move past it and be at peace with things. I don't like bad feelings gnawing away at me.
The fate of nations is intimately bound up with their powers of reproduction. All nations and all empires first felt decadence gnawing at them when their birth rate fell off.