Quotes About Desperation

Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.

There's no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a wind-up.

For a long time, now, the circus-running sun had raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab.

and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.

Yo creo que el honor es un sentimiento muy vivo, pero también estoy convencido de que las formas ya superadas están llenas de apatía y de que hace falta un cansancio infinito para entregarse a un convencionalismo romántico y muerto del sentimiento. Se tiene que estar desesperado, perdido...

I've seen her kind so many times in town on Saturdays coming in to buy what they can with what they have left over from their husband's drinking. Old before their time, stooped and bent from overwork. Wasting their youth. Sitting around ... waiting for some old man to change, that probably couldn't change if he wanted to, until they have a house full of kids, and at forty look like old women.

My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run, the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

And even the privileged minority—must it not reconsider, with that practicality which even privilege cannot abolish, the value of its privileges, when they become threatened by the anger of the sacrificed, whether in organized rebellion, unorganized riot, or simply those brutal individual acts of desperation labeled crimes by law and the state?

the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture

the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

forced to sell their virtue for bread.

It was now just after 1:30 a.m. Ten of the Titanic's sixteen regular lifeboats had departed, carrying approximately 330 people—only a fraction of the 2,209 on board. To the passengers still on deck, the downward slope toward the bow was now very apparent. Yet many of them, the first-class men in particular, still believed that the ship would last till morning and that help would arrive

sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind them all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks...

There was absolutely no choice but to cut her adrift and hope her memory was fucked.

There is nothing worse than a man in the throws of an ether bender.

There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.

Hungry people have the cunning of wild beasts.

America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.

looked at her and at the streaks of his blood down her face he prayed that her eyes would open.

On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice, would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back.

since coming home, her life had stood still and a fine day like this made her impatient, almost desperate.

Her cleverness, her love and knowledge of music, literature, her liveliness and charm when he was securely hers masked her desperation.

Come back to me. Don't leave me all alone. Don't die on me, you stupid sonovabitch. You goddamn fucking idiot. I told you to stay out of the damn fight! Why the hell don't you ever listen? I fucking hate you. I hate you, you hear me? Don't you dare die on me, because I need to kill you with my bare hands.