C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Suspense
It is a miserable thing to live in suspense; it is the life of the spider.
Swift.
Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject suspense is one that most gnaws and cankers into the frame. One little month of that suspense, when it involves death, we are told by an eye witness in “Wakefield on the Punishment of Death,” is sufficient to plough fixed lines and furrows in a convict of five and twenty,—sufficient to dash the brown hair with grey, and to bleach the grey to white.
Bulwer-Lytton.