Quotes About Desperation

In their brief absence a few of the more adventurous or desperate wives would seize the opportunity to hire a sitter and meet another of these boy-men, permanent whiskey-dicks, most of them, out at the Lamplighter Motor Court for a little taste of the road not taken, only to discover that it was pretty much the same shabby, two-lane blacktop they'd been traveling all along, just an unfamiliar stretch of it that nonetheless led to pretty much the same destination anyhow.

You're falling now. You're swimming. This is not harmless. You are not breathing.

They wouldn't let me live and I killed. Maybe it ain't fair to kill, and I reckon I really didn't want to kill.

I looked at him and did not answer; there flashed through my mind a quick, running picture of all the squalid hovels in which I had lived and it made me feel more than ever a stranger as I stood before him. How could I have told him that I had learned to curse before I had learned to read? How could I have told him that I had been a drunkard at the age of six?

the city in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in America could be an alluring place; but it also often was, for persons without brains or money or simply good luck, a crucible in which the superficial elements of personality and civilization were quickly burned away, to reveal the animal underneath. As

The middle is the longest in any story, and therefore the time with the most desperation.

Don't untie me, she said, no matter what happens or how much I plead. I'll want to go straight over the edge and drown myself. Are you trying to tempt me? Ha-ha.

I tried to think of something to say. Excuse me? Hello? Marry me? Anything would have done.

My bus is in flames My son is older than me Please, Zeus, make it stop

You can't hide from yourself, Loki! I said. No matter what form you take, you're still you - alone, scorned, bitter, faithless. Your insults are hollow and desperate. You don't stand a chance against us, because you don't have an us. You are Loki, always alone.

It's human nature to get distracted by minor issues. We play Trivial Pursuit with our lives. Henry David Thoreau observed that people live lives of "quiet desperation," but today a better description is aimless distraction. Many people are like gyroscopes, spinning around at a frantic pace but never going anywhere.

She prayed now, with desperate conviction but no faith, and she suspected it made no difference either way. When

You're trying to shore up a civilization that's in its death throes," Hugh said, as casually as if he were remarking on the weather. "There's really no point.

Suddenly she wants to fall to her knees and pray for the poets. She imagines them with immaculate ravaged faces, with necklaces of ransacked moons, with teeth which are black stubs. Poets are collections of unused crescents and bandages, confused images and terrible departing.

Flora reached out and grabbed hold of William Spiver's hand, and he held on to her. It was as if he were drowning and she were standing on solid ground. According to TERRIBLE THINGS! drowning people were desperate, out of their minds with fear. In their panic they could pull you, the rescuer, under, if you weren't careful. So Flora held on tightly to William Spiver. And he held on tightly back.

If you have not left your home in the middle of the night without even giving it a backward glance; if you have not left your cat and your friends and also a one-eyed dog named Buddy without getting to tell any of them good-bye; if you have not stood on the side of the road in Georgia, somewhere just past the irrevocable state line, and waited for someone to come along and give you a ride, well, then you cannot understand the desperation that was in my heart that day.

I ran back dithering, chewing my hands in fright, until Arty finally allowed himself to roll slowly over and drift, belly up, toward the surface, where my short arms could reach him with the crook and tow him to the side. I patted and smoothed his water-swollen scalp and kissed his cheeks and nose and ears, weeping and begging him not to be dead because I, useless though I was, loved him.

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of a life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete.

Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and—no matter how much we despised ourselves for it—unable quite to let each other go.

One of the boys asked if the fences around the camps had been electrified, and then someone else had said how strange it must have been, living in a place like that, where you could commit suicide any time you liked just by touching a fence.

So identical were their pitiful whimpers, the way their screams gave way to desperate entreaties then returned to screams, that the notion came to me: this was what each of us would go through on our way to death, that these terrible noises were as universal as the crying of newborn babies.

Nicole was trying to rouse her dad. Hayley was doing the same with the pilot. I took the headset and got on the radio again. No one was responding. So either we tried to land or we kept flying until Sam lost control and we plunged into the strait.

Captain's Log... ...Four days have passed with no sign of human life on this island. Hunger is about to push me to the point of... ...Eating pocket lint. It looks edible.

But desperate people find courage.