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Quotes About Desperation

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
~ James Thurber
He was pal o' me heart, so he was. I try not to think of him, only I can't get him off my mind. He's with me always day and night. I do see him places he's never been, in the middle of a crowd I see him. His face looks out from the top of a tram, a schoolboy wouldn't pass but I'm thinking it's him. I try to make him go away, for I'm a soldier now and I'm under orders. But he's always there and I'm desperate to hold him. I doubt I'm a man expect he's by me.
~ Jamie O'Neill
Too soon did she find herself at the drawing room door. And after pausing a moment for what she knew would not come, for a courage which the outside of no door had ever supplied to her, she turned the lock in desperation and the lights of the drawing room and all the collected family were before her.
~ Jane Austen
I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever.
~ Jane Austen
First—we must alleviate poverty. If you are living in crippling poverty, you will cut down the last tree to grow food. Or fish the last fish because you're desperate to feed your family. In an urban area you will buy the cheapest food—you do not have the luxury of choosing a more ethically produced product.
~ Jane Goodall
Sometimes I think it's me. I think I must be doing something wrong, giving out subliminal messages so they can smell the desperation, read the neon lights on my forehead . . . "KEEP AWAY FROM THIS WOMAN, SHE IS LOOKING FOR COMMITMENT," but most of the time I think it's them. Bastards. All of them.
~ Jane Green
Get me a gun. If I don't go into labor soon, I'm going to shoot myself. And pass the gravy. Pass it now. Valerie - To the Nines
~ Janet Evanovich
These are desparate times. - Stephanie Plum
~ Janet Evanovich
What I lack in expertise I make up for with desperation and tenacity, because I only get paid when I catch someone.
~ Janet Evanovich
How easy I was. Like a limpet I attached myself to anything, anyone who showed me the least attention.
~ Janet Fitch
She would buy magic every day of the week. Love me, that face said. I'm so lonely, so desperate. I'll give you whatever you want.
~ Janet Fitch
I hate people," he said, wiping the urchin's face with the rag. "Animals are more noble. Look at this boy. He's poor and desperate, but can they see it? Can they pity him? No. They should embrace him. They should save their kicks and blows for the bastards who keep them so poor, who set them on each other like dogs.
~ Janet Fitch
She was drifting outside the limit of all reason, where the next stop was light-years away through nothing but darkness.
~ Janet Fitch
Shot by a desperate fan. On the news, fans were always desperate. Got his signature and then shot him down. The saddest thing about it was that she wasn't more shocked. To Josie, it just seemed part of the way things were heading, Ronald Reagan, greedheads running everything. Killing John Lennon seemed like just mopping up. Thirty thousand people missing in El Salvador, those nuns, and everybody in America was worried about who shot JR.
~ Janet Fitch
Michael, in a motel in Twentynine Palms, a gun in his hands. Not at Meredith's, painting in an explosion of new creation. Not over on Sunset, digging through the record bins, or at Launderland separating the darks and lights. Not at the Chinese market, looking at the fish with their still-bright eyes. Not at the Vista watching an old movie. Not sketching down at Echo Park. He was in a motel room in Twentynine Palms, putting a bullet in his brain.
~ Janet Fitch
In barely one generation, we've moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them - often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
~ Pico Iyer
Cersei is a character who's done unspeakable things, and yet we also know that she's a mother who's lost her children - that she's been pushed to the end of her tether.
~ Jeremy Podeswa
The faltering of our suburban living arrangement is probably certain. The response of suburbanites is not. Will they elect maniacs who promise to make America just like it was in 1997? Will there be a desperate attempt to sustain the unsustainable by authoritarian measures? Will the institutions of order and justice fail in the process?
~ James Howard Kunstler
'The Talk-Funny Girl' opens with a glum picture of a desperately poor rural New England family. Poverty has so brutalized the family that the ordinary laws and rules governing humanity have eroded, turning systems of behavior upside down.
~ Carolyn See
I think the guys who are sort of infantry in Somali piracy are not unlike low-level drug dealers in urban areas in America, who see it as, you know, not having many other options. I think it comes down to money and needing to survive.
~ Cutter Hodierne
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
~ Antonin Artaud
Creative expression requires an ability to work with feelings and channel them. Frustration, dissatisfaction, and even a sense of desperation may help you access an eloquence you never knew existed.
~ Shaun McNiff
You think you can go into all those auditions not knowing who you are? The work came after I found my sense of self - when I wasn't so manic and desperate.
~ Jenifer Lewis
My hunger and desperation, being an actor, an out of work actor - my memory of that is as fresh as an open wound.
~ Griffin Dunne