Quotes About Desperation

Anarchists live in fear and long for death, because they despair of seeing in others the very virtues they lack in themselves. In this manner, they take pleasure in sowing destruction, if only to match their inner landscape of ruin.

To stand in the heart of Dragnipur, to stand above the very Gate of Darkness, this was, for Anomander Rake, a most final act. Perhaps it was desperation. Or a sacrifice beyond all mortal measure.

Empuñar la espada es el último acto de un hombre desesperado.

A small whimper escaped her throat, then she desperately pulled her eyes away.

We will ourselves empty to numb us to our cruelty. We stiffen our faces and say we have needs. But to be empty is to have no purchase, nothing to grasp on to, and so in the emptiness we slide and we slide.

Taking up the sword is the last act of desperate men. Mark my words and find yourself a more worthy dream.

Rake was an atmosphere, a heart-thudding, terror-threaded presence no-one could ignore, much less escape. Violence, antiquity, sombre pathos, and darkest horror – the Son of Darkness was a gelid eddy in immortality's current, and the Mhybe could feel, crawling beneath her very skin, every Rhivi spirit awakened in desperation.

Is there a difference between spilled blood and blood squeezed out slowly, excruciatingly, over the course of a foreshortened lifetime of stress, misery, anguish and despair – all in the name of some amorphous god that no-one dares call holy? Even as they bend knee and repeat the litany of sacred duty?

How much could be stripped from a people before they began stripping away themselves? The steep slope of dissolution began with a skid, only to become a headlong run.

I rush to her side and touch her cold skin, hoping against hope for a pulse.

It's deeply disturbing to think about how many people in the world are dying inside, screaming for someone, anyone, to care, reaching out again and again, sometimes to the hand that slaps them, because, all too often, without that hand they have nothing at all.

Sex and excretion are reminders that anyone's claim to round-the-clock dignity is tenuous. The so-called rational animal has a desperate drive to pair up and moan and writhe.

What motivates people to seek out dubious or frankly bogus treatments? Diverse motivations are likely to be at play, including imitation, conformity, desperation, and indiscriminate reliance on authority figures. According to one survivor of the Spanish flu pandemic: My mother used goose grease and turpentine mixed like a salve, sometimes she made a poultice out of it. I think it really helped. She told me it did, so I had to believe it. (Pettigrew, 1983, p. 120)

Instinctively, he reached for his knife, fumbled fro fractions of a second with the thong of a purse, tore it loose. He stabbed frantically at the thing that surrounded him, tore the blade through cloth and hair and flesh. One part fell away, a languid, dead flailing of limbs and hair. The other gripped him, and even though he had stabbed a limb, would not release him.

He sounded sceptical, but Othman sensed the hope in his words, that dreary, desperate hope. He smiled.

My sore words are inspired by desperate need.

Tamara's heart clenched in her chest, a desperate muscle.

He hugged Daniel tightly for a moment, and Daniel could feel Othman's body trembling as if he was weeping. He knew then that Othman would kill him.

I realise, as I stand swaying on the splintered slabs, that I have lost the thread of real life. It is stretching to an infinite thinness. And I am losing the equally fragile thread of sanity; it will not be long.

In the meantime, I would work in the relief office and I began interviewing people . . . and found out how everybody, in order to be eligible for relief, had to have reached absolute bottom. You didn't have to have a lot of brains to realize that once they reached that stage and you put them on an allowance of a dollar a day for food—how could they ever pull out of it?

You should have seen the things they were giving babies instead of milk. I remember seeing them put salt-pork gravy in milk bottles and putting a nipple on, and the baby sucking this salt-pork gravy. A real blue baby, dying of starvation. In house after house, I saw that sort of thing.

What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence.

I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind.

You might have thought I'd worry about him, about causing him pain or at least embarrassment. I simply didn't. I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy. That makes you unkind. When I described myself as I was at that time to Daniel, I often said to him, "You wouldn't have liked me then.