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Quotes About Desperation

Like many alcoholics, I was a staggering woman in a chic apartment, sick and utterly disgusting.
~ Mercedes McCambridge
I think I started out because I was desperate for approval and acceptance and praise. Some actors never break away from that. They're after that validation their whole life.
~ Judge Reinhold
Zo is het gegaan met de Indiaanse bevolking van San Nicolas-eiland, voor de kust van Los Angeles, die uiteindelijk werd gereduceerd tot één enkele vrouw die in volstrekte afzondering nog 18 jaar leefde.[...] Brachten de laatste inwoners van Henderson veel tijd door op het strand, generatie na generatie starend over zee in hoop de kano's te zien die nooit meer kwamen, totdat zelfs de herinnering aan hoe een kano eruitzag was vervaagd?
~ Jared Diamond
Als ik niet meer zou kunnen vissen, zou ik een grote voorraad morfine aanleggen en diep het bos intrekken. Ik zou een afgelegen plek kiezen waar niemand ooit mijn lijk zou vinden en van waaruit ik een prachtig uitzicht zou hebben. Ik zou met mijn gezicht naar dat uitzicht gaan liggen - en mijn morfine nemen.
~ Jared Diamond
People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.
~ Javier Marías
You are the kind of guy who always hopes for a miracle at the last minute.
~ Jay McInerney
Already God existed only in the desperate attempt to prove his existence. It is the same today with human beings, whose existence we attempt desperately to verify by the very means that make it improbable. Feminism, populism, humanism: all words with the suffix '-ism' are the caricature of their root. Of women, of the people, of the human. Including terrorism: the caricature of terror?
~ Jean Baudrillard
Gambling is only the resource of those who do not know what to do with themselves
~ Jean Jacques Rousseau
I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.
~ Jean Paul Sartre
I have tried, I said, but he does not believe me. It is too late for that now (it is always too late for truth, I thought).
~ Jean Rhys
May you tear each other to bits, you damned hyenas, and the quicker the better. Let it be destroyed. Let it happen. Let it end, this cold insanity.
~ Jean Rhys
Nothing left but hopelessness.' Say die and I will die. Say die and watch me die.
~ Jean Rhys
I prayed, but the words fell to the ground meaning nothing.
~ Jean Rhys
I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe.
~ Jean-Dominique Bauby
I looked out across the Ocean, and determined to drown myself. I was up to my chin when the shout came, and I will never forget it. Never. For it seems to me that any hope in life is such a shout; a voice that answers the silent place of despair. It is silence that most needs an answering — when I can no longer speak, hear me.
~ Jeanette Winterson
Hopeless heart that thrives on paradox; that longs for the beloved and is secretly relieved when the beloved is not there. That gnaws away at the night-time hours desperate for a sign and appears at breakfast so self-composed. That longs for certainty, fidelity, compassion, and plays roulette with anything precious.
~ Jeanette Winterson
I broke his Bible box into bits and lit a fire and laid his body beside it and felt where the bones were broken in his back and chest and legs and licked the blood from his mouth and tried to give him my breath and I would have given him one of my legs and one of my arms and one of my kidneys and half of my liver and four pints of my blood and all easy for I had already given him my heart.
~ Jeanette Winterson
I like passion, I like to be among the desperate.
~ Jeanette Winterson
I am desperately looking the other way so that love won't see me.
~ Jeanette Winterson
down the stone steps to the windswept beach, her raven tresses flowing out behind her. She scanned the empty sands, and when she saw no sign of Blaine, a great cry of anguish escaped her lips. She could not live without him! She would sooner die!
~ Jeanne DuPrau
But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert - if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people's anger. Swine! He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
First, it has been charged with inviting people to remain in a kind of desperate quietism because, since no solutions are possible, we should have to consider action in this world as quite impossible. We should then end up in a philosophy of contemplation; and since contemplation is a luxury, we come in the end to a bourgeois philosophy. The communists in particular have made these charges.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
I only know that all is lost, and that nothing can help me unless I inherit money, strike oil or go to work.
~ Will Cuppy