Quotes About Desperation

My penis lay pathetically along my left thigh, like some small animal washed ashore.

I am penniless and on the run. How fucking noir.

Me apuntaré a uno de esos cruceros de pasarse el día bebiendo —uno que me lleve hasta alta mar pero no requiera identificación—, me beberé un vaso gigante de ginebra con hielo, me tragaré unos somníferos y cuando nadie esté mirando me dejaré caer en silencio por la borda con los bolsillos llenos de piedras a lo Virginia Woolf.

People have to do awful things for the money.

But here's the thing I want to be clear on: I knew what I was doing, I was punching every button on him. I was watching him coil tighter and tighter—I wanted him to finally say something, do something. Even if it's bad, even if it's the worst, do something, Nick. Don't leave me here like a ghost.

There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child—you grow up knowing you aren't allowed to disappoint, you're not even allowed to die. There isn't a replacement toddling around; you're it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made.

I didn't need to hide from someone courting oblivion as ardently as I was.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving...

Limper flopped violently. The gag flew out of his mouth. His ankle bonds parted. He gained his feet, tried to run, tried to mouth some spell that would protect him. He had gone thirty feet when a thousand fiery snakes streaked out of the night and swarmed him. They covered his body. They slithered into his mouth and nose, into his eyes and ears. They went in the easy way and came gnawing out through his back and chest and belly. And he screamed. And screamed. And screamed.

It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.

That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape--anywhere--for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

All, Pyle? Wait until you're afraid of living ten years alone with no companion and a nursing home at the end of it. THen you'll start running in any direction, even away from that girl in the red dressing-gown, to find someone, anyone, who last until you are through.

The soap-box orators talked in the bitter cold at Marble Arch with their mackintoshes turned up around their Adam's apples, and all down the road the cad cars waited for the right easy girls, and the cheap prostitutes sat hopelessly in the shadows, and the blackmailers kept an eye open on the grass where the deeds of darkness were quietly and unsatisfactorily accomplished.

I'm sick with life, I'm rotten with health.

He saw her fixed in her life like a fly in amber—Maria's hand raised to strike: Pedro talking prematurely in the dusk: and the police beating the forest—violence everywhere. He prayed silently, 'O God, give me any kind of death—without contrition, in a state of sin—only save this child.

The dead are more bloody desperate than we can even guess.

And I ask him why he cuts his arms with a razor. Just fo feel. Just to feel something.

Because I expected so little, Gaines's painting is startlingly powerul. A lank-haired blond woman with a hard face sits at akitchen table in the harsh light of a bare bulb. She's surrounded by dirty cereal bowls and fast-food bags, and her shirt is open to the waist, revealing small sagging breasts. Her hollow eyes look out from the canvas with the sullen resignation of an animal that has helped build its own cage.

There's a singular kind of desperation that links all of us who cannot conceive but think of nothing else. I wonder about us. What has made that message play over and over inside our heads? Is it biology? I want it to be that. I want the reason I sit on the toilet, hoping against hope, to be biological and not some kind of mental disorder.

We were a sinking ship headed for the bottom of the ocean.

They thought the Allies would be desperate to "buy" their reactor research in the postwar era. Apparently they were not moved to check to see whether this arrogance was founded, and the depression and desperation one hears them going through after Hiroshima and Nagasaki reveals their sudden irrelevance. As Otto Hahn chided them right after they learned of Hiroshima: "If the Americans have a uranium bomb, then you're all second-raters." The

Some loves are like that. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, & your self-respect & independence. After a while you start throwing people out - friends, everyone you know. & it's still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, & you know it's going to take you down with it. I've seen that happen to a lot of people. I think that's why I'm sick of love. - Karla

It was just that all the hope had been so empty, so meaningless. And if you prove to a man how vain his hope is, how vain his hoping was, you kill the bright, believing part of him that wants to be loved.