Despair Quotes - Page 4

Despair? I don't despair. I have never once in my life despaired anything. I make a point not to go further than resignation.

Megan Derr

Hence it is a superficial view (which presumably has never seen a person in despair, not even one’s own self) when it is said of a man in despair, "He is consuming himself." For precisely this it is he despairs of, and to his torment it is precisely this he cannot do, since by despair fire has entered into something that cannot burn, or cannot burn up, that is, into the self.

Søren Kierkegaard

The seemingly most hateful, those on the front lines of despair, are mere instruments of sinister forces, which pull the manipulative strings of manufactured supremacy.

T.F. Hodge

Let the darkness transform into rockacross the wilderness of my memory

Xiaobo Liu

A desperate soul needs a good and inspiring music

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Suffocate despair with prayers.

Ahmed Mayouf

my mother died of an overdose of sleeping pills after extensive surgery so that the cause of death was probably listed as despair.

Sue Grafton

You must think I don’t know what’s keeping you up at night. You must think we’re so different. But I know. Everyone knows despair. Isn’t that why people jump off bridges or drown themselves? Anything, really, to escape being human.

V.J. Campilan

Just as the weak, despairing person is unwilling to hear anything about any consolation eternity has for him, so a person in such despair does not want to hear anything about it, either, but for a different reason: this very consolation would be his undoing; as a denunciation of all existence. Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author's writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error; perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential part of the whole production, and now this error wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No! I refuse to be erased! I will stand as a witness against you; a witness that you are a second-rate author.

Søren Kierkegaard

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. Did they slave so long just to go to an occasional Iowa picnic? What else is there? They watch the waves come in at Venice. There wasn’t any ocean where most of them came from, but after you’ve seen one wave, you’ve seen them all. The same is true of the airplanes at Glendale. If only a plane would crash once in a while so that they could watch the passengers being consumed in a “holocaust of flame,” as the newspapers put it. But the planes never crash. Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. Their daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.

Nathanael West

Spent my whole life,” Morganith went on, staring miserably into her drink, “thinkin’ that out there somewhere was ah woman who would love me incredibly and I would love her incredibly. Like ah fire consumin’ the very air. Then I meet her, and she leaves me.” Morganith snapped her fingers lazily. “Just like that.

Ash Gray

What makes the hero truly greatis never, never to despair.

Robert Burns

Death finds you in such strange poses. How long can you cry, until the rivers gone and dry.

Daniel Bashford

How much had I missed in these months of despair and numbness?

Sarah J Maas

Urgency and despair don't get along well.

N K Jemisin

ROMEO :'Tis torture and not mercy. Heaven is here,Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dogAnd little mouse, every unworthy thing,Live here in heaven and may look on her,But Romeo may not. More validity,More honorable state, more courtship livesIn carrion flies than Romeo. They may seizeOn the white wonder of dear Juliet’s handAnd steal immortal blessing from her lips,Who even in pure and vestal modesty,Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin.But Romeo may not. He is banishèd.Flies may do this, but I from this must fly.They are free men, but I am banishèd.And sayst thou yet that exile is not death?Hadst thou no poison mixed, no sharp-ground knife,No sudden mean of death, though ne'er so mean,But “banishèd” to kill me?—“Banishèd”!O Friar, the damnèd use that word in hell.Howling attends it. How hast thou the heart,Being a divine, a ghostly confessor,A sin-absolver, and my friend professed,To mangle me with that word “banishèd”?

William Shakespeare

The more she laughs, the more he ups the ante with his clowning. By the time he finishes he will have run through all the secret mysteries of laughter that human beings have ever understood, mobilizing everything at his disposal. There is no way for him to know how guilty it makes his mother feel, seeing such a young child go to such lengths just to wring a bit of apparent happiness from her, or that her laughter will all eventually run out.

Han Kang

Dividing earth and skyis not the right wayto think about this wholeness.It only allows one to liveat a more precise address--were I to be searched forI'd be found much faster.My distinguishing marksare rapture and despair.From 'Sky', in the collection 'Miracle Fair

Wisława Szymborska

He waited for the black, terrible anger as though for some beast out of the night. But it did not come to him. His bowels seemed weighted with lead, and he walked slowly and lingered against fences and the cold, wet walls of buildings by the way. Descent into the depths until at last there was no further chasm below. He touched the solid bottom of despair and there took ease.

Carson McCullers

My days are as long as despair can make them.

Kathryn Harrison

I wish you did return my regard," he said. "More than I have ever wished anything in my life! Perhaps you may yet learn to do so: I should warn you that I don't easily despair!

Georgette Heyer

Having no intercourse with anyone, she lived in the torpid state of a sleep-walker.

Gustave Flaubert

Ivanov: I am a bad, pathetic and worthless individual. One needs to be pathetic, too, worn out and drained by drink, like Pasha, to be still fond of me and to respect me. My God, how I despise myself! I so deeply loathe my voice, my walk, my hands, these clothes, my thoughts. Well, isn't that funny, isn't that shocking? Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, I was cheerful, tireless, passionate, I worked with these very hands, I could speak to move even Philistines to tears, I could cry when I saw grief, I became indignant when I encountered evil. I knew inspiration, I knew the charm and poetry of quiet nights when from dusk to dawn you sit at your desk or indulge you mind with dreams. I believed, I looked into the future as into the eyes of my own mother... And now, my God, I am exhausted, I do not believe, I spend my days and nights in idleness.

Anton Chekhov

Grumble weakens the spirit.Despair is counterproductive.Both are true toxicants in life.

Toba Beta

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

R.D. Laing

There is a dark place calling to me, but I will not go just yet. I know I can't return from it.

Lauren DeStefano

To be Despair. It is a portrait. Only close your eyes and feel.

Neil Gaiman

I feel as if I had been born dead underAmerican bombardment.

Ştefan Bolea

The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

Jonathan Franzen

But, as I say, I was toofull of excitement and (a true saying, though those who have neverknown danger may doubt it) too desperate to die.

H.G.Wells

Bosch had never liked Las Vegas, though he came often on cases. It shared a kinship with Los Angeles; both were places desperate people ran to. Often, when they ran from Los Angeles, they came here. It was the only place left.

Michael Connelly

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim

Graham Greene

Temptation is not his (Satan's) strongest weapon. Despair is.

Dennis Garvin

When you are sad, do not bow your head in despair, lift it up; you can see and fight better when your head is up!

Mehmet Murat ildan

What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances that satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu

I can see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.

David Herbet

To whomever is writing this book, what do you want from me? I need to know my calling. Why was I chosen? Why not Lee? Why not Susan March? Why me? What is my purpose? Please let it be more than to destroy a life and embarrass another. I need to know. I am suffering. You are a constant headache. Anywhere I go, I can hear you, I can feel you. I want to be like the others, ignorant of this.

Kevin Jared Hosein

Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.

Thomas Hardy

And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?

Mervyn Peake

Then I think of all the tricks, all the minutes all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can't breathe then, like someone's stepping on my heart, Laila. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.

Khaled Hosseini

the thing is you can get used to anything you think you cant you want to die but you dont you cant you just are

Elizabeth Scott

The tears that kept Buttercup company the remainder of the day were not at all like those that had blinded her into the tree trunk. Those were noisy and hot; they pulsed. These were silent and steady and all they did was remind her that she wasn’t good enough. She was seventeen, and every male she’d ever known had crumbled at her feet and it meant nothing. The one time it really mattered, she wasn’t good enough.

William Goldman

I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despaire wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy."-white oleander

Janet Fitch

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

Cormac McCarthy

What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Walker Percy

Whether you are man or woman, rich or poor, dependent or free, happy or unhappy; whether you bore in your elevation the splendour of the crown or in humble obscurity only the toil and heat of the day; whether your name will be remembered for as long as the world lasts, and so will have been remembered as long as it lasted, or you are without a name and run namelessly with the numberless multitude; whether the glory that surrounded you surpassed all human description, or the severest and most ignominious human judgment was passed on you -- eternity asks you and every one of these millions of millions, just one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not, whether so in despair that you did not know that you were in despair, or in such a way that you bore this sickness concealed deep inside you as your gnawing secret, under your heart like the fruit of a sinful love, or in such a way that, a terror to others, you raged in despair. If then, if you have lived in despair, then whatever else you won or lost, for you everything is lost, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you, or, still more dreadful, it knows you as you are known, it manacles you to yourself in despair!

Søren Kierkegaard

I cannot do it. I cannot bear it. I cannot go back to what I was here. I cannot stand at her side and watch another take her. I am not that strong or that good.

Laurell K. Hamilton

The art of our necessities is strangeThat can make vile things precious.

William Shakespeare

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing

Guy de Maupassant

It's funny how despair can soon become an old companion

Jacqueline Carey

It is said that scattered through Despair's domain are a multitude of tiny windows, hanging in the void. Each window looks out onto a different scene, being, in our world, a mirror. Sometimes you will look into a mirror and feel the eyes of Despair upon you, feel her hook catch and snag on your heart. Despair says little, and is patient.

Neil Gaiman

Why does it have to be like this?' I asked bitterly. 'Why does life have to be so short, with all the good things passing quickly. Is it worth living at all?

Joseph Delaney

Despair filled his skull even more tightly than his own brain. All around him cars filled with normal people perfectly unaware of the disease turning Perry's body inside out. Fucking normal people.

Scott Sigler

In the next world I could not be worse than I am in this.

Patrick Branwell Brontë

By this time I was nolonger very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed thelimit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost,and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything

H.G.Wells

She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.

Vladimir Nabokov

Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

Tom Robbins

the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.

Emil M. Cioran

my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world.

Charles Bukowski

Whatever happens in your life, no matter how troubling things might seem, do not enter the neighborhood of despair. Even when all doors remain closed, God will open up a new path only for you. Be thankful!

Elif Shafak

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Despair Quotes - Page 4

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